Best posts made by pptacek

I'm an experienced embedded developer and I spent weeks tinkering with various things around MySensors. Here are my 2 cents to anybody who wants to start quickly and painlessly.

1. Do not bother with anything but Arduino, nano is especially simple to use due to the built-in USB. I personally prefer pro minis due to the form factor. Do NOT bother with Raspberry Pi, it is too much work to get something done unless you have pre-build images you can just dd on your SD card.
2. Please, if you are starting with Arduino and stuff, USE some shield for your radio module. Order some Nano RF24 shield like this one https://www.amazon.com/Emakefun-Terminal-Expansion-ATMEGA328P-Interface/dp/B07N8PLFVC to avoid self-wiring. nRF24 4x2 header is idiotic and it is easy to make frustrating mistakes, have loose wires, miss a capacitor, have a weak voltage regulator, etc.
3. A serial gateway with a nano on a shield can be put together in 5 minutes. You just stack things up, make sure you CE and CS pins are right and upload a sketch. You are done.
4. nRF24 is a radio on 2.4GHz. Let it sink for a bit. Almost everything wireless (and microwaves) in your house runs on that frequency. Do yourself a favor, run a simple wifi scan on your phone and see which part of the band is messed up and which is available. It is simple to do today with free Android and Apple apps.
5. Watch your signal strength! What do you do when you start dropping packets? Put both modules closer and bump signal UP right? WRONG! That will make it worse and you will go down the spiral trying to figure out why your nRF24 radio is total crap. Closer you get, weaker signal you need. Seriously. If you will be operating the same room, set a signal to LOW. When you will go over one wall, set it to HIGH. I'm using nrf24l01+pa+lna modules (one with antenna) between house and garden, three walls in between, 50 yards, and on LOW I have 100% reliable connection, no dropped packets.

As of now, I'm using these battery-powered stacks (nrf24l01+pa+lna & jModule2 & pro mini 3.3V) around the backyard and I'm happy camper:

@dzjr it depends what do you need it for. This is my 2 cents on 3d printing at the moment.

If you need to print something small with high detail, get an SLA printer like Elegoo Mars. It is cheap, easy to understand and resolution is amazing. Prints out of the box, but it is messy and smelly.

Otherwise:

1. You are a complete noob, you have no clue how that stuff works, you just want to print. Get Prusa and print PLA. Basic printer, not great but reliable and great company support and great community.
2. You are a complete noob on a budget but willing to learn. Get Ender 3 and print PLA. It is basic, cheap, but gets a job done. Community support is great, but expect you will have to tinker with the printer.
3. You are a moderately experienced in tech and you need a workhorse. Get FlashForge Creator Pro or similar and print PLA, PETG or even ABS. Community support is great, that thing is an older design but it just works.
4. You are moderately experienced, with special (tinkering) demands. Here it gets very personal. There is a bunch of RepRap style printers with a moving bed (which I hate). There are some deltas (why??) and there is growing number of CoreXY printers of various sizes (Two Tree, Elf, Tronxy...). I would probably go that route. Stick with PLA and PETG.
5. Geek with time, resources, and curiosity. Build your own CoreXY printer. Voron, Railcore, etc. Print what you want.

I skipped 1) and 2) and went through 3) - 5). I personally own Elegoo, FlashForge CP, Elf, and CoreXY of my own design.