A 3D printer that just works? - AnkerMake M5 Review

the anchor make M5 is a 3D printer that arrived on the scene with a lot of hype today we take it through its Paces to see what it does well and where it still might need Improvement [Music] [Music] I consider this anchor make M5 and Next Generation 3D printer handsome polished and should be able to just work previously I made a video on this topic including my first impressions of this machine which were quite positive now we're back with the full review after I've used it non-stop for the vast majority of my 3D printing over the last month this unit was provided free of charge and tested in accordance with my review policy and as always that means you get my unfiltered experience so let's jump in the anchor make M5 is a new 3D printer significant because it's the first foray into this Market from an existing Electronics giant such as Anka anchor is well established with its Electronics products and personally previously I had already purchased some of their power Banks but Anka also has a series of sub Brands including well-known security product brand yuffie more on that later back to the M5 and we can see a lot of similarities here between the M5 and the end of 3. it has the exact same print volume at 235 squared by 250 millimeters tall and like the end of three and the prusa I3 series it was mostly based on it features a bed slinging frame one of the big selling points here is high speed printing with a feed rate up to 500 millimeters per second this is still while maintaining high quality and the M5 is part of a full ecosystem with filament a mobile phone app their own anchor make slicer with pre-made profiles and the option to add multi-color capabilities with the V6 color engine there's also a built-in camera that uses AI to detect print failures and save your filament the whole printer is designed to be user friendly and fit into the category of just works the price is 800 US dollars that puts it in between the bamboo labs p1p and their Flagship X1 Carbon and significantly cheaper than the kit version of the original prusa mark IV so on to unboxing and setup and the box for me was my biggest early obstacle the printer comes double boxed and I struggle to get out the smaller box but my main problem was that the contents of this box were all packed upside down this was not a huge problem but it was a little bit more confusing to see the bottom of the printed components instead of the top as they were designed to be lifted out from the other end Beyond this everything was well protected and survived the trip without any damage with components ready I started reading the quick start guide the diagrams are very informative but I wouldn't have minded some more contrast with the two colors chosen I also found it a little bit small overall oh and it magically loves to change Pages backwards without permission cleverly the foam packaging is used to support the pieces and position them at the right height and this assembly process overall is quite straightforward with a few bolts per side to attach the Gantry to the Hefty base the base is recessed so as you tighten these bolts the Gantry will move perfectly into position following this there's four plugs to be inserted one for each Z stepper motor and then left and right USBC cables which are retained in their inserted position thanks to some Fasteners and once you're done underneath a plastic cover will snap into position to hide all of the wiring the filament spool holder bolts on next with the choice of two positions and to finish we remove any remaining pieces of foam and peel off some protective stickers is from the touch screen and the camera all very straightforward and made nicer thanks to this custom toolkit it's got a few spares plus the specific tools you need for working on this machine and the primary tool uses magnets to hold the interchangeable bits in position other nice touches include clearly labeled Hardware bags and a spare for each set of bolts I think most people will be ready to power up in around 10 to 15 minutes whether they have any experience with 3D printers or not next up you're instructed to download the anchor make app which is simply a matter of downloading from your app store once that's done you can accept the conditions and make a free account followed by using Bluetooth to pair your printer with your phone and get it on your local network from this point onwards you'll have full control and access to the camera of the printer the quick start guide now prompts you to start the auto leveling process this starts by heating up the bed and nozzle before homing Zed and then doing an auto alight process to get the vertical height of each set stepper motor even the nozzle will then be used to probe a grid across the bed in a 7x7 pattern this does take a while but the good news is the probing doesn't happen before each print instead the mesh is saved and then restored to be referenced as a new job starts I noticed a red icon on the touchscreen interface and tapped through to be prompted to update the firmware which was automated and only took a few minutes I then used the preheat interface to prepare for loading the included mini roll of pla filament is fed through the left hand side where a filament run out sensor resides within and through the reverse Bowden tube until it meets the back of the direct drive extruder from here we can simply push down the lever and continue pushing the filament through until it melts and comes out the tip of the nozzle alternatively we can use the touchscreen interface to Prime the hot end before our first print there's a range of pre-sliced models on the internal storage so I went for a 3D benchy that was meant to print at 250 millimeters per second and with that my first print was underway with a pretty smooth overall process I followed the