Direct Drive Voxelab Aquila with the Creality Sprite Pro

on today's episode we're going to be converting our Vox lab Aquila into a direct drive printer and we'll do it using the creality Sprite Pro extruder kit now first I'll talk about the difference between our stock machine and a direct drive unit and then we'll look a little further into the creality Sprite Pro after that it's on to the installation and finally we'll take a look at all the prints that I've accomplished with the Sprite extruder and that includes ABS TPU PC and nylon because yes just like Eddie Munson this extruder is all metal and here we go [Music] [Applause] [Music] folks welcome back I am Leo of Prince Leo 3D thank you for joining me and this is going to be a rock rolling episode because this is my most requested feature by far converting our Aquila to be the direct drive or more accurately direct Extrusion and today we'll be using the creality Sprite Pro it is one of the most simplistic ways to do it it's basically Plug and Play of course it's not that easy it never is but at the end of this video I think you'll be fully ready to install this unit and modify to direct drive like the rest of my videos I try and jam pack as much information as I can it's going to be a long video so please I put chapter markers below that breaks this video up if you're looking for a particular section or particular information please navigate down below find the chat you're looking for and head right there now the first thing I'm going to talk about before we get into anything else is the difference between our stock Aquila and a direct drive unit so right next to me I have an ender3 Pro it's going to stand in as our Aquila because right now all of mine are direct drive this is the same setup so it will help to explain on our stock Aquila it's a boating style printer which means the cold end of the extruder which does the pushing and pulling of filament is situated right over here behind this rail and then the hot end which is right over here has the nozzle this is what heats up and extrudes filaments where the filament gets ejected from right at the bottom here and you'll see they're obviously very far apart so the Gap that the filament has to Traverse needs to be maintained and we do it with this tube right here this blue tube and it's called a Bowden tube whereas on a direct Extrusion printer the cold end the extruder that pushes and pulls filament is situated directly on top of the hot end where the nozzle is right here it's all one unit there's no need for a bone tube or anything to maintain the filament path because it's directly on top of one another now these systems both have their own strengths and weaken businesses for a boating system because this filament path is so large your retraction distance is going to be greater I would say a stock machine like this is usually between six to six and a half millimeters of retraction that's something you would set in your slicer and then also because of that printing TPU a flexible filament is going to be a little harder on a stock machine whereas a direct Extrusion machine like this is going to be able to print flexible filaments like CPU much easier right out of the box and the retraction distance on a direct drive is way lower for this unit my retraction is one millimeter where this was six and a half millimeters due to everything being on the printhead and on the Gantry that means there's added weight in a direct drive system because it's all right here on our x-axis whereas the Bowden system has only the nozzle and the fan shroud so it's much lighter so when we're printing with a direct drive system speed and artifacts are something we're going to have to look for if we're trying to print very fast the extra added weight could hinder that if we're having artifacts ghosting in your prints it can also be due to the weight you might have to slow your speeds down and then due to how the Aquila is built we usually have a single Z Rod just as this does right back here now with that added weight as the print head moves over to that non-supported side this Gantry could sag and dip down because it's heavier there are things we can do to mitigate that we can always add a dual z-axis I just did on this printer as well as my S2 that's over there I put a video out on that recently but either way it's something to consider if you're going to modify your printer to be a direct drive now in my own personal experience I really haven't seen much of a difference between a boating system and a direct drive system I can get quality prints out of both machines the one thing I will say about direct drive it can sometimes be harder to clean clogs and issues with the nozzle simply because everything is right on top of itself if you get a clog somewhere in this nozzle or anywhere in the hot end it can be a little tougher to clean out than it would on a Bowden system where all you have right behind the Shroud is the hot end other than that I haven't really seen much of a difference personally now there are a lot of different ways to convert our Aquila to direct drive I chose the creality Sprite kit because it's basically Plug and Play we're going to plug this rib cable into our main board it comes right up here and it plugs right into the extruder this also comes with its own Gantry so we took the old Gantry and print head off and we just pop this one back on it was a very simple setup and not only