Elegoo Neptune 4 Pro: Unboxing, setup and first impressions

hey this is Ben here I've got the elu Neptune 4 Pro elgu's latest uh fdm 3D printer and today I'm going be doing an unboxing and setup video um this unit was provided to me from BC hobbies in Victoria British Columbia and super excited to open this up and get it printing so the the elu Neptune 4 Pro is the successor to the Neptune 3 Pro which came out about a about a year ago and um what's special about this is it comes with um a Clipper firmware so you can print faster up to it's advertised to print up to 500 millimeters per seconds which is quite an upgrade to the elu Neptune 3 Pro up here here we've got the the frame we've got the instruction manual uh this is a reminder to make sure that yeah the voltage is set correctly and some more instructions and leveling information got glue stick we' got a bag of accessories in here it comes with a an ethernet cable because this printer has clippers so you can access it through a web interface and it comes with a ethernet port so you can and access it over the web interface zip ties here we've got some grease because this doesn't use uh V wheels and the pulley you have to grease the metal linear the metal sliders that come with it some sample filament some rapid pla plus micro SD card and adapter uh scraper for the printed scraper a filament runout sensor us a USB flash drive and two replacement nozzles and a bit of PTFE tubing um what's special about this is you can see those nozzles aren't the standard Mark 8 or V6 style it's a special high flow nozzle for this because with those High printing speeds you need to be able to melt the plastic faster so you need a bigger nozzle here we have screws for there going to be the included like Cutters for it and then some tools to put it together and a needle for cleaning out nozzle jams all right so we've got everything out of the box here and we can start putting it all together so we've got all the included screws here and then included tools so we can if you take a look at the instructions here so you got cautions um contents then here we have some of the parameters about it so fdm it's got build volume of 225 by 225 by 265 uh print Precision plus or minus 0.1 millimeter uh print speed 30 to 500 millimet per second that's quite fast compared to the N 3 Pro which normally prints around say between 60 and 100 millimeters per second so here we have the machine structure diagram so you can see all it shows all the different parts there and then here we've got the packing list with all the different parts that are in front of me here so if we look at the instructions here the first thing it says to do is install the print head so unlike Oh missing the print head um unlike the Neptune 3 Pro the print head doesn't come attached to the uh x-axis although it looks the same as the Neptune 3 Pro this print head is actually substantially smaller because it doesn't use the Nema 17 pancake motor it uses a smaller P stepper motor I believe it's a Nema 14 and take this off see it's a smaller stepper motor to allow for that lighter and faster print speeds and it's a very different print head and looks like we got a light here in the nozzle area there something that I really like about this style of extruders is the Dual Park cooling fans so on top of having the big Park cooling fan on the back of the x-axis you've also got these dual par cooling fans that wrap around on some printers we only have it on one side you can get good cooling on one and then kind of not as not as good cooling on the other side so that really helps with that and then here you've got the breakout board with everything attached um um looks all good to me we got our yeah nozzle there and this is where it connects to the printer and it's direct drive so there's no bow and Tube or anything which is really nice or it's just easier to use so the first step is we're going to attach this to here move this over oh that's so smooth those metal rods there so take that right here so this is very this is very similar to the Neptune 3 Pro and how it's attached okay so I think it's probably best do this with this upright just move that like that seems to stand okay on its own so then this is going to going to go here and then this goes so this is this is the front of the machine so this is the back so this is going to go on like that and this goes behind it and then there's some insert some metal inserts inside the print head which these screw on to it's just a little bit finicky but it's not too bad tighten that up there we go now that is attached looks nice and straight nice and level so now you can see this isn't this is still kind of loose so then we can use these smaller screws to secure that to the body like that so this goes right into there like that okay not not going to tighten it all the way just say want to get this other side too and so with these parts you don't want to tighten you want you don't want to overtighten it so you want to tight until you feel resistance and then you can oh yeah so there's two more so there's the two there and then there's two underneath that as well so there going to lay it down there because I don't want it tipping over put it right like that and that'll make it nice and easy to access these so there's this side here now that it's kind of on its side here I'm forgot to mention is this is the inductive bed leveling probe and so this thing's got I believe an 11 by 11 mesh okay and there's this side so one thing that I should have done is I I tightened these off fully which is probably a bit of a m which is a mistake because they the problem is the screw hole was just wasn't perfectly centered so I couldn't get perfect fit there sure that's so now I'm just going to retighten these bolts here okay that looks that looks good so now we can flip this back up so now we've got this extruder and hot end fully attached to the the x-axis Gantry so now if we look at the instructions the next step is to attach the X and uh Z axis to the Y axis in base so we'll do that now now trying to remember the best way to do this I think I remember correctly for the Neptune 3 Pro put these first something that I did find was helpful with the neun 3 Pro was having this over a ledge like this and this allows you to have push these up through here like that and this is probably the hardest part of the whole build and even then it's not that hard so now so those kind of those go in there so now we want to lift we want to put this AIS on top align that so now we need to get the largest Allen key you can screw this in tighten that up and you want that to be nice and tight now we can do this side so now I'm going to spin this around and do the other side so the trick is you just kind of get the screw when it's hanging over the edge and then once you've got one in it's kind of framed and then you can just kind of finger thread it in until it's um engaged and then it will fall out there we go so now it's in enough I can don't fall out I just grab the wrong all key the Allen key tighten it the rest of the way so now this is pretty sturdy and now we can continue with the assembly process so now we've got the uh x and z axis attached to the base here and we can continue on with assembly so we look at the instructions so we just finished