Monoprice Select Mini Heated Build Plate 3D Printer with Micro SD Card & Sample PLA Filament

This was my first 3D printer, and I had quite a few initial struggles and frustrations with it before I finally got it to work properly. I spent a LOT of time watching YouTube videos and reading forum posts about the various Cura profiles and settings I should try using in order to get a successful print. I fiddled with print nozzle temperatures, bed temperatures, print speeds, retraction settings, and adhesion settings seemingly endlessly. No matter what I tried though, I kept experiencing failures. Bed adhesion was an issue, I had ripples on any flat surfaces the printer tried to lay down, and it seemed like new layers weren't sticking to the underlying layer. I was also getting numerous unwanted strings of filament between travel points whenever the print head moved from one location on the bed to another. The most annoying part however, was that the 3D model of the cat that came preloaded on the included microSD card printed perfectly fine, without any issues, regardless of which filament I was using (the included white sample filament vs. the spool of black PLA I bought to actually use with the printer) so I KNEW the root problem was purely software. I just couldn't seem to figure it out. In the interest of saving someone else the headaches I encountered, I thought I'd post the simple solution I discovered on my own that resulted in a pretty much perfect print on the first try after it was applied. For full clarity, the spool of PLA filament I'm using is Monoprice item number 10551, and I'm using Ultimaker Cura version 4.12.1. First and foremost, make sure you level your print bed before trying to print. My printer's bed was way below where it should have been when I got it set up and checked it. I used a sheet of paper to do the leveling, following the instructional video created by Monoprice as my guide. I tended to level the four corners so that they were fairly snug with the paper but not too much so. I did notice that the print bed didn't seem to be perfectly flat, but in the end it didn't seem to matter. Also, I'm not sure if it makes a difference, but I did do the bed leveling while I had the bed heat turned on and set to 60 degrees using the preheat feature on the printer. I left the nozzle temperature set to a low value to avoid creating any drips of melted filament from the nozzle that might get in the way of accomplishing the bed leveling. Next, and this was the key for me to finally get my printer to work properly, I went into the settings menu of Cura and told it to import a profile from a file, then pointed it to the cat.gcode file that contained the included cat test model. I didn't initially realize that a profile could be imported into Cura from a gcode file, but apparently it can, and it was the golden ticket for me. Once I imported cat.gcode as a profile, I saved the settings as a new profile and then used that new profile to slice the STL file I had been repeatedly trying to print over the last few days and was shocked to witness it print pretty much perfectly on the very first try. At this point, since the printer works, I'm happy. I'll still probably fiddle with some of the settings now that I have a working baseline, but even if I'm stuck with the settings exactly as they are right now, I'm OK with that, since the printer does finally print and the result looks good enough for me.

This unit is cheap, and you get what you pay for. I never could get anything to stick to the bed no matter which settings I used, and sometimes jobs would just quit partway through, seemingly from memory issues or something similar. Navigation is clunky and temperature settings seem to be very temperamental. I would highly recommend spending a little bit more money and getting something better.

I do like the compactness of the 3d printer but it?s not versatile to print with TPU which is what I purchased a 3d printer for. Downloaded a few modified parts and they printed great. However the parts both shown on what was on the videos of the parts that were downloaded now I?ll have to purchase an extra Bowden coupling and an m6 nut to assist with the modification.

The 3D printer was a Christmas present for my husband and stopped working the first week of February. The cut off for returns was January 31, so naturally it broke two days later. We have done trouble shooting and have officially given up. I can't believe this lasted barely a month (and I bought new instead of open box to avoid these problems).

DO NOT BUY Worked for about a month until filament dug into the side of the printer. The printer made a grinding noise inside and that's not covered b the warranty. The printer is very loud and annoying. After a couple of usages, the bed had a hole melted into it. Would stay away from monoprice's cheap printers and other products. Go and buy an ender 3 or 3 pro instead of buying some non-functional trash. The service sucks and I spent a lot to fix this printer. NOT WORTH 200