A BIG upgrade! - Prusa MK4

hi I'm Tynan and I'm here to talk about the prusa mark IV I have definitely been a fan of prusa in the past a lot of their printers and a lot of the experiences I've had with them have been generally quite positive and the fact that they're in almost entirely open source and allow users to hack it and upgrade it along the way is a big selling point that I generally have been quite a fan of as time has progressed there have been a couple other printer manufacturers in the market that have made things more difficult it looks like they sent us a couple of snacks in terms of other unboxing things a nice little handbook for anyone who needs a little bit more introduction power cable standard stuff but a whole bunch of replacement Beds which is quite nice because this is one of the most common consumables especially if you accidentally cut into it or something like that when you're trying to take a part off and a bunch of packing they do provide a box of filament which is always nice assorted accessories which we'll open up after this big box is out of here one piece yeah all right there be the printer one more little box to open up I have a suspicion yeah so this is a nozzle adapter which normally doesn't come with it this particular one has two sides so you can load multiple filaments at once if you want this is the pla prusa Galaxy black which is persiment they should have a profile for it when we get there so I haven't actually seen an improvement roll in a while but they have a little filament catch on the end inside of the Roll normally I see it like fed through holes or something like that they have a wi-fi system built in which is a notable Improvement in previous versions you've had to either attach a Raspberry Pi or some other single board computer or Wi-Fi adapter to be able to connect these wirelessly but that seems to be out of the box compatible now Yee there's two big upgrades that I'm aware of right now one of them is the extruder set itself they've replaced the existing two gear drive with one large gear and a couple of idlers that greatly increases the amount of grip that the extruder has on the filament and to compensate for that they have a planetary gear set that allows the stepper to operate well within its ideal range but still have the filament move at a reasonable Pace they have a force sensor integrated into the hot end so they can probe the bed and get the actual measurements rather than having to do manual bed leveling which is also a massive quality of life Improvement is anyone who's ever had to mess around with that knows it's an adventure in a lot of the upgrade kits you can get the printed Parts purchased as well but generally for any of these they suggest just printing your own upgrade Parts they'll provide you with the files and get you rolling to the point and also even on production printers they print a whole bunch of components including the screen cover a bunch of the other stepper mounts and some of the mounting components onto any of the hardware boxes and that is all of the hardware setup that we have to do before you get set up and start doing software but that'll come right after the segue to our sponsor thanks to Super Micro for sponsoring this video get ready for the super micros h13 generation servers they're powered by amd's epic 9004 processors with up to a staggering 128 cores and AMD 3D V cash these are designed to handle the most demanding workloads they offer unmatched scalability and memory expansion options allowing you to boost your productivity with the highest core count on a single processor and blazing fast performance for memory intensive tasks visit the link in the description for more information on super micro's AMD powered server Technologies today the build volume of this printer is 250 by 210 by 220 millimeters it's not the biggest build volume out there but it'll get most of what you need done and the self-test begins we will need your help with this test you'll be asked to tap the nozzle don't worry it's going to be cold and it gives me a nice little countdown and that's just detecting that the load cell is working properly now it's doing a z-axis calibration goes all the way to the top until it vibrates and then moves over to the side this is its initial self-test after it's built or taken out of the box to make sure that everything is attached properly and that it's detecting its ends this particular printer doesn't actually have limit switches on most of the axes I think any of the axes it detects feedback from the motors themselves they've been upgraded to avoid weird artifacting along z-axis okay so it's still going through tests and now it's actually starting to heat things up so no one's particular surprise prusa uses prusa slicer it's a great slicer and a lot of other companies actually make forks from prusa slicer to develop their own because they do a very good job it has all of your standard settings all the way down to 0.05 millimeter detail to 0.3 draft standard you can upload a whole bunch of different generic or persimmon specific or other manufacturer specific filaments into your presets and they also allow different profiles for your printers and different nozzle sizes we have a nice little Snorlax here that we're going to do our for our print while this is heating up there's a couple of things to talk about about the nozzle itself there is a quick swap nozzle with a couple of thumb screws inside the extruder so you can take it out and swap a new one in very very quickly compared to any others and also the nozzle and extruder section is fully metal with no PTFE pipe or PTFE tube which means the entire hot end can get up to 300 degrees Celsius which allows you to work with a lot more of the engineering style Plastics on this particular printer all right and now here is our full self-test result which looks like as one would hope everything passes happy printing thank you this is another nice improvement over the previous versions where you could only use SD cards to upload files you can now use USB drives and you can also hook up a micro USB to I believe their your laptop if you wanted to print directly from there it should detect it automatically lovely oh it does happen automatically that's quite nice slight caveat for this make sure that the setting of the plastic is correct for your nozzle temp or you're going to have a bad time so it'll pull it in automatically and then ask you hey what plastic did you just put in and then this is gonna these are going to be all of your presets for your different types of plastic so pla pet G ASA polycarb now that that's all set