that the components that make up this Sprite Pro are really really nice this is an all metal extruder capable of printing up to 300 degrees C it has a titanium heat break to do so it also comes with two nozzles one's brass one's copper coated nickel which is fine but another cool feature is the daughter board that's attached to the back of this extruder so once you remove this extruder there's a daughter board back here that means if we want to replace any of the fans the VL touch the thermostat the heating cartridge we no longer have to take the wires and then run them down to our main board that's what this ribbon cable is for the door board behind there is where we're going to make all our connections so for instance this is the wire I need for the BL touch it is really short I don't have to Trail these BL touch wires all the way down to the main board now strength weakness like anything else the issue with the door to board is that the connections are unique so for instance this BL touch this is not a normal BL touch connector any kit you get that has a BL touch in it is not going to be able to connect to this daughter board the connection on this BL touch is a Molex Pico blade 1.25 pitch that is a normal connection for plugging into our autobed level our BL touch or CR touch the opposite end is the same size that is unique normally this is a larger jst connector that plugs into our main board but this is the same connection on both sides so that makes plugging a BL touch into this door board kind of difficult and going forward you're going to see that's kind of the same thing with the fan wires and the heating cartridge all those connections are slightly unique so now for the BL touch three ways to go about this one you could bypass that door to board altogether you could plug your BL touch right into the main board and not use the ribbing cable that's normal two you can go to digikey.com and buy the same cable I did and this is the easiest way to do it if you want to use this daughter board which you kind of do because it makes it look really clean not a lot of wires or extra wires going to your main board this is the way to go about this Cable's only like five dollars probably another four dollars five dollars for shipping depending on where you are and you can get this cable or you can do what I had to do because I didn't realize this order board was unique and you can take two separate VL touch cables and splice them together now I'm going to put on screen the pin out for the back of the door board but if you can see here this is the side that normally plugs into a BL touch and this is also the same connector I took two cables that I have from other BL touches I cut them in half I spliced it together and that worked for a time being it didn't look pretty but it worked three options plug it into the main board splice your own cable or go to fidgetc.com and buy a cable why am I pushing digikey.com I'm not it's just the only place I found that has this cable I looked on Amazon there were a few options nothing matches this I'm going to leave a link in the description to this product so if you want to buy it in advance or even after you've gotten a Sprite you can do so now speaking of the description there's a lot of information down there so please read it I'm always updating these videos with experience I've had since I put them out or if someone in the comments corrects me which I love when you do I really appreciate it I add it to the description so please peruse the description see if there's any updated information or anything else you might need to know about this project so I talked about the Corelli spray being all metal you can print those high temperature filaments it also is a dual geared extruder which means it's going to be able to push and pull the filament with more Precision because it has those two gears doing it now one thing you're going to want to check is how tight those gears are if you see filament leaving your machine very dented or very marred up it could be because the gears are a little too tight pretty cool way that they've included to adjust that and that's right here this is how you adjust the tension on those two dual gears in the cold end extruder you can get a Allen key right in there and then you can tighten it or loosen it as necessary another thing I noticed with the Sprite extruder and that is the screw that holds in the thermistor wires is so large that it's actually touching the wires going into the heating cartridge that's next to it now I don't really know what damage if any of this can do but I really don't like it now I actually asked this question in my Discord and we had some great responses and one was very smart kind of far as for the trees loosen the heating cartridge rotate 90 degrees so this way those wires are oriented out of the way great option that's what you can do if you want at that point the screw should no longer be touching those wires but definitely when you mount this look for that see where the screw is and see if it's touching those heating cartridge wires and if it is rotate it out of the way and one last really nice feature that I thought the Sprite included was feraled wires all the cable ends for this have been ferreled what that means is normally in a 3D printer the end of the cables that got plugged into terminals on the main board are just exposed wire and then sometimes they get tin and that can be a