print progress on the app and was able to access a real-time camera although in my opinion it's a pretty limited camera angle for monitoring how well the print has started approximately 40 minutes later I had myself a banshee and it was pretty clean a couple of fine wisps of stringing beyond that the only real blemishes I could see were some horizontal lines on the side of the boat but not the normal bowel line a great first impression so we proceed by installing the slicer we retrieved the slicer from the anchor make website and it's called anchor make slicer it is based on Cura and therefore the source is available on the anchor make GitHub I imported this lattice Cube torture test and started exploring how this version was different to the regular version of cura as you can see the interface is quite simple and if we leave it in Easy Mode there's very little for the user to play with slicing brings up a print preview and then when we click print if we have it ticked and AI image will be created more on that later and then we'll be prompted to select our printer and click the print button file transfer is fast and so far has been very reliable I think for every single print I sent this way the transmission was over within a minute and I had confirmation within the slicer that the print had been received successfully obviously you can start the video feed within the slicer as well so just like with the app you can watch to see if the print has started correctly the simplified interface is good for beginners but I quickly became frustrated for instance there's no button to quickly rotate a model to a particular side therefore you have to come to the rotate dialog and this doesn't even have snapping so I found myself constantly having to type in the value I wanted manually the print preview lets you turn on and off different portions but it's limited in that you can't change it to different preview types for instance previewing by feed rate layer height Etc the biggest problem however is the missing search bar that you use to filter settings in Cura let's say I want to print in vars mode I can search for this setting and then simply ticket to do the same in Anchor slicer and interchange from easy mode to expert mode but then the search bar is missing which means you need to have a very good understanding of cura to know exactly what section to go to to find the specific setting I couldn't find anywhere in the options to turn this on a workaround that is not user friendly is to have Cura installed as well look up what section what you're after is in and then navigate to the same section to turn on the same feature I feel this is really clunky and I have no idea where they left the search bar out if you're worried about the anchor Network going down in the future you can export to USB and start the file directly from the printer the printer has a USBC port and I tried to use an adapter at first but after about half an hour of processing it failed with this error so I purchased a dedicated USBC flash drive and this time the USB printing worked like you'd expect on the slicer download page there are instructions on how you can use the anchor make N5 with other slices I followed the prusa slicer instructions but with super slicer instead and this allowed me to import in a printer profile but it didn't create any print or filament settings so you're going to have to use what you already have or copy over the parameters one by one from anchor slicer if you do use a another slicer and Export to a flash drive you won't be able to use the AI function but if you drag the imported G-Code file into anchor slicer it will appear in the preview and then you'll have the option to click print sending it wirelessly and generating the required AI file as well my understanding is that Anchorman can be switching to a prusa slice of fork in the near future instead of cura so hopefully that's done properly so how does it actually print let's start with that lattice Cube the first bottle I slice myself and I would say this one is quite clean it's not perfect in terms of stringing and retraction but it is quite good remembering that this is a torture test next up I wanted myself a rolling camera Dolly so I picked this one from Chef 3D having a fast printer for a project like this means that you can complete it in much less time than you might be used to these wheels were done on the normal preset and I'm happy with the quality apart from a very obvious Z seam the bridging was good on the underside and accuracy was good when fitting the external bearings for these parts I experimented between normal and the fast preset within the slicer here we see a direct comparison between the two with the fast version looking more or less the same but completing in around two-thirds of the duration the layer height for fast is coarser at 0.25 so I stuck with the normal speed and it's 0.2 layer height for the majority of my printing next up this beautiful polar bear with seal automata from Amaya Chan which I featured on a recent video about cam mechanisms this was a good test because all of the different colors means I used a range of different plas some new some old some dry and some a little wet I'd say the worst of my parts were these ones in gloss white which had horizontal banding across the surface I believe this is related to the cold temperatures I was printing in which I couldn't ignore because the printer was constantly complaining about it and many of these prints were long enough that the ambient temperature was definitely fluctuating over their duration again I'd say the quality is not amazing but it is quite reasonable the finished model looks quite nice and I would highly recommend once again that if you're looking for something nice to print that you strongly consider this model my Patron Derek had his fan design featured on