up we'll hit print and it's going to go if I recall correctly this does have its own first layer cowl built in where it'll probe the area that it's going to print in to get a good mesh map in case there's deviations down or up so it'll automatically compensate for that variation as it's printing its first layers it's good fun so this is a 45 minute one at this point it's going to be heating up the hot end and the bed and then once that gets to temperature it'll go now it's going to go through and do its self-test or first layer calibration it just triggered the load cell and I actually noticed that there was a little dot on the print bed right where it touches that's it detecting through the load cell where it is and now if I understand correctly it's going to go through and do a grid in the area that it's printing and one nice thing about this is it only does the area where it's actually printing so it doesn't always do the entire bed which can be a pretty substantial Time Savings one of the things that it did here was it reduced the hot end temperature to the point where the plastic would still be solid but malleable which means you don't get those little dots left on the print bed as you're probing it and now it's increasing the temperature up again to actually start the print and the way it goes some of the other things I've seen floating around with the four cell and this setup in general some people have suspected that they may release active Force compensation from the plastic coming out of the nozzle to detect if there's any variations additionally though never buy something for a feature that might come I am pretty inclined to believe that any of the features that could be implemented with this Hardware but isn't yet most likely will over time or someone on the internet might just figure it out and post it to everyone and if you wanted to use it you can though be aware of using other people's code without vetting it first that is an extremely flat first layer a lot of the times when you're doing your first layer if you over extrude or under extrude while you're going over it you'll end up getting little bumps that come up or little gaps in between the in between the layer lines but on this one I don't see any of that at all even from the outer profile into the intersection which is solid all right and away it goes we'll see you in about an hour [Music] this print looks real pretty yeah I don't have very many yeah the bottom layer is very flat the print quality of this is very very consistent and similar to what they say I don't see any banding or recoiling when it's going around corners it seems to be extremely consistent on all of the flat faces which is really nice now that we have a successful print on this thing let's start taking apart and showing some of the cool upgrades that they've done using my nice lttstore.com screwdriver that is interesting those are not magnetic screws so this is that planetary gear setup that I had talked about earlier you can see in the center of that is the post attached to the motor you have two Planet gears on the sides and then an outer ring this holds stable and it moves the actual extruder gear which is in the side so these are the two thumb screws that detach the extruder open things up on the floor oh hi there this is the other two idlers for the extruder and then on the inside you can see the large extruder gear that engages with the plastic in general I'm quite happy with this printer and the history I have with prusa and the printers I've used from them and that I've seen people using from them I do believe that it is a very good machine though some of the features of it don't quite seem to be fully implemented yet like the extruder having force feedback or I have learned this is a touch screen or at least the hardware is a touch screen it's not implemented as one but maybe at some point and I think there are other a couple of other aspects of the printer itself that will get better over time with more firmware and software updates it is a good printer and I'm really happy with the overall quality of the parts that come out in the overall space of 3D printers currently I really like what prusa does I like all of the machines they've launched but with some of the competitors like the bamboo that have come out it's made the value proposition a bit more interesting this is a machine that you can buy not have to connect to a network not have to connect through anything hook up through your own Wi-Fi or your own ethernet if you want to and not have to worry about it connecting to any other servers so there's definitely some value there but for the price of about eleven hundred dollars for the out of box kit it is expensive looking at the biggest competition in the price bracket the X1 Carbon from bamboo or the p1p they are at 1200 for the carbon or 700 for the p1p compared to this which is 1100 for the as built out of the box or 800 for the kit that you have to assemble probably per myself purchase the kit and then build it because I'm technically Savvy and have built several 3D printers before but if you just want something to take out of the box and be good to go I would say that this would be a good purchase especially in the long run if you have a Mark III already or a Mark III Plus getting the upgrade kit is a pretty strong proposition at 580 for the upgrade kit plus a couple of 3D printed Parts you'd need to do yourself that makes a ton of sense to take a printer that's been around for five years already and giving it a new lease on life with a new extruder a new a whole bunch of new electronics and a bunch of other upgraded components overall it is a great printer and I believe that it does have some benefits over some of the competition in its history as well as the dimensional accuracy of the printer I know we've had a couple of gripes internally about how much tuning is required for dimensional accuracy on the bamboo and historically everything I've ever had from prusa that's never been a problem I maybe have to do one iteration figure out accurate settings and job done thank you so much for watching this episode of short circuit do you have a 3D printer at home and think that this is either an upgrade path or a replacement for what you have leave your comments down below and be sure to like And subscribe

Channel: ShortCircuit

Views: 341,788

Keywords: shortcircuit, SC, unboxing, first impression, tech, gadget, home, fun, buy, 3D, Printer, 3D Printer, Prusa, Prusa MK 4, Printing, Fillament, technology, extruder, nozzle

Id: nkjy_5_cuXc

Length: 13min 2sec (782 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2023