What is the Technivorous channel all about?

Hey folks, I'm Technivorous, and if you found your way here, you might be a technivore. What is a technivore? A technivore is somebody who devours all things tech. See the shirt? Technivorous. See tech? Devour. Basically, I get absorbed by pretty much anything that grabs my attention, whether it has bright lights, beeps, whistles, or what have you. If it's new, if it's tech, it just somehow grabs a hold of me and I can't really let go. Case in point, 3D printing. Well, I guess not latest, but one of my latest addictions. Odds are you already know plenty about 3D printing. If you found your way here, there's a pretty good chance you were doing some sort of search on it on YouTube. I have around 400 to 500 videos, and 90% of them are about 3D printing. I print using several different machines here, including the Creality Ender 3, the TiVo Tarantula Pro, and a couple of Anet machines, such as the Anet AA Plus and the Anet ET4. I also have an Anet ET4X arriving soon, two in fact, and in two or three days here, I'll be receiving an FLsun Q5, which will be my first Delta printer. So we do a lot of printing here on the channel. I do a lot of reviews of printers. I do a lot of filament reviews, but I also do other stuff too. You'll notice recently in the last couple of weeks, we did a review of this guy right here, actually. This is the Elegoo Uno R3, one of the little Arduino boards that they use, that you can use to do all sorts of things, from robotics to mini computers to pretty much anything that you can think of that runs off of a board. And they make different sizes as well. So there are micro boards and nano boards. This is the equivalent of, I would say, probably a Raspberry Pi 1st edition minus the USB port. They do have other versions as well. If you were around yesterday, you would have seen this guy. Now this is the Arduino Mega that I fried the voltage capacitor on by wiring it wrong. So we learn things every day. I don't claim to know everything, but I can show you the methods and techniques that I use to make things work. And for an example of that, let's jump over to some of my print footage. I can show you some of my greater disasters and I can show you some of my amazing wins. So you're going to have both in the 3D printing world. Don't expect every print to come off the printer perfect. And yeah, I mean, you're going to have to level the bed. It's probably the most common piece of advice when in the 3D printing world. And I kind of use it as a euphemism for going through the motions of making sure that you're doing everything properly, because it is the one thing that people say you need to do in order to get a good print. But there's actually a lot more to it than that. And the actual leveling process isn't necessary between every print if you're following some of these other steps. So that being said, I know that sounded kind of confusing. It's not as confusing as it sounds. Basically, printer maintenance is a big deal. I have been a villain in the past and a major culprit of this by not dusting and cleaning my machines regularly. It gets a little overwhelming when you have eight or nine of them running at a time. But once in a while, you do have to turn them off, clean them, oil them, grease the linear rods here. You'll start to get some pretty interesting grinding and scraping noises if you do not lubricate those. Of course, you don't want to over lubricate and make a oily mess of your machine or your workspace. So I'm going to show you how to do some of that stuff. Simple printer maintenance. We have a playlist down below that is called 3D Printing 101, and there's a lot of stuff in there. Although that playlist is over a year old now, and I'm planning on making updates to it soon. So if there's any information in there that has become irrelevant or that is no longer true, bear with me. But for the most part, that stuff should still be pretty well in effect. If you're an Ender 3 owner, we have another playlist for you that is the Ultimate Beginner's Guide to the Ender 3. You'll find that right below this video. It is pretty simple to find. That playlist has a ton of videos in it, specifically for Ender 3 users going over everything from initial printing, your first test print, a couple of calibration prints, and then making some adjustments to the hot end, your first mod. And that brings me to our other Ender 3 playlist, which is a playlist of Ender 3 mods. I am always adding to both of these playlists because I'm always modding my Ender 3. If you take a look over here, you'll see it kind of in no man's land there. And if you see right here, one of the mods we're doing right now is a dual extrusion mod on this, and that's actually how I fried that Arduino board. And I have another one coming, but in the meantime, we are working on some other stuff for this. So we are doing a mounting bracket to hold these a little closer. I'm working on that today. You won't be able to see that video unless you become a channel member, not just a subscriber. You actually have to be a member for that video. It will be my first membership video, and I don't plan on doing a ton of them. I will still release a lot of content to my regular subscribers, but there will be some exclusives for those of you who choose to go ahead and join via the membership button, which is next to the subscribe button. So there is a lot to learn here. There are a ton of other playlists and a ton of other videos. I barely scratched the surface. If you're a Cura user, some things you might find of interest, I update to the beta every time the beta comes out. I always keep my older version, but I test the beta for a couple weeks, and then when there's a new release, I go over a video featuring the new features of the new release. Sometimes there's a lot of features, sometimes there's not very many. I don't determine that, but I do make a video for every version, and there is a playlist called Cura Versions and Settings where you can find those videos and see what is different over each iteration of Cura. I will warn you with Cura, their first release, their initial release can often at times have bugs in it, which is why we do the beta run. If you do use Cura, I highly encourage you to download their betas at every opportunity and test them out, because your feedback is what prevents those bugs from making it into a final release. So that being said, we have another Cura playlist. That playlist is called Cura Settings in 5 Minutes or Less, and in that playlist, I go over pretty much every individual setting in Cura. In 5 Minutes or Less, I break down what it does, how to use it, and what other settings it interacts with. So that has been a very popular playlist for us, and since Cura is always adding features, I am assuming that I will always be adding videos to that playlist. So it's definitely one to bookmark and keep an eye on, because if you don't want to keep track of the new releases of Cura every couple weeks, you can always pop back to that one when you're thinking about updating and see what new features they've added since the last time you were there, and that's a great way to keep track of things. I do also use a ton of other slicers. I'm heavy into testing pretty much every slicer I can. You'll find some Sim3D videos around. Being a paid slicer, it's not my favorite when I have so many free slicers to compare it to that can do as much or more, such as Matter Control, for instance, or Ice SL. So if you want to see videos on those slicers, I have a slicer playlist that includes me testing and reviewing pretty much every slicer that there is out there, even if it's not necessarily a slicer, but a host engine like Repeater Host, which has slicer engines built into it. Some of those can slice with Prusa Slicer and Cura, not at the same time, but there's different engines built in. We do a lot of Marlin programming. We do a lot of Arduino stuff. I have a lot of fun on this channel. The interactions that I have with you, the people that are watching, have been really overwhelmingly positive, to be honest. Once in a while, we get a troll on here, and I'm pretty sure there's one guy that goes around and dislikes every video that I post as soon as I post it, but I say thumbs up to him because he must really be obsessed or something. That's going to be it for our intro video. If you've made it here, you have probably got your reasons for being here. I just wanted to make a little video and explain why you should stay here. You should hit that subscribe button. If you're feeling like contributing to the channel, definitely hit that membership button. It'll get you access to exclusive videos and perks, emojis, super chat, things like that. There are other ways to support the channel. Those will all be listed in the description down below, and if you're checking out my shirt, that link is in the description as well because until you reach 10,000 subs, there's no merch show. You can't buy the t-shirt on YouTube here, but if you follow the link in the description below, it'll take you to the site where you can. There's not just t-shirts. We have hoodies. We have bags, coffee cups, all sorts of things. If you're feeling like supporting the channel, definitely pop over and check it out. That's going to be it for this video, guys. I am Tech Niverous. I'm glad you stopped by. Find one of the playlists down below and go ahead and binge it out.