fire hazard what reality has done with this is feraled those cable ends if all that means is it's like a metal tube that goes on the end it gets crimped and now there's no longer any exposed portion of the wire those terminals get plugged into our main board and there shouldn't be any more danger of exposed wiring now the build volume on the Aquila printer the built the stock build volume is 220 by 220. however we can increase that build volume in the firmware because in actuality this is a 235 by 235 build service so we can use all of that by making some firmware adjustments however with this creality Sprite Pro I was only able to get up to 225 on the x-axis because the way this mounting bracket sits if it goes too far over it's going to hit into this passive block and you won't be able to get past 225 on the x-axis so with the Sprite Pro extruder my build volume is now 225 in the X and 235 in the Y now if you're looking for firmware for the Aquila after you include this new strike Pro extruder you can go to my website princeleo3d.com it's going to have everything you need because now this is an all metal printer it can print 300 degrees Celsius the stock firmware or even Alex's firmware is made for a stock machine that can only reach 260 degrees Celsius so I've modified Alex's firmware to do a few things one is reach 300C two I've brought the build volume to 225 235 so you're going to get the max value out of your build volume I've also increased the e-steps to what reality call for 424.5 and then finally I found out what the X and Y offset was for this probe and I've installed it into the firmware so you really shouldn't have to do any of that leg work again princeleo3d.com navigate to the firmware section and you should be able to find it now we've talked about it we've seen the differences let's go ahead and see how we install it I promise not really all that difficult even though it does look like a long video I just try to go through everything step by step so let's go ahead and get to the installation of the Sprite Pro extruder on our vaux leviquila so here's the box that my Sprite should open as well as all the components that were in that box it came with an instruction manual that gave the initial e-steps as well as a guide on how to hook it up it also came with all the screws we needed and an additional nozzle the nozzle that comes equipped on this right is a brass nozzle while this one we're looking at here is a copper nozzle coated and nickel copper known to be a better conductor of heat nickel is known to not let filament stick to it so this is a nice option that was included I mentioned it earlier but here are all the cable connections and you'll notice again all the loose wires have been ferreled here's what the entire Cable Bundle looks like and here's a plug that's going to connect on top of the Sprite and here's the mounting bracket when we remove our hot end we're also going to remove the carriage plate that's on the x-axis this mounting bracket is then going to go in its place and then our Sprite hooks directly up to this it's very simple and then next we have the Sprite itself and you'll notice it's a very compact design a lot of direct extruders don't allow you to get the full axis of your vertical volume because of their height but this is a compact design it's nearly the same height as my original Bowden hot end and now here's that daughter board I was talking about this is where you're going to make all your connections if you want to replace a fan or a thermistor wire and this is where you'll plug in your BL touch as well here is the air duct connected to our parts cooling fan which of course is what blows cool air on the extruded filament and cools down our parts my air duct was cracked right out of the box not sure if it's reality's fault or just during delivery these things tend to happen I'm not sure but it required some immediate action before we installed it and one more thing literally as I'm doing the final edits of this video someone from my Discord true to their name my boy blue came through and let me know they had just bought the Sprite extruder and their kit came with that dedicated BL touch cable so for them going to digikey.com and buying it or having to splice along wire was not an issue will you get this in your kit I have no idea I didn't get it in mine but it's good to know at least some people are getting them and they are available for some like I had mentioned when I received my Sprite right out of the box the air duct was cracked air would have leaked out it would have provided really poor Parts going so what I did was I went into Fusion 360. I mocked up a very quick design printed that out in ABS and I was able to repair it before I even had this extruder mounted on my printer you have to work on this shroud or even the nozzle while it's on here's an easy way to access it all there were three screws that hold this fan in place we only need to remove one that's the top one here the other two can be unscrewed very lightly and we can move the fan out of the way then we can tighten one of those screws and it stays in place this way we can either access the nozzle or the fan duct without getting in the way of anything else after that I unscrewed the fan duct only needed one screw to take it out because the other one was clearly cracked off and then I replace it with that ABS air duct that I had made this was printed in ABS Overture blue