This is a benchy printed in under 28
minutes with minimal tuning, using readily available entry-level 3D printing
products that cost less than $425. And in this video I'm going to show
you how I did it and how you can use what I learned in this process
to speed up your 3D printer too. If you've only recently tuned in, you
might be fooled into thinking that this channel is all about peak performance,
the cutting edge, but here at The Next Layer, we believe that fast, quality
3D prints are a basic maker right. We believe that whether or not you
have thousands of dollars to spend, you should be able to print high
quality, engineering-grade parts fast without breaking the bank. Enter Sovol - the makers of the SV06 and
now the SV06 Plus, and a longtime sponsor of this channel, including,
full disclosure, this video. Though, honestly, I'd probably make
this video even if they weren't sponsoring it because who doesn't
like printing fast for cheap? Anyways, recently, Sovol has been getting
a lot of attention and publicity from many of the most respected thought leaders
in the industry, some of whom have even gone as far as to ask if the SV06 has
replaced the Ender-3 as the number one best budget-friendly 3D printer for
beginners, and it's easy to see why. For just $259, you basically get an
exact copy of the legendary Prusa MK3S+, formerly my go-to-it-just-works printer,
but with improvements like a slightly larger build volume, dramatically quieter
operation, convenient belt tightening, an extremely powerful planetary direct drive
gearbox, and significantly nicer fit and finish due to injection molded parts. I've even had great success
printing everything from PLA to PETG, and even ASA on this. And for those of you already typing a
fiery response in the comments below about how this $259 printer could
never be compared to the legendary Prusa, just remember that this machine
is fully open sourced, just like the MK3S+ it's based on, from hardware to software. That's all well and
good, but let's face it. As I pointed out in recent videos, the
Prusa MK3S+ is, well, it's a dinosaur. Perhaps when Sovol began designing
this machine, it was going to be an absolute game-changer, but in between
then and now, we all know what happened. The Bambu Lab P1P, as well as a few other super fast machines
like the FLSUN V400, the Snapmaker J1 and the AnkerMake M5 all hit the
market, whereas 80 millimeters a second print speeds and super high reliability
used to cut the mustard, today, they don't impress like they used to, but
as you're about to see, this machine still has so much to offer and it still might be the best value out there. Let me explain. But first, let's talk about the software
and interface to make this happen. See, because the Prusa is such a
dinosaur and we are slowly seeing most of these machines with simple 8 bit
boards and touch knob interfaces go the way of the dinosaurs, you can imagine
my excitement when the folks at per year reached out and offered to send me
the new Creality Sonic Pad for review. Now, for those of you who don't know, the
Sonic Pad is basically a tablet for your 3D printer, complete with a touchscreen. And that's great for upgrading
an aging printer to a more modern interface, but it's actually not
what makes this so interesting. See that comes from the fact that the
Sonic Pad allows you to quickly and easily, insert asterisk here, upgrade
your slow Marlin 3D printer to the increasingly popular Klipper firmware,
which used to be only for people who are willing to mess around in Linux. But which requires a much more
powerful processor than the 8 bit one in your 3D printer. Now, I know you've probably already
heard about Klipper, and if you're like me, you've been intimidated by
the prospect of flashing firmware and maybe messing up your printer. But listen up, it's literally
never been easier, again insert asterisk here, to flash
learn and use Klipper, thanks to products like the Sonic Pad. And with RaspberryPi's in extremely
short supply, $160 for a Sonic Pad really isn't bad at all, especially
when you factor in the fact that one Sonic Pad can simultaneously
run no less than four 3D printers. Now for clarity sake, Creality and
Pergear did not sponsor this video, that honor goes to Sovol, but they
did send me a free unit to try out. But one way or another, free product
or not, to me, this is a no brainer. Here in Israel where I live, just
the RaspberryPi without a touch screen or the included accelerometer
or stand is going to go for $164. But you're not here to hear about me gush
about how great these products are or how awesome it is that I get free stuff,
which honestly it's, it's really awesome. So thank you guys for following
the channel, seriously. What you wanna know is how I got a
28-minute benchy out of them and how you can make your own 3D printer faster. So let's now talk about the conversion. Creality markets the Sonic Pad as a
pretty much plug and play upgrade for your 3D printer, and while that may be
true for the limited list of their own 3D printers that are featured on the default
firmware and software, it definitely wasn't my experience with the SV06. The first step flashing the SV06 to run
on Klipper firmware was easy enough. I just downloaded the right profile,
which I've linked in the description below because it wasn't easy to find. Then I loaded it onto an SD card
and I booted up the printer. But when it came time to connect
the Sonic Pad, I hit a wall, which left this entire printer bricked
until I could figure it out. I played with the Sonic Pad and the
SV06 on and off for a week trying to figure out what I needed to do and
how to do it, and Googling seemingly random error codes to no avail. Creality customer support tried to
help, but after a bunch of honestly, pretty prompt email responses,
they told me that I was on my own because it wasn't their printer. Great. Eventually though, I found some obscure