major Hardware's fan showdown and for these components I decided to test out the maximum quality 0.1 millimeter layer height in x3d Marble filament they really look the goods and you can barely perceive any layer lines again the Z seam is more prominent than I would like but apart from that they're really clean prints I did have to reprint a component because it got particularly cold around this time and it warped up off the bed and made the printer start when I had an even worse problem with the reprints I ended up using a wham bam temporary enclosure and that solved the problem of warping and lifting for pla however the retractions could be a little bit better with some fine wisps hanging off various parts of the model this model also gave me the chance to try the one-click support settings in Anchor slicer I feel that although in some places support was added where it wasn't needed the support removal was tuned beautifully and all of the support material could be removed with ease revealing some fairly clean undersides next up fast number four by extra Tim being a single line wide Buzz mode prints are great for testing Extrusion consistency and interlayer strength and I'm happy with the results of this one as I think it's strong and uniform how about some different materials these clips are super handy but tend to disappear so how about some more in ABS in Anchor slicer when you select the material of ABS it will automatically apply a large brim to try and prevent the model warping and lifting off the bed this kind of worked and with ABS on an open frame machine your success will largely depend on the model and the ambient temperature brim or no brim personally I try to avoid brims because it takes a while to peel them up off especially on a model like this frustratingly for both of these clips it took me around 10 minutes to get rid of all of the extra material and even with the brim the part was distorted fortunately not enough to stop it from being functional this is not unique to the Anchor maker M5 just the reality of printing a material that warps on an open frame machine my goat snapped yet another webcam Mount so I designed a robust replacement to be printed in petg using the anchor slicer petg preset these parts are good apart from some obvious fine stringing this filament can be difficult with this but I still think there's room for improvement with the preset profiles after some quick cleanup the part is dimensionally accurate and suitable for use how about a little grogu to test TPU expecting anchor slicer would lower the feed rate automatically I did a comparative test slice in pla with the predicted duration of just under 40 minutes and then a re-slice for TPU which was only around four minutes slower I found the TPU a little bit hard to load and preferred to remove the reverse Bowden tube from the top of the extruder and then feed it in that way but after that the printer seemed to have no dramas printing this at the usual speeds it did complete successfully but once again there is some stringing and wisps and I think those slicer profiles could do with a little bit more tuning Hardware wise the direct drive extruder is definitely suitable for softer filaments next up testing the artificial intelligence built-in AI camera monitoring is one of the main selling points of this printer and after some of those earlier fan print delaminations I was pretty sure it was useless but it turns out it was turned off on my review printer even though it's meant to be on by default annoyingly you can't turn it on from the touchscreen and you have to turn it on from the App instead and that's just what I did first phase is checking whether the initial layers have connected to the bed properly and to do this for the first two or three layers the print head will move up allowing the camera to take multiple photos of the print bed for me the vast majority of the time this led to false positives and since it checks it for two or three layers this means either on the app or on the actual machine I had to resume the print maybe this system is susceptible to what light is shining towards the camera because I got false positives even when it was obvious the first layer went down okay also annoying is that some filaments at string would make quite a mess when the print head lifted up to take the photos so that was annoying but what about the spaghetti detection when a model completely dislodges from the print bed to test that I sliced a benchy upside down and started the print obviously the initial layers for the chimney were fine but soon we started to extrude in mid-air and the system takes the last five layers into account so I had to wait to see if this would be detected the print progressed longer than this and still no air is triggered long enough for the spaghetti to miraculously join back to the chimney and from there the print actually recovered quite well and until once again it got to an unsupported section and not too long after this the detection finally triggered and I stopped the print I think it's hard to pick an ideal camera angle for this and hopefully the algorithm improves in time all I know is that's the weirdest ready benchio I've ever seen what did work a lot better was the filament run out detection after this kicks in the print will pause and you'll have a message on the touch screen as well as your mobile device if you like you can use the app to scan the QR code on the touchscreen which will guide you through how to change the filament extrude some through the nozzle and then resume the print the end result with this filament change is almost imperceable which in my books means it works pretty well that's all of my experience so let's summarize the pros and cons I think for the most part this is a printer that works as advertised and just works print quality is not quite the best I've