You tell them you don’t work for $500.

Or you tell them that you do.

Per hour.

But since they’re clearly such great mates with dad, you can cut them a deal.

This comment is kind of fascinating because it’s essentially reinventing Slashdot’s metamoderation system 25 years later.

It was good then. No reason it wouldn’t work again today.

If you’d like object detection with fully local processing/control, I’d highly recommend looking into Frigate. It uses a Coral TPU (basically a little USB stick that acts as an accelerator for detection) and works extremely well. It also has Home Assistant integration if you’re using that. Frigate works with a wide range of cameras and all traffic stays on your local network.

You can also just spend $10 on a domain name with a registrar that offers dynamic DNS. Offhand, both Namecheap and Cloudflare do. I have no idea what my public IP address is because my router just updates it automatically for me. Plenty of DDNS desktop clients around if your router can’t for whatever reason.

One thing this overlooks is that the rigid mounted bed of the V2 causes thermal expansion issues. There’s a lot of really bad lore that gets repeated in the community re: bed heater power because the V2 tends to want to taco the bed if it’s heated too quickly.

The WhoppingOrchard kinematic mounts are a solid option for addressing the issue.

The Trident is the overall better design with a higher performance ceiling.

Flying gantries are a solution forever in search of a problem. They can work okay and they’re fine at the speeds that were common when the V2 was first designed, but there’s a reason why the community has converged on fixed gantry designs. They’re neat to watch operate but they don’t offer any practical advantage. The V2 tends to be relatively slow by modern standards, especially in terms of accel.

The Trident isn’t without flaws but it’s a perfectly fine starting point and the huge community does mean that most of the bigger design issues either already have a usermod or somebody working on cooking something up.