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The Elegoo Centauri Carbon is a cool-looking 3D printer you can get for $300. I’d never run a 3D printer in my life before this thing showed up at my shop, and I had a few significant hiccups getting it running right. But after just a few sessions of set-up and training via YouTube, Reddit, and ChatGPT, I was able to make myself a viable car part.
I’ve become quite enamored with 3D printing this year. I know, it’s been around for a minute. But it’s more accessible than ever in 2025. Not only can you get decent 3D printers pretty cheaply, but you can also have AI teach you how to use one and fast-track your way through the intimidating programming aspect of plastic fabrication.
The Centauri Carbon is not the absolute cheapest 3D printer out there; it’s supposed to be entry-level-good. If you’re comparison shopping, some specs on this include: CoreXY with 500 mm/s velocity, 20,000 mm/s² acceleration, and a build volume area of 256×256×256 mm. In other words, it can make things that fit within a 10-inch-sided cube. As Elegoo pitches it: “Designed for advanced materials, Centauri Carbon is equipped with a 320°C brass-hardened steel nozzle and superior cooling within a fully enclosed chamber. It specializes in carbon fiber reinforced filament, allowing you to create strong, lightweight, and heat-resistant parts, ideal for aerospace, automotive, and athletic applications.” It won a design award this year, too. You can buy it with a starter kit of accessories on Amazon for under $400.
The printer itself is $300, but you’ll probably spend about $450 total once you buy some filaments and accessories. Elegoo sent me one to review in the context of car projects after seeing the 3D-printed parts stories we’ve run here.
Rather than comparing it spec-for-spec against other 3D printers, I’ll walk you through my experience getting it running and making my first car part while sharing impressions along the way.
Centauri Carbon Form Factor
It feels a little silly to care how cool a tool looks, but I have to admit, the Centauri Carbon is a really impressive tabletop decoration. It looks like something out of a Mass Effect video game without being cheesy—I don’t even mind the “CREATE THE FUTURE” text on the side. The parts feel high quality, the touchscreen interface is gorgeous, responsive, and intuitive, and the toolhead (the thing that actually moves around and poops out hot plastic to make your models) is relatively easy to service.
Assembly was trivial—I just had to remove a few shipping security bolts and click the screen into place.
The Elegoo Centauri Carbon takes about the same amount of space as a female Australian shepherd mutt (though it is slightly lighter). I figure that’s a more practical measurement than whatever “centimeters” are. Andrew P. Collins
The Centauri Carbon also has a little camera inside its print box to take time-lapse footage of your parts assembly, which is neat. Unfortunately, the LED you can switch on to illuminate the printing area is woefully inadequate, so you’ll need supplementary lighting if you care about watching your print in real time.
Another thing to note is that the printer is fairly large. Not so much by 3D printer standards, but it’s about four times the size of the paper printer you might already own. Plan to clear quite a bit of desk space wherever you plop this. You should also keep it on a heavy or reinforced table. I set mine up on a coffee table I thought was solid, but its legs wobbled like wet noodles once the Centauri started printing. Seriously, the printer vibrates quite a bit, and I think arresting it will help long-term life and print quality.
The armature that moves the toolhead around and the elevating platform that holds your workpiece glide and slide beautifully.
Machine Setup—And My First Screw Up
3D printers at this level use spools of what’s called “filament” as their source material. Those are pretty much just very long rolls of a small, malleable rod. They sort of feel like weedwacker string. Different filaments are different types of plastic, requiring different heat settings in the extruder nozzle … and already I’ve introduced you to some new vocabulary if you haven’t experimented with 3D printing yet. But you’re getting it from context, right? If you get one of these, that’s how your journey with 3D printing will begin: lots of phrases you might not have heard. But if you think about them, they’re mostly self-explanatory.
The filament gets fed through a long tube from the exterior of the printer all the way to the nozzle; it kind of looks like the tail on an xenomorph alien from Aliens. Instructions say to “feed it until it stops,” but I got a little tripped up there, and you might too—you’re pushing a fairly hard plastic through a bendy tube that makes several big turns. It might want to “stop” a few times. And when you do get to the end, you don’t want to over-push, because you can get your filament clogged in the little gears that move it along. Finding the “hard enough but not-too-hard” level of pushing was not intuitive to me—take a lot of care with this step, because the filament can get out of alignment easily, which is annoying to rectify (more on this later).