filaments after securing the air duct I lower the fan back in position and I put the screw that I took out right back in its place and I tightened the under screws down after that my Sprite was ready to go so I wanted to start with the wiring first thing we have to do is get access to the main board that's under our printer so there are four total screws that we need to remove to access it the first one is right here on top after that I flipped the printer over on its side so I can get access to the bottom of it and I take out the remaining three screws be careful when you remove that last screw the main board cooling fan is attached to this piece of metal we're moving and if You Yank It Out you're going to yank the mainboard cooling fan out of the main board so be really gentle with it now what I did during this installation is I unplugged that fan completely and I got it out of the way I knew I was going to be doing a lot of jostling in there I didn't want to pull the fan out accidentally you don't have to do this but if you want more ease of access a little more room to work not a bad idea to remove it so before we watch the installation this is a picture of our main board I want to show you where all these wires are going to be plugged in because it's really not that complicated starting at the bottom left here is the hotend fan that's the insert for that to the right of that we have the heating cartridge goes right there next to that this bottom Port right here that's the parts cooling fan that will be plugged in there all the way to the right hot end thermistor gets plugged in there if you'd be using a CR touch or a BL touch it gets plugged in right there the last plug we have is for the extruder motor it gets plugged in right there very very simple only six total plugs you're gonna have two left over there's eight total plugs those are redundant cable heads don't worry about them now that we've seen this basic layout of it let's go ahead and see what it looks like when we do it on the actual printer first I'm going to do is remove this wire so I have access then I'm going to remove the parts cooling fan that was the plug I just unplugged after that I go to my BL touch my BLT is not a single plug it's a three Pin cable and a two Pin cable so I take those out after that I go to the extruder motor cable that's the one all the way at top now sometimes these cables are held in with glue if they are for you you might have to get a pair of tweezers or something in there gently remove that glue that's on it now it was at this point I decided for the video only to remove the main board so there was a kind of a better angle to watch me doing this you don't have to do this if you feel like if you got some really chunky hands or you don't have enough room removing the main board really isn't that hard it's four screws you're gonna see me do it now make sure you remove that SD card as well because if you don't it's gonna stick out and you're not gonna be able to remove that main board now that I have the main board out I kind of free up that extruder cable just a little bit because eventually I want to remove all these cables from that wire harness so I want that extruder cable kind of dangling out by itself after that I'm going to remove the wire to the hot end thermistor that's the one in the bottom right right there next I start with the heating cartridge and all you're going to need is a small flathead screwdriver that should have came with the printer you'll loosen these terminals up a little bit and the wire should slide right out after the heating cartridge I go for the final portion and that is the hot end fan again I am loosening these Terminals and the wires will eventually just slip right out [Music] foreign Ty direct drive plugs I want to just clean up all these wires so I'm sliding the big braided portion down close to the main board it opens it up and I'm passing all the wires I've unplugged back out through the other end I'm not going to need them anymore the final wire that I pull out is the wire for the extruder motor and now here's a shot of the main board what it looked like before I installed my creality Sprite extruder yours are going to look just like this except you might still have the ribbon Cable in for your screen I removed it just for this video so you could see a little better so now it's on to installing and this is really simple we pulled out now we're just going to push in we start all the way to the left with that hot end fan it's going to be the two wires marked fan plus and fan minus the fan plus is going to be on the left side of the terminal that's that red wire and the fan minus which would be fan negative that's going to go to the right of that [Music] and now the fan negative goes in to the right side of the terminal and I tighten it down when you insert these you want to make sure they are fully inserted I do not do a good job during this portion of video of doing that later on I go through I push these ferrules all the way in we don't want any metal to be exposed now these cables are all also all ferals which is awesome sometimes loose wires get tinned and they can be dangerous and a fire hazard next we move over to the heating cartridge wires just like all the other wires heat plus is going to go on the left side of that terminal and heat minus is going to go on the right side of that terminal now I'm going to cover this later in the video but