Creality WIFI Box tested: Budget Octoprint alternative?

today we test the reality wi-fi box it's a budget alternative to octoprint and we're going to find out if it's worthwhile or worthless [Music] you might have noticed a new product from creality recently called the creality wi-fi box in fact i think they were giving it away with some printers recently on sale what it aims to do is to compete with octoprint a operating system that runs on a raspberry pi to run your 3d printer and even extend its functionality using some amazing free plugins priced at only 20 bucks it's probably natural to wonder whether this thing is worth taking a punt on well i've tested it out so you don't have to and the results probably won't astound you let's start by looking at the product page the product we're testing today is the creality wi-fi cloud box and it retails for 20 us dollars on this page there's a lot of marketing talk and it's not really that clear what this product does it is an alternative to octoprint where we plug the box into our 3d printer the inbuilt wi-fi will then connect it to the internet and we can use our mobile phone to control the printer and monitor print jobs as they're happening if we come to this linked page with more information about the product we can come to the section reasons to use creality wi-fi box and here we discover it's the truth that in 2020 one of the biggest problems that plagues the world is having to read g-code files by inserting an sd card to a 3d printer and they do acknowledge octoprint here but they also say that it's hard to set up and that octoprint requires a raspberry pi which will cost more than fifty dollars they claim easy installation using a qr code and again they talk down octoprint saying it's very powerful but it is limited to being used on the local network and you can't access it from outside your home or wherever the printer is set up one of the big things that this product does offer that's typically not done with octoprint is cloud slicing and this is achieved through the creality cloud site where we can download unlimited stls for free share models and have online slicing to start those print jobs remotely some pretty big claims there i purchased a couple to test them out so how did it go the creality box comes inside a coriality box and it's pretty well packaged inside we have the actual unit hopefully you can tell compared to my hands but the length and width are just a little bit bigger than a credit card we have spots for the micro sd card a reset switch on the back we have an ethernet port a port for supplying power and two usb ports also included is a usb micro cable for connecting to the printer and a usb mini adapter in case the printer needs that if you dig further into the packaging you'll find a second usb micro cable and that can be used to power the box we have a card related to compliance for the wi-fi feature and we have the manual in chinese and english with all of the parts labeled and then step-by-step instructions to get going so let's follow them the wi-fi box does not come with a micro sd card so you will need to supply your own format it to fat32 and then insert it into the side of the box this acts like a hard drive and the box won't work without it the other thing you need to supply is a 5 volt power adapter to power the creality box it must be capable of supplying at least 2.4 amps this one is a smidgen above that and you'll probably find that most modern mobile phone chargers will do the trick after powering up the creality wi-fi box we're unable to proceed until we install the companion app i'm testing the app on android and here is a google play page for this app the screenshots all seem interesting enough a little bit like thingiverse but the reviews maybe not so good nevertheless let's press on and open the app opening the app reveals the default interface is a news feed and if we want to get much further we need to log in and if we're a first time user that means making an account complete with the usual email verification after we've made our account will be automatically logged in and we can tap on the plus in the upper right hand corner to add our device the easiest way to do this is to use the built-in qr code scanner and approach the bottom of the creality box to scan the unique code once we've done this our device will be added and we have a chance to give it a name i started with ender5 which was my target printer we now need to get the creality box on our wi-fi network and for some reason it wanted location permissions which i denied and this wasn't really a problem as i could still switch over to the wi-fi of the creality box entering the default password before selecting my home wi-fi network and entering the details for that from here things got a little weird because i waited three minutes which is pretty agonizing when you're just staring at the screen only for the timer to finally expire and be presented with an error message that the connection failed when i went to repeat the process all of a sudden the device was listed as online so i connected up my ender 5 running an skr version 1.3 and vanilla marlin we swipe down to refresh and still no connection all the cables were connect but no matter how many times i tried i was stuck in fact connectivity with machines was a major problem for me even though i took the time to check cables and update the firmware to the newest version so here's a list of all the printer combinations that would not connect to the creality wi-fi box artillery 3d x1 running lpc rip-rap firmware prusa mark iii with the stock main board and firmware bqb x completely stock ender 3 running an skr mini e3 v2 second sk go with the duet maestro mini delta skr mini e3 dip prusa mini completely stock i also tried some boards not installed including an 8-bit reality board and the easy board light from th 3d running their unified firmware i expected the cr10 max to work as as the original main board but an upgrade to the tiny machine's version of marlin meant that it would connect but the manual controls didn't work for the printer and anytime i tried to start a print job it would hang on loading and this was true for multiple files i did send a