Excited to pick this up after getting a notification it was ready this morning.
Contents photos for those interested.
Just have to wait for INDX firmware for this.
Box is tiny, ketchup and mustard for scale. 🌭
I started off by eating all the gummy bears days before. I did not want them to interfere with my ‘process’. 😉
Overall the build took me about 80% of the time to build the core one, about 7 hours. You spend about a quarter of the time just disassembling the printer.
I found this one easier but the instructions much worse, there are already comments by others on the guide so I won’t address them individually. A lot of paths seem to take unnecessarily complex approaches.
I never had any issues tapping / screwing into the 3D prints, I used a finishing/cabinetry electric screwdriver which is sort of perfect for this, but even that cheap Bosch electric screwdriver would do it. I felt a lot of complaints were overstated but that’s just me. There were couple of times I needed to break out the right angle chuck, I don’t know how they would be fastened otherwise.
There were 3-4 places where there is not adequate clearance to screw bolts, like the top hinge bolts.
Overall I would give it 4 out of 5 gummy bears.
I 3D printed these screw organisers which helped a lot. (Photos):
- This one is already existed for the screws removed from the core one (many of which need to be reused)
- This one I made to organise all the screws that come with the kit so they are immediately ready without having to search for the right bag. I saw one of these organisers made for the core one kit after I built it and I wish I had it before I started the core one.
I have printed about 2Kg of filament since getting it setup up and my feedback/experience is:
- I had a noisy load cell issue causing failed calibration, I tried a couple of different configurations on the oscilloscope and adequate noise attenuation was achieved by looping the INDX lead that plugs into the Nextruder socket through a ferrite toroid 2-3 times (3-4 turns in technical terms). This reduced noise by 18-20dB. I also measured near field EMI emitted and twisting the cables reduced noise emitted but did not meaningfully reduce the noise from the load cell circuit. I think if the circuit was wired differently with differential pairs rather than a common ground and signal this might be more useful.
- I printed about 300 of the same thing before and 100 after the INDX build and the print quality on Prusament PETG with a single tool is much worse compared to before switching to INDX, really shows how much care went into optimising the profiles for the Nextruder. Pressure advance, flow factor are off and the first layers in general are poor compared to the nextruder. Filament PM PETG gave better results. You can see the poor print quality with the filament clips in the photo. Prusament PETG IIRC.
- I have had issues where the first couple of layers delaminate from the rest of the body of the print.
- I had an instance where the filament pulled out of the tool while docked before a print started. 5 hours later and the printer had just been printing air and somehow along the way the filament sensors disabled themselves when I investigated afterwards. I’m surprised this wasn’t detected.
- The spool join implementation is very unintuitive and inconvenient. In general the UI flow may need to be refactored. I don’t want to set this per print every time.
- Im a little surprised the filament sensor blocks have no way of interfacing with the PTFE tubes from the USS Dry box, the suggested clip design is semi useless (pictured) and I need to order separate parts and 3D print a replacement. Instead of just providing 8x the little plastic collets (pictured) and having the 3d print accept them like at the top.
- It would be good if there was a defined process for creating filament profiles and submitting them and quality criteria to be met for them to be adopted. This is not really specific to this though. I would be willing to create profiles for brands not covered if I thought it would be helpful to others.
- I assume there will be a fix for the LED bar location becoming mostly ineffective? Currently the location of the LED bar is very poor and limits visibility of the first couple of layers which is really the only time I look at a print. I would prefer an official solution rather than leaving this to the community.
I would say my main negative experience has been around communication/CRM on the Bondtech side. It has been worse than most kickstarters. I only recently joined their discord (which I only found out about from Reddit), I had not received any email updates since originally receiving the founders edition and just saw people posting on Reddit that they were receiving kits despite no communication to me on my order. 𝓦𝓣ℱ. The discord is far too noisy to track in any meaningful way and is a terrible place to retain any sort of community knowledge and is not searchable outside Discord. I think relying on discord is the source of a lot of their communication failures. I preordered for a product and paid, i expect to be notified by email when it is available to order.
My second main issue is (forgetting al-dente nozzle-gate) is that I do a lot of printing at 0.6 and 0.8, not so much at 0.4, and when I finally ordered my kit I was not given a choice, now I have 8 tools in a size I don’t need and the tools are EXPENSIVE. I now have to spend additional hundreds of euros in tools. My tool order from a week ago has no progress. I think Multi-colour prints are cool but I personally didn’t get the INDX to do multi colour, I could do that with MSLA and a paint brush. Most of my prints are functional. I often switch between filament types and nozzles, run out of filament etc… and I want to print supports in a different material and hopefully at some point print text in a 0.25 nozzle while printing the body in 0.8mm.
I guess my next step is to make a bunch of filament profiles.
Looks like they are all arriving at once, time to update my flair
The box is much smaller than it looks in the other posts.
I have a whole collection of waiting room pics, if you like this.
Developed with Fuji Hunt Xpress Kit and scanned with the Canon 5DS + EF 100mm 2.8L Macro
London City Airport is kind of surreal, you walk to the gates and you are right next to these big regional jets, this gate framed one nicely.
Circular polariser gave this unexpected impressionist look from the ripples in the water. (Upside down)