New U1 owner saying hi: TPU trouble, bed mesh, and which slicer do you use?
Hey everyone 👋
Just joined the club — got my U1 five days ago and I'm still grinning at it. Not a newbie tho, I'm coming from an Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro, and the main reason I went with the U1 was Klipper and how flexible it is.
Funny thing: all the deep knowledge I had to collect to make the Neptune print half-decent feels completely useless here. Stuff just… works. Not complaining! Pretty sure that experience will pay off eventually.
Most of my old filament presets moved over fine and print great, but I've already hit a couple of U1-specific things:
1. TPU drama. Got a roll of cheap chinese TPU, calibration tests came out fine, but on the first real model it started printing air after 2-3 layers. Cancelled, pulled the filament out of the tool with a LOT of force, and decided to stick to rigid stuff for now. Thing is, after that the tool stopped grabbing filament at all — just the classic clicking. I was sure it was a clog or leftover soft filament somewhere, so I tore the head down to the bare bones… and it was perfectly clean. Weird. Got it loading again by holding the extrude button and slowly pushing the strand by hand untill I felt the gears bite. Works now, but I'm a little worried this becomes a recurring thing. Anyone run into this?
2. The printer status view in Snapmaker Orca. Coming from vanilla Orca + Fluidd I'm used to seeing way more info, bed mesh especially. I connected the U1 to my old vanilla Orca install just to double check, and yep — it's all there. Also found out how tilted my bed actually is 😅 Would never have known otherwise, prints are coming out perfect so far. Hence my poll question above — which slicer are you using?
Plenty more questions coming, but honestly I'm just having a blast with this thing. Supports in a different material are pure magic — finally I can stop being scared of supports 😄
UPD:
Fan Fact - because of where I live (UAE) local retailers sell U1 for 1.4K USD. Which is not far from final price if you order officially and pay additional fee on the border. At least that is how I understood this.
So as soon as I saw this one for 1K USD I acted fast. Eventually I bought Chinese local version. Which means I have no cloud and other official fancy staff such as Cloud Firmware Updates. So, it is pure LAN only mode, but I plan to resolve remote availability via my home routes setup.