it's possible you might need to swap these wires even if you did it correctly like I did once we get all this installed we're going to check to see what happens when we heat up our hot end if we try to heat it up and the power turns off that means these wires need to be switched doesn't mean you did anything wrong it means you followed the diagram as is but for whatever reason how the Sprites hooked up those two wires now need to be switched foreign plugged in was the thermistor that's the one all the way to the right and it's marked TB [Music] and then after that I plug in the parts cooling fan and that's labeled K fan [Music] after that I plug in the CR touch cable foreign and then after the BL touch cable the last cable is marked e for extruder it gets plugged into the top and we are basically finished with plugging in the wiring and then right here these are the two extra cables you're going to have again they're Superfluous don't worry about them they have no home you didn't forget to plug anything in they're just extra cable connectors now after that I re-secure my main board again four screws that come out go right back in it's really not that hard so if you also remove your main board to make this a little easier for you this would be the way you get it back in I start with my top screw line everything up and then the remaining screws go in [Music] and as you can see I also removed the ribbon cable from my screen again to make it easy for you to see what during the video and it's at this point that I replace that ribbon cable now the only weird thing about this installation is this wiring harness is extra thick so make sure you run it through the cutout channel in the Extrusion and it's not getting pulled on either side of that sharp portion [Music] and then once everything's secure we button back up our main board case if you unplug the main morph in plug it back in and then the three screws we took out on the bottom go right back make sure again you're not snagging any cables the ribbon cable to the screen isn't caught and the cable is going out and up to our extruder and our stepper Motors aren't caught either foreign once you have righted the machine don't forget to get that last screw that's holding that main board casing which is right below the bed now if the wire is hooked up it's time to remove our old hotend and our old cold end extruder I start here I have the PMG clone on you might have just a regular stock extruder process is the same there's either three or four screws the BMG clone has three screws stock extruder has four now what you do with these is completely up to you this kit comes with everything we need so this is going to be an additional stepper motor and an additional extruder that you can use on a different printer or you can just have for spare parts now remember when the last screw comes out that stepper motor is going to fall so make sure to keep your hand under it next I remove the belt very simple it's tucked into two little slots I just untucked it from either side the belt comes free and I'm not going to remove it entirely because I'm just going to re-secure the Belt when we put the new extruder on now we're going to remove the hot end and we're going to do that by removing the lower wheel all three of these wheels are fixed in place with a screw and a nut holding it on and for the bottom wheel we're just going to loosen the nut remove the screw the wheel will come out and the hot end can be removed if that bottom nut is spinning the screw while you're trying to loosen it you're going to have to remove the two top wheels that way you can get a screwdriver in front of the screw for the two top wheels and remove the nut now what we did to remove our old hot end is what we're going to do to replace our new hot in we're going to remove that bottom wheel and this wheel is also the one that has the eccentric nut also known as The Eccentric spacer so for this I'm doing the opposite what I did last time I secured the nut with my wrench and now I'm unscrewing from the other side with my Allen key or my Allen driver and after it's loose the nut comes off the wheel comes off and The Eccentric spacer can come out as well now this next part can be a little tricky hard to explain but I guarantee as you try to mount it yourself you'll get a feel for what we're trying to do and remember when you're mounting this the wheels need to be facing the back of your printer as this is a back view we're looking at the first thing we're going to do is lay the disassembled mounting bracket onto the Extrusion after that we're going to run the screw through it and then The Eccentric nut and now we're going to want to do is get the wheel onto the screw and in place under the Extrusion now this is the tricky part as you're attempting to get the wheel onto the screw it's going to be butting up against the Extrusion what you're going to want to do is you can kind of see my hand doing it rotate that eccentric nut it'll bring the wheel closer and further from the Extrusion as you keep moving it and you can eventually squeeze this wheel under the rail and in place now keep in mind the bracket needs to be straight up and down if it's angled and you're trying to get the wheel under it it's not going to fit you need to make sure the bracket is not angled and it's straight up and down in order for the wheel to sit snugly foreign once that wheel is in place I make sure I want to