I found my way into 3D printing with the Tevo Tarantula, a Prusia i3 clone at a pretty low price(205$). The base model has pretty much everything i was looking for.

The available options looked interesting, but i choose to stay with the basic model. Options included:

• Larger build  area: i don’t think i need one, and i guess it would draw more current, and therefore be harder on the power switching and power supply. Also: more power consumption means more heat dissipation, and, well…  it‘ summer 🙂
• Dual or fancy extruders: i guess i could add this option later on if i like to.  I expected to be able to get into 3D printing with the basic model. Dual extruders seem  to add a lot of complexity, so i chose to avoid them for now.
• Automatic bed leveling. To be honest, i added this option to my order, but the sensor failed after my  second print.  Turns out that the 35$ option is just a 8$ sensor + a connector.  Let’s pretend that i didn’t chose  the option and just added the sensor later on 🙂

This Youtube Playlist helpt a lot putting the printer  together. The build was pretty strait forward.

Adding the bed level sensor was basicly just one more screw. The rest is changing the firmware, which required a bit more reserach. The firmware is an open source project called Marlin. The configuration file is a bit hard to get through, but there is a comunnity(facebook, website) surrounding the Tevo Tarantula, which provides configuration.h files for the Tevo (also one with automatic bed leveling).