I run 16 Bit Virtual Studios. You can find more reviews from me on YouTube youtube.com/@16bitvirtual or other social media @16bitvirtual, and we sell our 3D Printed stuff on 16bitstore.com

  • 24 Posts
  • 122 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Right, lots of suggestions for Bambu and Prusa and rightfully so. But their prices are high and while they are worth it, they wouldn’t be what I’d suggest for a first time printer.

    The Ender 3 is what I’d suggest, though not the V1. The S1 or the v3 and good starting points for being in budget and having some modern features.

    This isn’t like the mid 2010’s where it was hit or miss and the printers will have a slight chance of burning your house down. Hictop anyone? But these days even a $200 printer is good enough to start printing.

    That said software is going to be your biggest pain point.

    For the slicer make sure its compatible with PrusaSlicr or Cura. Preferability the former. This makes the models to print, and some cheep third party slicers makes their own with questionable quality and support.

    For modeling, you have some options. Blender if you are looking to design 3d shapes like clay. Fusion360 is a cheap and free (while limited) solution for parametric cad design. With TinkerCAD is a good in between. But like Photoshop is to gimp, Fusion 360 is to FreeCAD and it may be worth learning how FreeCAD works since its an extremely flexible tool.

    TL:DR Ender 3 V3/S1, Prusa Slicer, Cura, Blender, TinkerCAD, Fusion360, FreeCAD and you should be too to start printing and making brackets.




  • Recommendations for learning. Have someone who knows how to hand sew nearby to ask questions. My local leather shop has classes to help newbies.

    That said I didn’t take those, as I had a really good idea on what I wanted, and someone nearby that could teach me to sew. Plus I used cutting machines to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

    My only advice is to not use a vinyl cutter like from Cricut or Silhouette. The motors are not strong enough to cut actual leather, they fetch and loose steps very easily. Laser is your best bet, though the smell is pungent, ventilation is required.

    The other advise is unlike cloth, you need to plan and make your stitch holes before you sew. Leather is too thick to punch through it without significant force. A Sharp knife is your best friend if you missed a hole.






  • 16GB is more than enough for most written books, ranging from 1-3MB. But for comics they can range from 93MB to 250MB or more. As such while you can have 5000+ Books on your Kobo, you can only have 65 comics, and considering how large some manga series are, that’s not enough to keep everything on the same device.

    My gripe with Kobo is how they organize their books, and while I could organize them into collections, for DRM free books, they don’t store them in the system, so if I remove and re-add a book to my e-reader, I have to manually re-add them to the collection. But in truth no e-reader is perfect, the closest I found is the Pocketbook, since they offer SD Card support, but I opted for the Onyx Boox Nova 3 Color. I like the fact I can write on it, like a remarkable tablet, it’s running Android so I can get a lot of utility out of it. But I don’t like the fact that it’s a chinese android tablet stuck on Android 10 with no OS updates in sight, and the lack of Micro SD Card support (though USB support is nice).

    You win some you loose some.



  • I have both (cuz I’m selling the case and needed to test), and I’m working on a video review for it.

    Tldw for the video is this. Clara BW is a Clara 2e, processor, ram, and storage are spec exactly the same, even the power button and sleep sensor is the same position. It only took me 9 days to make these since I reused the sleep cover from my 2e case design. However it’s a little snappier, making it on par with the latest Kindle for books. Still slow for comics.

    The e-reader shown is the Clara color, despite the spec bump feels exactly the same as the Clara BW. Unless you read colored books like magazines, comics, or textbooks it’s not worth the upgrade. Kobo really needed more than 16GB of storage.

    That said I was never a fan of Kobo so the Clara color is the first one I actually like.


  • Yeah, I made these because my original case broke (Nova 3 color not kobo). I sell them on Etsy, though sadly since it’s so labour intensive to stitch it ends up costing as much as the eReader. Trying to make it more upgradeable and user serviceable to better justify the price, but I’m still testing them.

    As for the desk, it’s my deterrent to keep eBay scam artists from selling my designs with my photos. I have fancy professional photos I can use if I want.

    Like this one

    The Keyboard is from EVGA but it was on clearance when I got it so I don’t think they sell it anymore.