tested but it is still pretty good and this is achieved in spite of the speed of printing which I think lives up to what's advertised the appearance is highly polished giving it the feel of other high-end consumer electronics unboxing at assembly is straightforward the app is easy to download and to use the touchscreen is responsive and the interface intuitive and firmware updates don't require any special knowledge of 3D printing it's also amazing that instructions for maintenance and simple fixes are built right into the touchscreen interface and even reference the supplied toolkit backing this up on the website is a support section full of short concise videos explaining various procedures the abl system did a good job of leveling and setting the Zed Offset you can still tweak this but I had to do so very little and the majority of users I'm sure will just ignore it in the last video people Express concerns that the plastic covers that make this thing look pretty would also make it harder to work on but at one stage the extruder stopped feeding and I followed a video on the website to find that only four bolts needed to be removed before the plastic shroud could be pulled off the print head and all of the internal components could be accessed in my case I only needed to remove the tension bolt for the lever arm this allows the two halves of the extruder to swing open and that revealed a small length of the filament that had snapped off and was preventing the two halves of the extruder from closing together and gripping the filament this was a pretty simple problem to fix and it was the only blemish I had in terms of reliability that was apart from the bed that seemed to offer less grip than equivalent surfaces in the same ambient conditions I had a few failures where the first layer went down fine but later became dislodged and to get delicate prints to finish I had to switch out of easy mode into expert mode and then manually come down and lower the print speeds for the first layer for the most part the slicer and the pre-made presets are quite user friendly and do a good job of holding the hand of new users however there are some features lacking that are found in most other slices and I hope this is updated soon the same goes for the slicing profiles which could be improved to reduce wisps and stringing one thing that's really not so good is the noise which during printing with all of the fans on is quite obnoxious foreign and annoyingly even when the machine is Idle there's always fans spinning that aren't exactly quiet at least the touchscreen beep can easily be turned off the AI detection could definitely use some work and all of the stops starting on first layer checks makes for quite a lot of cleanup post printing a lot of those wisps end up finding their way into cavities where they're not meant to be so users will need to be diligent cleaning here it is very convenient how the camera just works without any special networking setup but the angle isn't really ideal when you're trying to monitor how well a print is going and anchor doesn't exactly have the best reputation when it comes to handling users data I've got this video Linked In the description if you'd like to learn more most buyers won't care about this but let's briefly discuss intellectual property there's a lot of parts to this printer that are based on familiar open source principles clearly there's a lot of Polish that's been added but the base structure of the machine isn't that different to a humble Ender three yet the physical components of this machine are not open source the source for the Marlin firmware as well as the Q based anchor slicer have been released but my understanding is there were delays in doing so there's also some other components included in the slicer that by license should also have their Source available publicly if I was to sum up the machine it would be like this for the majority of people who just want a 3D printer to make things and expect it to just work they'll be quite happy with the anchor maker M5 it looks nice it prints fast the print quality is pretty good and the user interface across hardware and software is intuitive and simple to use there are some areas where it could be improved but they're mostly software and firmware related meaning they can be rolled out at a later date by anchor make for those that are already immersed in the open source culture of 3D printing I don't think this printer will be for them and they'd be better off with the prusa or building up a premium core XY kit that's just one person's opinion and you should always look at multiple reviews to see what trends persist across different experiences let me know in the comments section do you think this printer is a winner is it something you've considered buying and why or why not I'm interested to see the next steps and can make take in improving this product and if anything significant happens I'll update Below in the description thank you so much for watching and until next time happy 3D printing g'day it's Michael again if you like the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click subscribe and make sure you click on the Bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time foreign

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 60,163

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d print, 3d printed, ankermake, ankermaker, anker, eufy, security, review, test, honest, transparent, pla, abs, tpu, petg, 3dbenchy, speed, feedrate, quality, stringing, problems, abl, ai, artificial intelligence, spaghetti detection, noise, loud, volume, slicer, camera, wifi, app, cura, accuracy, prusaslicer, usb, firmware, marlin, license, gpl, open source, maintenance, bed, enclosure, troubleshooting

Id: 3LwvNMsTOGY

Length: 22min 30sec (1350 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 02 2023