YouTube videos, Facebook posts in the SV06 owners group and GitHub files
that led me down the right path. See, basically what I needed to do
was find the right printer.cfg file for the SV06, which again, I will
link in the description below to make it easy for all of you, and then
load that onto the USB thumb drive. Then as it turns out, and this is an
important one, I needed to plug both the thumb drive and the printer into
specific ports on the Sonic Pad, which may have been explained or documented
somewhere, but I sure couldn't find it. And yes, unlike typically, I did take
the time to read through the manual, at least the first couple pages. Anyways, once I had my ports
right, the Sonic Pad just worked exactly as advertised, flashing the SV06, re-enabling the
screen, and creating a web interface where I could now access the printer. I was up and running. Now I just needed to get my
software stack working as well. At the time of this recording, my slicer
of choice was Prusa Slicer, more on that in an upcoming video, and so I went
about adding the SV06 to Prusa Slicer. While I did already have a profile
from when I originally tested the SV06, it was not only too slow, but
didn't have any wifi connectivity for sending G codes directly to the printer. To be honest with you, because this
printer is so similar to the MK3S+, I just copied that profile from Prusa
Slicer and then began changing things like the dimensions since they are just a little bit different. You can see that I even left in a bunch
of start and G codes specific to the MK3S+ because it doesn't make a difference. From there, I configured the
physical printer profile to connect to the Sonic Pad. Pro tip here: did you know that
Moonraker allows you to access via your browser using the OctoPrint API? That means that all I needed to do was
select OctoPrint in the dropdown, put in the URL of the Sonic PAd, which I
had to find by scanning all the devices on my local network, and hit save. I actually didn't even need to
generate an API key or anything like that, which I guess means that
anyone on my local network could technically take over my printers. I don't know. I better, I better guard my
wifi password just in case. Now I'm going to get into the settings,
speeds and all of that in a second, but I do just want to take a quick moment
to talk about the user experience now that I have this thing up and
running on Klipper with a touchscreen. Obviously a central part of
this combination is this massive seven inch touchscreen which really does allow you to control
every aspect and every function of the printer, from preheating to choosing
files to whatever else you want to do. I can't overstate just how awesome this
is considering I've been struggling for the last month or more, trying
to design a custom mount and figure out why the display isn't working
and otherwise struggle to get Klipper screen working on my Voron 2.4
with no observable success so far. I can just imagine getting four of my
printers to all run Klipper via this one Sonic Pad and then designing some
kind of custom mount to put it right in the middle of the shelf so that I'll
have access to one clean touchscreen interface to control all of them,
without having to reach up and try and get to the different touchscreens. But of course the touchscreen is
only part of the experience and it's a relatively small one at that. See, another of the main draws of
Klipper, at least for me, is the sleek, fast and responsive web interface. And of course the speed. We're gonna get to the speed in a second. Relax. Coming from OctoPrint and Marlin, you'll
find that Klipper is just slim down and much more customizable and tweakable, and just, it's generally more advanced. I'm sorry, OctoPrint. I can't say I love the default theme
and layout of the widgets that Creality chose for the Sonic Pad, but the beauty
is I can just change and personalize it really easily to my heart's content. Though I still haven't actually made
the time to do that on my Voron, so pretty pessimistic that I'm actually
gonna have the time to do it on this. Overall, though, I've really been
enjoying Klipper's web interface as opposed to OctoPrint, and I've found
workarounds for most of the stuff that I liked about the ladtter, whether it's
Exclude Object, or Obico for Klipper for remote viewing and monitoring. And in case you are wondering, yes, you
can connect a camera to the Sonic Pad for remote monitoring or timelapses,
and you can use a USB hub to connect multiple cameras so that you have
enough ports for all four printers. Alright, with all the setup out of
the way, let's talk about speed. One of the coolest things about the
Sonic Pad and one which I really appreciated, given that I broke the
super delicate ADXL accelerometer that LDO provided me for my Voron build, is that the SonicPpad comes with
a well-protected plug and play accelerometer, which even has a
diagram on it to help you ensure that you place it correctly. I simply double-sided taped it,
followed the on-screen guidance, and in no time at all, I had automatically
generated the recommended values for acceleration, as well as the optimal
resonance compensation algorithm. No, installing Klipper will not turn your
Cartesian bed slinger to a core XY monster like my Voron or the Bambu Lab X1-Carbon. But I was pretty surprised to see
that I could nonetheless comfortably go to up to 300 millimeters per
second speeds and 3000 millimeters per second per second accelerations. Now those values are about 40% as fast as
my Voron, but this printer costs almost 90 to 95% less and comes fully assembled,
which I think might make this a better bang for the buck, honestly speaking. But how fast can it actually print? Well, after my initial successful
38-minute benchy that I shared on a YouTube short, I decided to go for
broke, and I tried printing a benchy using the reasonably fast profiles that
