Taking stock and looking around at what might need replacing is just one of the items on the agenda for August. It makes for an idle window to scope out gadgets. Naturally, this meant checking in on my hobbyist 3D printer, the 2020 Flashforge Adventurer 3. It sits quietly out of the way, perpetually plugged in and ready for the mere two or three assignments I give it each year. I decided to see where my white-and-black, acrylic Easy-Bake® Oven actually fits into the modern technological landscape.
As it turns out, the answer is "in a museum."
A brief dip into the 2026 marketplace revealed that additive manufacturing has been completely conquered by high-speed consumer robotics. The shiny new benchmark is the Bambu Lab P2S, a thousand-dollar enclosed gantry that handles four-colour filament swaps, runs on artificial intelligence to spot errors, and connects directly to your smartphone so you can watch plastic melt in real time. It also prints at five times the speed of my Flashforge. While my aging machine plods along at a stately, glacial pace, the new rigs whip across the build plate in a complete blur.
Take a classic demo example like a tiny plastic desk frog. If I hypothetically wanted to print one with royal blue eyes instead of monochrome green, the modern software makes it look effortless. You just click a digital paintbrush to colour the eyeballs blue while leaving the skin green. The hardware then executes this marvel by cutting the green filament, retracting the line, feeding the blue spool, and purging a mountain of sacrificial plastic down a rear waste chute on every single layer. It is a four-hour mechanical ballet to deposit eighty milligrams of eye colour. Meanwhile, any sensible adult with a $3.99 CAD jar of Testors® enamel and a wooden toothpick can achieve the exact same artistic triumph in six seconds, utterly humiliating a thousand dollars worth of automated Shenzhen robotics.
The real joy of the exercise wasn't buying anything. It was the pure, academic pleasure of finding out how far the hardware has advanced while my Adventurer 3 lived out its quiet existence. Spending money on hyper-niche, techno-curiosity hobbies that spend 98% of their operational lives parked on standby is a classic Dennis ailment.
The hardware upgrade to a multi-colour appliance is probably inevitable eventually, but the beauty of voluntary obsolescence is that the timeline can be deferred indefinitely. For now, the Adventurer 3 remains in active semi-retirement. In fact, the trusty old box is humming away on a print job right this second, while the credit card stays firmly in my wallet. The thousand-dollar printer upgrade can wait for some other year, while any hypothetical desk frog can get its blue eyes courtesy of a tiny brush and a steady hand.