tighten the nut down in the back fully and then I have to adjust the eccentric nut I don't want this place to move at all and as you can see right there there's a lot of movement in this plate so I start turning The Eccentric nut that starts bringing the wheel closer to the Extrusion and I get it to a point where it's no longer making any big movements with my hand that's exactly where I want it now it's time to reinstall the belt now we're looking at the back side of this again and the belt slides in to the two belt Crews that are already there one side has a single Groove the other side has two grooves so if your belt only reaches the first Groove that's fine put it in there if you have enough belt though to go to the inner Groove place it in there you may even need to loosen your belt tensioner for this like I did I was loosen my belt tensioner I was able to stretch the belt out to that inner slot and then I tighten it back up we are almost at the finish line but before we hook the Sprite up to the mounting bracket this is the time to make any connections to that door board behind it because once it is hooked up to the mounting bracket you don't really have a lot of room back there so one connection everyone's gonna have to make is the heating cartridge wire it comes unplugged from the factory all you need to do now is plug that in and then if you are hooking up a BL touch or a CR touch and you are hooking up to the daughter board now is the time to plug that in after you've made all your connections to the daughter board we can now hook the Sprite up to the bracket and it's simple four screws they all go on the same side just make sure you put them in all one by one tightening them up as you go and then after they're all in Secure it firmly and make sure the sprite's not moving anywhere and the final step is to plug in the ribbon Cable ONE end we already plugged into the main board now the other end comes up and around it's a very long cable and gets plugged into the top of the extruder now remember to open up the arms of the cable adapter so you can fit the cable in there and then once it's in snug the arms will close up around it locking it in place with everything mounted and assembled we can now power on our printer and check for a few things first are the fans working second we want to heat up our nozzle and make sure our printer doesn't restart it's a common issue with these Sprites that when you're trying to heat the nozzle it will restart the power on your printer if that's the case which it was for me you have to go back into the main board and swap the heating cartridge wires in orientation that means positive goes to negative negative goes to positive nothing you did wrong it's just on some of these models that's how it works after that I do all the base calibrations I normally would I start with the e-steps and on a direct extruder machine I need to remove the nozzle so I can get the filament directly out of the heating block I need to disable the cold Extrusion safety feature I made a line of g code I saved it to a text format and I simply printed that the printer reads that G-Code it disables the safety feature and I can perform my e-step now the manufacturer recommended eseps was 424.9 I got 422.5 not a big difference but a difference nonetheless after I saved that it was time to reassemble everything and when I put the nozzle back on I made sure to heat tighten the nozzle and of course whenever we're working on this nozzle the power to our printer is off we don't want to accidentally touch a thermistor wire and blow our main board the next calibrations to be done we're finding the X and Y offsets for my BL touch then I found and adjusted my Z offset and after that I re-leveled my bed and then the last thing I did was PID auto-tune my machine I want to calibrate the temperature to my environment so that's what PID tuning does I have Alex's firmware installed on my Aquila so I was able to do that directly from the menu and now finally we load filament and this is where the fun begins because we can start printing my first print is in pla and I'm printing a flow test now at this point the only slicer adjustment I have had to make for this direct extruder printer is by lowering the retraction distance and I made my retraction distance one millimeter in length now after this flow test I'm going to adjust the flow in my slicer and I can start printing larger models the first print I wanted to see after a flow test was an overhang print now this isn't your standard overhang test this is actually a lightsaber hilt holder that I mostly print from my father who has an abundance of a collection I've printed this holder so many times I can get a really good estimate on how well the overhangs are Printing and this printed it perfect it was spot on next we tried a longer print and this was a black noir Bust from the TV show The Boys designed by fotus Mint and this model is amazing this was printed in polymaker matte black PLA and it came out completely stunning the overhangs were amazing and this model really was remarkable once I peeled it off the bed for our next filament I wanted to turn up the heat so I chose p-e-t-g this is Inland translucent green ptg and I'm printing out a dial down scorekeeper and once again this Sprite was completely up to the task the dial fit together perfectly and had a very satisfying snap for each of the numbers the next hurdle for the Sprite was