This 3D Printer is RIDICULOUSLY Smart - Craftbot FLOW IDEX XL Review

this is the craftbot flow idex xl one of the largest smartest and most expensive 3d printers i've ever reviewed on the channel this machine has automatic functions for almost everything and with two independent extruders a sheet metal chassis and removable print surface it has the makings of the perfect 3d printer but is it well let's get started [Music] how's it going guys angus here from makers muse we're here in my garage because well this printer is so gigantic that there's literally no chance i would get it into the studio i know many of you have been waiting patiently for this review but truthfully the review process for this 3d printer has been one of the most difficult i've ever done on the channel and has literally taken months of testing so a thumbs up on the video and a sub to the channel would be really appreciated it's free and it helps me out hugely let's start on the specs this machine is huge no doubt about it but the flow series come in several flavors both idexx versions have around 425 millimeters and 250 millimeters in y depending on the printing configuration and 250 millimeters in the z which is double to 500 millimeters in z for this monster the idex xl there's also the single extruded variant flow and the flow xl which have slightly different print volumes and lose the idex functionality but overall carried the same interface and features construction is incredibly robust with a chassis being made from sheet metal and heavy duty motion components i'm not sure why they only went with linear rods for why when x has fast superior linear rails this is a step back from the previous gen idex craftbot 3 but at least it has rails and a nice big ball screw for that huge cantilevered z-axis this machine's party trick is the idex system with two extruders which move independently on the x-axis linear rail and you can use them in a number of ways such as dual color printing printing a different support material or more inventive approaches such as mirror or parallel 3d printing or a firm favorite recovery mode you might be thinking well to do that kind of thing this machine needs some kind of sensors and man does it have sensors in fact this 3d printer is so jammed full of sensors and it offers the most automatic functionality i've literally ever seen in a 3d printer filament monitoring is done using an encoder something we saw on the craftbot 3 last year but it's now integrated into the direct drive all metal hot ends this means it knows if filament jams and not just when it runs out like a basic micro switch sensor would i'm happy to announce that mesh bed leveling is finally making an appearance on a craftbot 3d printer and have used a genuine bl touch here along with a complex automatic routine to sample several points across the bed at two discrete printing temps which is important because this huge aluminium plate will expand enough to disrupt first layer heights between pla and abs printing temperatures without compensation main bed leveling is done using the traditional three screws and it's manual yes but the machine touches off and tells you how much to rotate each nut and when it's dialed in the last time i saw something similar to this was in the zortrax line of printers but i will say the automatic routine it moves to the point and then waits for you continuously touching off to move the dial and initially i didn't realize it was waiting for me it was not really an indication to say come to the printer i need attention so some kind of notification to say hey i need your intervention now to level these screws would be handy because i thought the machine was just going to do it all on its own to be honest calibrating idex is also a user nightmare because you have to align both extruders in x y and z axes and to do it manually is incredibly tedious as i found out during my review of the copy master 300 v2 however instead of guesswork this machine uses cutouts on the spring steel print bed to locate where the nozzles are and for leveling the nozzle zed height it has screws in the side of extruder 2 which you can then loosen and move it up and down by the design of the shroud makes accessing them seem like a complete afterthought honestly it's probably the most unclear part of the whole calibration process despite craftbot having some quite good tutorial videos when you first get this machine there's actually a wizard to step you through all of these calibration steps one by one and then once you do all of that and you have the machine dulled in you won't have to do it again unless you move the machine or update its firmware and during the process of testing updating this firmware was something i was doing quite a lot but let's talk about that touch screen since 2015 and my review of the craftbot plus i have loved the responsiveness of craftbot's interfaces everything you need is here from file navigation to filament management and a whole array of calibration functions and diagnostic tools it's such a responsive display it should come as no surprise that the flow xl and flow series in general runs a complete custom control board with 32-bit architecture it has internal storage alongside usb storage as well as an iot integration and a built-in camera yes you can wirelessly control this bad boy over network and watch the print in progress it's the ultimate lazy makers tool first you have to log into the wireless 3d printer's interface and then find that printer's ip and access it from another computer on the same network from there you get this interface where you can upload or download g-code and other files it can even do a time-lapse using the webcam if you like you can start or stop prints preheat and go into the webcam and monitor the prints in real time while doing long prints for the night this feature has been amazing i just would log in and take a look to ensure things are going well and not failed now just go about my day i even got the machine hooked up to a cheap iot mains relay so i can power the whole thing up completely remotely and then start a print i don't even have to come down here it's amazing i didn't used to care too much about wi-fi support because it's often buggy and difficult to implement but this is definitely one of the more useful implementations