You need to update the firmware and remove a few security bolts before you begin printing. In this lower image, you can see the track system that the printing toolhead rides around on. Andrew P. Collins
On the printer’s touchscreen, there’s a page for loading the filament. You punch in the temperature you want your nozzle to be (the filament’s wrapper will tell you), then simply hit “load.” What’s happening there is, tiny little gears are grabbing even tinier rungs on the filament so that the printer’s computer can precisely control the rate of flow. Imagine lowering a straight belt between two gears, where the gear teeth mesh perfectly with the belt’s buckle holes. That’s essentially the action that’s happening.
The included quick-start guide says to “hit the down-arrow button repeatedly” until the filament appears. At this point, I learned Elegoo and I have different ideas of what “repeatedly” means. I pushed the button a few times and nothing happened … so I mashed it like I was playing Street Fighter on a Pizza Hut arcade cabinet, then got myself into a cartoonish self-own.
The device started puking out a puddle of filament. A white blob was quickly melting and solidifying, entombing the nozzle in its own emulsion. Panicked, I killed the power and scratched my head. Then, after giving the nozzle a minute to cool a little, but not too long to let it get cold, I plucked the gross shape it’d crapped out and carefully picked away the excess plastic with a tiny blade.
First, I accidentally printed a plastic marshmallow. Another failure: I tried to print a new shape with an improperly loaded filament.
I tried again, this time, no button-mashing, just trusting the machine … that seemed to work. Then I selected a little boat from the small batch of pre-made demo models you can print. What do you know—the Centauri Carbon shook the hell out of the coffee table I’d placed it on, but after a few minutes of squealing and shaking, it spat out a very robust boat toy that looked exactly like the on-screen image. Well, minus the roof—I hit “stop” once I was satisfied the printer had proven it was capable of doing its job. Forget desktop baubles, we want to make parts we can use!
Software—Scary, but Surmountable
Obviously, a 3D printer must be told what to print. And as I learned, turning your idea into a file that the Centauri Carbon can understand is a little more complicated than editing a digital shape in a drawing program and hitting command-P.
This printer needs two things to create an object: an STL file and something called G-code. STL files can be created with design or rendering software, while G-code is created with software called a “slicer.” You can then export them together over Wi-Fi or on a USB stick—the Centauri Carbon has a USB port right on the front.
Don’t understand what any of that is? Don’t worry, I didn’t either. But perhaps I can save you some time troubleshooting by breaking down my experience figuring it out as I made my first part.
First, you can download a 3D model or create one from scratch. Then you need some CAD software to edit it and mint an STL file. That file can be put into the slicer, which makes G-code. After all that, you can bring the STL and G-code to the printer and get it working on your printout. Andrew P. Collins (Thingiverse, OpenSCAD, Elegoo Slicer screenshots)
The simplest car part I can imagine is a switch blank, one of those little plastic pieces that goes in place of a button for an option that your car doesn’t have. And the simplest way to get a 3D printable file is to download one somebody else has already made. Plus, I’m about to remove some fog lights from my Honda Civic and will, in fact, need a new switch blank in the near future. Boom—my first printing project practically assigned itself.
There are numerous sites where you’ll find free and paid pre-made files; I ended up with this “rocker switch blank” by mrmacsmg on Thingiverse after a short Google search.
Once I had the file, I had to load it into the Elegoo Slicer (free software for the printer) to create a G-code. While the STL file is like the blueprint of your model, the G-code is like the instruction manual on how to make it. It translates the 3D model into a language the printer can understand. It also gives you one last look at the model, along with dimensions.
So at that point, the Elegoo Slicer told me that the switch panel I’d found was going to be 44mm long. My nose wrinkled, my lip curled, an annoyed snort escaped my nostrils… I needed 42 mm.
The slicer can look at STL files, but it cannot edit them. For that, you need design software. I found a legit-looking free one called OpenSCAD and asked ChatGPT to train me up on it. The LLM even gave me a fresh template for a switch blank with a little more prompting. This is where things start to get exciting.
Messing around with different ways of doing retention clips. ChatGPT wrote me the code for this file from scratch using my dimensions and some pictures of similar parts that I sent it. Andrew P. Collins
In OpenSCAD, you get a text-based representation of your shape on the left with a picture of it on the right. You can alter the shape by changing the numbers in the code—I was able to teach myself its syntax somewhat clumsily (but effectively) through trial and error. I’d simply pick one number to change, hit “preview,” and see which dimensions changed in the picture, then revert before messing with something else.