going to be flexible filament and right here I'm going to try and print Overture TPU now for every new filament I also performed a flow test and on my TPU flow test it wasn't quite right so I started with one of these calibration dragons or Cali dragons after printing this I realized I was sprinting too hot I lowered my temperature and my TPU prints came out amazing and I started on this articulated octopus which is generally a hard print the Sprite tackled it without any issues and TPU was in the bag and all the profiles I'm printing with you can find on my website princeleo3d.com then I moved on to another high temperature common material abs and right here you're seeing a different flow test that I've used sometimes I will use a hollowed out cube as my flow test but more recently I've been trying a more aesthetic approach and a different way to do it this is Overture blue abs and I'm printing a print in place ratchet driver and this is a really cool print it shows the Precision that this printer and hot in are capable of by being able to articulate this print in place model and when it finally was finished it was completely capable of working really cool design ABS was over and now it was time for PC polycarbonate another high temperature filament I found a six piece model online to check the printing tolerances after a flow test with this new material it was Off to the Races and the printer did a phenomenal job now there is a tremendous amount of stringing but I have to imagine that was my fault for not quite calibrating the temperature settings and of course PC is known to be very hydroscopic and I could have done a better job at drawing this filament out this produced yet another functional model that went together easily and functioned as was intended foreign ly this is the last of our high temperature filaments and this is nylon also known as polyamide or PA and what I'm printing is only a two-piece model really just looking to prove if in fact this hot end combo can print nylon this is Inland brand nylon and just like all the other filaments before the creality Sprite handled it perfectly this model is a carabiner it is in two pieces it snaps together it still maintains the flexibility of nylon but also the strength yet another check mark in the list of filaments this hot end can print foreign folks that's it we've installed our Sprite Pro extruder it really wasn't all that hard we printed five one two three four five we printed six different materials some high temperature materials and I gotta say all my prints turned out really well and due to the complete time sync that these videos are for me I have actually been printing with this for about three weeks I've gotten over 500 hours of printing with this Sprite since I recorded the portions of this video that you've seen and I have to say it's been tremendous for me I've really liked printing with no issues to report thus far so if you're looking to install this on your Aquila go to my website look for the firmware it's going to give you access to those high temperatures that this can print with it's going to give you the proper bed size the proper offsets it's going to already Orient your e-steps although I recommend just like I did in a video calibrating the e-steps for yourself and then you'll find some other articles there some other things to peruse and check out for 3D printing now with the Sprite we talked about the daughter board and the fact that we can make all our connections behind it instead of in the main board it's a really cool concept and there is a user on Reddit classic rocker 883 who's familiar to the voxelab Aquila subreddit who's looking to put out a daughter board for the Vox lab Aquila pretty cool stuff I'm going to try and put this through the paces see what it's like this might be a really cool option for our other achillas our Bowden style aquilas this is a daughter board we will make all our connections right up here the wires go into the main board and we don't have to worry about trailing wires anymore we can just make all our connections up here so it's something to look out for I'm gonna put some videos out maybe some on Tick Tock maybe some on YouTube and we can see exactly how this turns out well folks as always thank you so much for staying this far if you have I really appreciate it if you haven't yet please subscribe it helps the channel hit the like button also helps the channel I have a website I've talked about it a million times not gonna mention any more besides that really thank you thank you thank you I'm nearing 2 000 subscribers right now blows my mind every time join the Discord we talk every day join the conversation with we would love to have you check out any of my social medias Instagram Tick Tock just to have a little bit information between these longer videos because I'm always putting out small blips and blurbs of anything I can 3D printing related thank you for staying this far and until next time as always boys girls everybody else keep on printing [Applause] thank you [Music]

Channel: PrintsLeo3D

Views: 14,975

Keywords: sprite, direct drive, direct extruder, creality, ender3, ender 3, aquila, voxelab, pla, petg, carbon fiber, high temp, high temperature, install, 3d printer, 3d print, better prints, all metal, nylon, ABS, ASA, better hotend, faster printing

Id: ZgNtuF3SwyM

Length: 38min 33sec (2313 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 05 2022