i've come across so then the user experience is clearly superb the build quality is fantastic so the printing must be fantastic as well right well mostly here's the thing craftbot has shoved so much smarts into this machine that sometimes it comes back to bite them this is the second craftbot flow xl that i've been sent for review yeah because the first was full of issues beyond weird firmware and sensor glitches that machine ended up having two loose motor pulleys with no clear way to access them and i did offer to repair it but i in my corresponds to craftbot it turns out by the time i discovered this the problem had been fixed they'd change things yeah haven't heard that one before after an immense saga and a lot of support from rick at fuse3d who's craftbot's australian reseller this printer finally arrived and i restarted my testing basically from square one i feel craftbot tried to rush the initial printer out to beat covet restrictions but it didn't really pan out for them with serious qc issues and unfortunately i know for a fact that wasn't an isolated case judging by their facebook group other people have encountered weird issues and joel telling on his recent unboxing of this machine uh had a faulty extruder cooling fan on the right side out of the box which could have happened in shipping who knows but either way this is a huge printer so you can't exactly just send it back to hungary or some poor reseller to fix it's not a cheap machine either so it should arrive working and you shouldn't have to expect to tink with it out of the box either way i did say i wouldn't base my review conclusions on that machine but rather this one so how does this updated 3d printer perform it's mostly really quite good let's start with single material prints and well you've been seeing this machine in action for the past few months in almost every project i've done on the channel the parrot puzzles custom sd drawer for my desk headphones holder and tons more were prototyped and printed on this machine with flawless results and reliability the ability for me to cad and then send and observe the print all while staying in the studio has proven incredibly valuable to me and for single color prints at least the machine has been very reliable using provided presets in craftware which is craftbot's own slicer when prints are done you don't have to hack at the print bed but instead just remove it and flex the parts off the printer uses an immense spring steel sheet with pei and it works perfectly for pla for petg you need a generous coating of glue stick but my smallish tests printed fine from factory though this machine is far too open to expect reliable large petg prints or especially abs prints but craftbot do supply aftermarket covers and a hat to keep the ambient temperature up which should help quite a bit though i'm not able to test its effectiveness the machine was able to clear all the way down to 0.15 millimeter gaps on my clearance gauge direct on the pei which is incredible and the surface quality is in general superb and uh did i mention how quiet it is seriously like i'm filming right next to it considering how loud the old craft bots used to be this would be impossible and this thing is almost like a ghost depending on how fast you print you could almost work in the same room as this machine but the curiously aggressive acceleration curves on the movement axes do tend to vibrate the machine quite a lot and it's this aggressive acceleration that can also induce ghosting or rigging artifacts on prints so i'll be looking at dialing that back in future but this machine has two extruders not one and they bring several possibilities to the table some of them very usable some of them downright terrible let's let's start with my favorite parallel printing mode in this mode the print bed is roughly halved and the second extruder copies exactly the movement of the first allowing you to effectively print two models in the time it would take to print one for the stuff i do with my prototyping this is mega handy as i can cut down my printing time dramatically on the same machine there's also mirror mode which is effectively the same but it just mirrors the axes i don't really see the value of that compared to parallel other than how visually trippy it is it's more of a party trick in my opinion another mode worth getting to know is redundancy which i mentioned earlier in the video but that reduces your print volume slightly but turns the second extruder into a spare ready to jump in and take over should the first extruder fail if you like the printer can also send you an alert if something happens which is pretty handy and the print bed is so massive that honestly the chance of something happening like a filament roll rolling running out or a jam occurring is quite high so this feature alone could pay for itself if you intend to make massive prints on this 3d printer but what about the main use for dual extruders dual color or dual material printing well like the craftbot 3 i reviewed last year getting any kind of decent multi-color prints of this machine has been a huge battle i've thrown so many test models at this printer using a range of slices and settings and it's taken a lot of my time but here's the thing the issues aren't really the fault of the hardware craftware the slicer made by craftbot just isn't good at slicing for dual color i cannot understand why there's not a good default profile that takes advantage of the idex nature of this printer with those wipers instead the default profile makes the machine try to print a cylindrical purge tower at blindingly fast speeds which is inevitably knocked over and ruins the print why well as the extruders are parked they just ooze and ooze and ooze filament and this isn't uncommon all hot ends will do this but it does mean it takes ages for the extruder to catch up again and start extruding properly this leads to underextruded parts in the purge tower which causes it to break in half or under extruded parts in the model or both there are settings to mitigate this in your header you can put g code for tool exit retracts and primes as well as a pre-change extrusion which should take advantage of the wipers but i found them all to be buggy and ineffective so like with the craftbot 3 it seems most users are resorting