The hotend is the part of the printer head assembly that heats up in order to melt the filament and deposit it out in layers. It can be separated into the print nozzel at the very bottom; the heater block, which houses the heater element and the thermistor, and the heat sink which cools the top of the assembly.

The print bed is the part of the printer where the material is deposited onto to make up the part that is being printed. They come in a variety of sizes and materials some common types being glass beds and buildtak surfaces. Some printers have a heated bed which helps certain materials adhere better, however materials like pla do not require a heated bed.

The extruder is the part of the printer where the filament is fed through and extruded into the hotend. There are two main types of extruder: a direct drive extruder and a bowden tube extruder. A direct drive system is when the extruder motor is attached directly to the carriage and moves with it and a bowden tube system is when the extruder is elsewhere on the printer and feeds the filament through a tube to the hotend instead of directly.

Filament is the raw material that is fed into the 3d printer. It is what is melted by the hotend to make your 3d printed part. There are many types of 3d printer filament, the most common of which is PLA (Polylactic Acid). Filament cones in all sorts of colours and textures from clear filament to wood filament. Different types of filament also offer different properties such as strength and flexibility.

Stepper motors are the components that make the 3d printer move. 3d printers dont use other types of motors because it is the stepper motors that allow the printer to move to precice locations. Stepper motors can do this because, as their name suggests, they move in steps not continuously so the gcode sent to the printer can tell the motors exactly how many steps to move.

Gcode is the code, or the instructions, sent to the printer which tells it where to move and in which direction, how hot the hotend needs to be; how hot the bed needs to be etc. Once a model is sliced you get the gcode which is what you upload to the printer.

CAD or Computer Aided Design is how you create 3d files. To create 3d model files you need to use CAD software. There are many examples of CAD software such as Tinkercad (for beginners) and Fusion 360 (for intermediate users). Once you have your 3d model the CAD software will export a stl file or a obj file which you need to send to a slicer before it is ready to be 3d printed.

A slicer is the last software that your 3d model (now a stl or obj file) needs to go through before being 3d printable. What a slicer does is it takes your 3d model and cuts it up into cross sectional 'slices' which get exported as gcode. The slicer is useful for altering print settings such as infill and layer height which will affect the print qualiy of your 3d printed part.