If you like puzzles, you’ll enjoy this part a lot. I blew over an hour just futzing with the code ChatGPT had given me, just to see what level of customization I could accomplish. It’s only limited by your patience and imagination—that right there is the magic of 3D design!
The Elegoo printer comes loaded with a handful of printable files you can test the machine out on. I tried the boat, and it came out well! Andrew P. Collins
There are far more design software choices out there, including, of course, CAD programs that let you play with shapes in a real-time graphical interface rather than text. And I’m eager to try those, but for the sake of this test print, I ultimately went back to the free switch panel template and only made the 2mm tweak to the length I needed for my Civic application using OpenSCAD.
With the new STL file exported, fed into the Elegoo Slicer for a G-code, and then both those files fed to the printer via USB stick, I was finally ready to encounter my next problem.
My white demo filament had run out, but Elegoo sent me some black stuff too, which I’d loaded into the printer before hitting “print” on my new switch blank object. The armiture moved furiously around the printer, looking and sounding very busy, but nothing came out of it.
After a long exhale and troubleshooting through Reddit, YouTube, and Elegoo’s own support site, I accepted the fact that I’d need to start disassembling my printer before even printing my first real item. Unfortunately, I’m clearly not the first person to have an Elegoo Centauri Carbon fail to extrude its filament. But the upshot of that is I easily found a YouTube video explaining the solution—the filament had gotten stuck in those gears that control its flow rate.
So here are my tips for taking apart the toolhead: Don’t use the Allen wrenches Elegoo includes. They suck, and I almost stripped a hex nut with one. Beware of the spring-loaded razor blade designed to cut off the filament when you change rolls, and be careful to let the nozzle cool before you lose a fingerprint to it. It gets hotter than hot.
The toolhead comes apart pretty easily. Good thing, too, because look at how the filament got all borked up inside. It was caught like a fishing hook inside the mechanism, probably because I was tugging on it too much. Watch out for the razor blade used to cut the filament when you’re changing to a different material!
From there, I was able to follow the guidance of random dudes on YouTube to carefully pry the gear mechanism apart, extract the stuck bit of filament that was gumming up the works, and reassemble everything successfully. It was annoying and frustrating, but I’ll take the L on user error on this one—I think I pushed too hard when I loaded in the black filament.
I’ll also note that I appreciate how user-serviceable the printer seems to be. I was scared to crack it open for fear of damaging tiny sensitive parts (and you should certainly be careful), but it was no harder to do than removing automotive trim piece to access an under-hood area.
The Centauri Carbon has a one-button calibration mode, which I ran it through after everything was back together, and finally, got to print my damn switch.
Elegoo Customer Service
It’s a bummer that I had to reach out to support on my first project, but the response was excellent.
While I was able to fix my Centauri Carbon with videos from other users on YouTube, Elegoo did respond to my plea for help about 36 hours after I submitted a ticket. Not only that, but the company hit me with a long email full of clearly illustrated instructions on how to open up the toolhead and access the gears, plus a link to a video, to resolve the issue. It was a really impressive level of help, and I just went through the normal customer service channel. Bodes well for being able to resolve future issues down the road.
Finally: My First Print
My switch blank is a little malformed where the print began, but it’s sufficiently rigid, and the broad plane that will face the driver is pretty enough for primetime.
From here, I can fine-tune not only the 3D file, but also the heat and speed settings of the printer in pursuit of perfection. But that will be a project for another day.
I’m sure I can clean up the printing process by dialing in my technique. In the meantime, this little blank will perfectly replace the custom mount I’d previously made to hold a KC Hilights dual-position fog light switch. I lost the OEM one I had in there in the first place. Andrew P. Collins
That brings us to my verdict on the Elegoo Centauri Carbon. It’s a lot of fun for under $500, and if you’re willing to invest the time to master 3D design, it could be really useful to any tinkerer. Just don’t expect to magically be able to make things at the push of a button once you get this thing unboxed; the loading process is delicate, the software’s a little intimidating, and there are a lot of settings to get your head around.
But if you want a cool-looking workshop accessory that will make you feel like Tony Stark, and actually be able to build practical things you can use, I think this tool is going to be rewarding to learn.
Got 3D printing tips? Maybe some more software or templates I could try? Hit me up at andrew.collins@thedrive.com.
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Automotive journalist since 2013, Andrew primarily coordinates features, sponsored content, and multi-departmental initiatives at The Drive.