to using simplify 3d for their printing needs especially dual color which sucks because you're spending so much on a printer the supplied software should handle all functions and do it well i literally have a pile of test models but here are my best three examples of flowalistics dual color pikachu at 150 scale sliced with craftware simplify 3d and a completely custom process slicer profile i put together with the help of a friend i had to use all sorts of tweaks and tricks and hacks to make them work out of all of them i like the prusa slicer profile the best which does a purge correctly but sometimes the dice get pulled over into the print and leave ruined parts so it's still not perfect okay while i was editing and got a haircut a new firmware for the craftbot flow was made available and this firmware was supposedly going to fix a lot of the issues i was experiencing with dual color so i had to go back and test and look it has fixed some things here's a great example of a slightly larger dual color pikachu that i did with the default settings in craftware and it actually worked incredibly well but there's still under extrusion problems going on and in another print i tried the purge tower did in fact break free and ruin the print and the pre-change extrusion you can set in craftware doesn't always occur i'm not exactly sure what's happening there sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't it seems to be quite buggy still so i wanted to be really thorough this video the latest firmware has allowed me to get some really good dual color prints but it still has a way to go okay it's pretty clear i'm unhappy with my dual color results across the board but the single extruder prints are really really good when this printer is fed good g-code it produces great results now i know craftbot has been rolling out constant firmware updates to this printer during testing so i implore them to do the same for their slicer and their provided slicing profiles right well i think it's conclusion time i feel this printer is about 95 there craftbot has created one of the smartest 3d printers i've ever reviewed on the channel but it has not been without its issues and i know for a fact i'm not alone in suffering these weird annoying glitches quality control issues and what in what is otherwise a fantastic experience there's just so many sensors in it like if you forget to put the build plate in it tells you there's a collision it tells you which is great but when you add so much stuff more things can go wrong and things did go wrong but they are getting better which is great to see but i'm not going to lie it's so disappointing to be let down by what is essentially software craftware hasn't really changed that much from what i can see since 2015 when i did my slicer shootout and i really liked it then because it had customizable supports but the 3d printing landscape has changed so much since then i just really don't think it's acceptable to rely on also outdated overpriced software like simplify 3d which is why i push so hard to get a pressure slicer profile working and i'll leave these these profiles i've created in the video description by the way if you'd like to try them out but if you don't care about dual color or dual material functionality then you're probably better off just getting the single extruder flow variants which are cheaper because i really have been happy with this performance printing single color models i do really enjoy parallel printing mode but the cost jump isn't really justifiable if you only want to use that mode because of how tedious this review process has been i haven't tried swapping nozzles but it's important to note that with a 0.4 millimeter nozzle that the machine comes with from factory utilizing the full 500 millimeter zed height could easily take days and that's why i haven't done giant prints but i will be swapping to a 0.8 millimeter nozzle for some massive future projects and i'll let you know how that goes by the way these nozzles are proprietary the whole hot end assembly is their own design but they're fairly reasonably priced and you can even get hard nozzles if you want to print with abrasives speaking of the extruders and nozzles i know that joel over at 3d printing node has also received on these machines to review so when his review comes out he'll have a bit of a bit more of an insight into that side of this printer because there's just so much to cover so i'll put a link to below and also here to check out his review when it comes out because it's really important to get different perspectives on machines especially ones this expensive um because yeah how expensive is this well are you sitting down the craftbot flow series starts at 2 600 euro for the single extruder 3 300 euro or 5 280 australian dollars plus gst for the idex and four thousand euro or six thousand six hundred and thirty six dollars australian plus gst for this big daddy the flow idex xl yeah look it ain't no end to three for sure but it isn't even in the same league this printer arrives on a huge palette needs two people minimum to move around and it might just be the machine you're after for your school college or design studio or the ultimate home maker space i just hope they nail down some better printing profiles asap a big thanks to craftbot for working with me through this somewhat delayed review and rick of fuse 3d the australian reseller for craftbot who you should definitely hit up if you're after one down under links are in the video description as always here on makey's music's review has been my own opinion and it hasn't been paid for hasn't been given approval this is the release that you're seeing it's the same that craftbot's going to see as well i do get to hold on to the machine for future projects though so i do have some plans because it's so huge so if you want to check those out maybe consider subscribing because here on makerspace is my aim to empower your creativity through technology and i look forward to seeing you again very shortly thanks for watching guys bye

Channel: Maker's Muse

Views: 594,304

Rating: 4.9369893 out of 5

Keywords: 3d, printing, review, craftbot flow idex XL, craftunique, maker's muse, makersmuse, angus deveson, australia

Id: iXtuS8pXz94

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020