support query through their website i haven't heard back yet but if i do i'll update in a pinned post so that's a lot of combos that flat out wouldn't work but i also had some other combinations that kind of worked the easy 3d nano would connect and i was able to slice and start a print however you might notice here that the z-axis is not moving and when the print was done there wasn't actually anything left behind the completely stock reality 3d print mill did in fact connect and i was able to control the temperature and the fan but not having officially been released yet there was no support for it inside the app so i couldn't slice any files and start any prints one combination i found very strange that worked was sativo little monster with lurge mainboard and firmware like the e3d nano i was able to set up a custom printer profile for this although i have to say it's pretty painful process especially entering things like start and ng code through a mobile phone instead of through a normal computer i was able to slice and start a print but i didn't persist with it because the lurge kept on beeping every time a command was sent out options well fortunately not quite there was one board that did work the creality version 427 32-bit board that i purchased as part of making my guide it still had firmware for an ender 3 pro in place from when it was shipped and it did connect to the creality wi-fi box it was out of a printer however so i took one for the team uninstalled my skr mini e3 and installed this new board into my ender 3. all of the hardware was now compatible so this is how the system is meant to work the main interface has a models tab where you can search for and browse existing models and if you want to browse what's available simply go to model.reality.com model you can see the interface is similar to thingiverse but that's not where the similarities end for many of the files on this site they've just been blatantly ripped from thingiverse even including taking screenshots of the original site to be clear this has been done by the users of the site and knock reality in this early stage there's not actually a lot on offer here like thingiverse there's a lot of obscure parts that are great for specific applications but there's not a lot of files that have wide appeal for general printing back on the app once you pick a file that you'd like you press the slice button to begin manufacture the first step is picking which printer you like from the bottom and then we can preview all of the slicing parameters that will be used for the cloud slicing we do have the ability to access the rivet along the bottom and customize the default profile in my case changing the retraction to suit a direct drive extruder and upping the bed temperature from 55 to 60 degrees celsius when we're done we click slice and everything happens in the cloud a few minutes later our sliced file will appear in a list along with anyone else who has sliced it for their printer we have the chance to review the slicing parameters and if we're happy with them we can press print we then choose our device that the creality wi-fi box is connected to and press yes to start the actual printing initially the g-code will download to the sd card installed in our creality wi-fi box before the hot end and bed heat up and our print will be underway mid print we have limited information on the progress but no controls for tweaking any settings i did hook up a generic webcam and plug it into the creality wi-fi box but as you can see no camera feed came up so my guess is you're forced to use the creality 3d viewer webcam when the print job is complete you'll get a notification on the app and after you remove the object from the bed you're free to start another print however you will need to re-import any custom settings that you had and for me that was very annoying so what's print quality like well the first thing i'd note is despite having the first layer spot on the priming line was way too close to the bed and therefore difficult to remove the actual prints look okay i believe the cloud slicer is based on cura so no issues there the trouble is that we're using cookie cutter settings and the results here are not as good as my own tuned slicing profiles now normally my position on creality is that while they're not perfect they've done an amazing job bringing quite high quality 3d printers for quite a low price enabling many people to take up the hobby but in this instance i'm afraid they've missed the mark this product was extremely underwhelming compared to octoprint which is both free as well as open source you can get a raspberry pi version 3b for 36. sure it's almost double the price of this but my advice would be to save a little bit extra to ensure you're getting good results with octoprint installation is quite straightforward you make an account only for your local raspberry pi which means you're not surrendering your phone number or email address to any companies you can follow guides to connect your version of octa print to the outside world meaning you can monitor your printer from anywhere there's numerous free apps available that give far more control over your printer we have amazing free plugins and built-in time-lapse functionality i guess this thing has potential if you're using a completely stock reality printer and you don't mind being limited to a small range of designs in any other case please just go with octoprint if you've bought one of these and maybe your experience differed please let me know down below in the comments if you're already an octoprint user let me know perhaps your favorite plugin down below too 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

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 174,504

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d print, 3d printed, octprint, octopi, creality, cwb, wifi box, wi-fi box, creality wifi box, creality wi-fi box, test, tested, review, budget, alternative, vs, connection, plugins, free, unboxing, troubleshooting, timelapse, camera, webcam, creality view, remote, external, octolapse, prusa, cr-10, cr10, mk3, mini, artillery3d, x1

Id: SBr0ArgDztc

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020