I've been tweaking for my Voron 2.4, and here are the highlights. 0.25 millimeter layer heights, 10%
infill, 3 top and bottom layers. All the standard stuff except
print speeds ranging from 200 to 300 millimeters per second. Yes, I know that because of
the small model size and the relatively low 3000 millimeters per
second per second acceleration., I'm rarely if ever going to actually
hit those speeds, but surely this heavy bed slinger, with the massive
planetary direct drive extruder, won't be able to go anywhere near them, right? Surely this off-the-shelf extruder and
hotend, even with the 0.6 millimeter CHT style nozzle upgrade from good old
Uncle Ali won't be able to match what I'm achieving on my Phaetus Rapido, right? I mean, this budget sub $300 3D printer
is probably going to fall apart, or spontaneously combust, or cause a rift
in the space time continuum, right? Right? Right? I made room in my PLA recycling
bin for what I expected would be a mess of spaghetti. I loaded up some Voxel PLA, which
experience has taught me performs much better at high speeds than even more
expensive PLAs and prayed, and you guys won't believe what happened next. The benchy failed because I
needed a little more Z hop and a cleaner print surface. But the next time I tried to print it,
it printed in 34 minutes because I didn't notice that the acceleration and reset
back down at the beginning of the print. But the next, next time, 27
minutes, 55 seconds, and it looks pretty darn good too. And yet I still didn't feel like I
was going nearly as fast as I can go. I was pretty sure that if I cranked
the accelerations above the recommended values, I'd still get a half decent
looking benchy and probably be able to shave off a minute or two in the process. Unfortunately, I don't have time this
week to test it out, but in case any of you wanna try it out or just use my
profiles and settings for the setup, I will make sure that the G code 3MFF and
profile files are available to my Patreon supporters at patreon.com/thenextlayer. But obviously a benchy is
just that, a benchmark. So check out these other high quality
prints alongside the corresponding times that they took to print out. These results are pretty insane
considering my Voron 2.4 with corexy kinematics, a lightweight
pancake extruder, phaetus rapido hotend, blah, blah, blah, blah, is doing about 20 to 21 minute benchies. Though admittedly with some tweaking
and tuning, I could probably crack the 15 to 16 minutes, but there's more to
life and more on my plate than fast benchies, so we'll just have to wonder. Nevertheless, I think you'd all agree
that these results are pretty remarkable. I mean, as we speak, a preassembled
Prusa MK3S+ with an old school LCD knob interface, zero input
shaping, and a smaller build volume will cost you a staggering $1,100. And here we have this near exact
replica, with better fit and finish, quieter operation, and the addition of a
massive touch screen printing at roughly three times the speed, for under $425! And keep in mind that one Sonic Pad
can run four printers, and that means that you could basically, three of
these printers, one Sonic Pad, CHT nozzles for all of them, and still
have enough money for a roll of filament for each one of the printers. Basically you could set up an entire print
farm with nine times the output for the price of one fully assembled Prusa MK3S+. Come on. That's insane. And yet there's no denying that
this still is, in all honesty, an entry level combination. It's just that what constitutes
entry level has only recently shifted due in large part, I think, to both
of these products and competing ones like the FLSUN Sonic Pad. No, this combination will not churn
out 17-minute benchies like Bambu Lab's mid-market offering the P1P,
and it certainly won't print 350 millimeter plates of engineering -rade
materials like nylon or polycarbonate. And it's definitely not perfect. I would really appreciate if it had a
filament runout sensor for starters. But for under $425, I challenge
you to beat it, whether in terms of build quality, print quality,
speed, or just user experience. And plus, for just $70 more,
you could recreate this exact setup with the new Sovol SV06 which features a massive 300x300x400
build volume, a much needed filament sensor, a high flow volcano style hotend,
and a touchscreen, which won't work once you convert to Klipper, though, I bet
you could probably sell the touchscreen to an SV06 owner, or perhaps in the
near future Sovol will come out with an option to maybe omit it from your order, who knows. Either way you cut it. It's amazing to me to see how
far the entry level has come in terms of price performance. When I got into 3D printing on a lowly
gtech 10 m, I was thrilled to print a half decent benchy in under an hour
and 52 minutes, with a significantly less enjoyable user experience. It honestly has got me thinking. Maybe I should convert all my
printers to Klipper and run all of them off of this one Sonic Pad. While it certainly isn't plug and play
for the non-Creality machines, the benefits are pretty significant and
it would be a lot easier than having all these different interfaces and
different touch screens strewn about at different heights on my shelves. Plus, I can think of a lot of different
projects that I could do by freeing up the various RaspberryPi's that are currently
running all my different printers. I'm even thinking about migrating
my Prusa MK3S+ to Klipper because if it doesn't get faster somehow,
it's gonna need to find a new home. Is it really that simple though? Just plug in a sonic pad, bolt on a
knockoff CHT nozzle, scour the web for the appropriate Klipper profiles
and triple the speed of your printer. Maybe. We'll have to see. Let me know in the comments below
if you'd like to see a follow up to this video where I try to upgrade
my Prusa or any other printer that you'd like to see me review. Until then, thanks for watching, and
I'll see all of you on The Next Layer.