that now it's time to put in the magnetic screen holder to the side of the printer and so this is one of the really nice features about this is the magnetic screen this just fits onto there like that and you take it off and so you don't have to be kind of hunched over the printer working on it and another thing that uh is nice about this even though it's running Clipper firmware which if you were to upgrade yourself on like a Raspberry Pi and hook up to your printer you're not able to use the screen because Clipper doesn't like support that so with this you get the benefit of clipper firmware but you can also use that uh touchscreen user interface I want it to be super tight I want it to be able to move around so I can still align it with the other bolts here so now I just want to align it with the top one there we go so I'm still not I'm still not tightening I Haven tightened them fully I'm still keeping a bit loose so I can reach this last one lift up there which is right here that so now that they're all in I can start tightening them and I remember when I was putting the neptun 3 Pro together the big magnet on this screen holder it likes to grab your tools so actually tightening them can kind of be hard on your tool which wants to stick to that so now that's done flip the page so now it's time to actually attach the screen to the unit really easy just pop it on there and then connect it with this little tab facing down in there so now you can take the screen off do whatever and put it back on so the next step after that is filament detector and the filament holder so let's do that so for that we going need the filament detector something that's kind of weird about this is that just like the neptun 3 Pro Plus Max it's on this kind of swivel Mount and it can be mounted on either side of the fillment spool holder here so let's put this on here is you got some uh drop in t- nuts here the top so you that goes on like this and then here you do kind of have to align there's one so I don't want to fully tighten that I still want to be kind of loose I want to take this and screwing it into place there you go so now you can see this isn't centered or anything uh because they're te- nuts they can move so I could slide this all the way over to here or whatever but I'm just going to keep it roughly in the center there that looks about right and you can always move that later it's not super important because the filament detector does swivel so we've got our filament detector comes with the screw here uh I like to mount it on this side here on the left side and this is kind of getting this I remember when I was assembling the 3 Pro was kind of hard to figure out when to stop tightening it because it is on a swivel and you don't want to tighten it until this doesn't move so you want to tighten until you feel resistance but it'll still move so there it'll kind of stops rotating so now we've got filment detector I'm out of here I might as well plug it in so now it's connected and this is seeing this now this is really nice here you can see here that this filament detector wire wire goes here and then underneath this channel cover and then down here on the Neptune 3 Pro it kind of came up and you had to Route it around where you have to figure out you're going to put it here there and it was just one more thing to think about when putting it together so now this is done now it's time to put on the part cooling fan take these out right okay so this thing is a it's a beast got these four big part cooling fans and just it's crazy more than enough part cooling so now one of the things I want to do now is it's kind of high up so I'm just going to lower it down I'm just going to slowly do this by dragging across the belt here you don't want to do this super fast because it can actually generate electricity through the step Seer Motors there that's good enough so now put thread these just go through like that and then on the back of this Extrusion there's three holes which these thread into I'm just going to line them up the edges first so now I got one one of the edges done and then I'm going to do this this Edge this corner and then the middle one and I'm not tightening any of them super tight yet I'm just GNA go around to each of them and gradually tighten them bit more and I know that's kind of all in place and looks nice and level and everything now I'm going to go through and tighten them to the proper amount so now this part cooling fan is own and let's take a look at the instructions now it's so now it tells you to wire everything up so we already did the filament detector switch so we don't need to worry about that but we can do the x-axis limit x-axis Seer and Z axis steppers so bring this around like that so here we've got one of our Zed steppers just plug that into the back here standard jst connectors there's one we've got a couple more here and then we got see this one is labeled as Zed so this will go to this one here so now our so now what else it says so now it says uh our x-axis limit switch and so that is located here on the x axis so should be labeled so here we've got so we've got two ones labeled X this one is the four pin so that's going to be for the stepper motor and then we've got this two pin which is going to go towards our uh limit switch so we take our one that says X we got two wires we'll plug that into there perfect and then we can plug in our cable that says X into the larger one with four wires into the x-axis stepper motor just like that perfect so so that's done and then you can also see these doesn't tell you what they are and then it tells you to plug those into each other pretty simple you just plug them into each other like so there's one there's two so that is everything there everything's plugged in let do a quick check through so got so we got one more here and I presume this is going to be for the the fan so I I missed an instruction there um this just leads to the breakup board or to here so I'll wire this up so we can plug this larger connector into this back thing here put the aside and then let see there's a little Notch and that goes back like this and then when I push this down the two side pieces should click into place there we go and then this just kind of get away to there boom perfect and this is what connects to the fans there we go so now everything's wired flip this around everything is put together for the most part we going put in our spool roller there and we still got a few odds and ends uh like this cable clamp and this is just so that you don't have this flopping around this into here so because that you can see there you're GNA you're gonna have to kind of pinch this back and then push that down because the screw is not super long so I have to kind of push down in order for it to thread there we go and then now it'll clamp its way down paint that off there we go perfect so you just want to make sure that it goes to the extreme on both axis that it has enough rope that it won't or wire that it won't you know it reach and so you can see that kind of interferes I came with some cable ties I'm just going to do some cable management here just G to put one right there I don't want I don't want that to be super tight just enough that it holds in place I cut the end off the included Flush Cutters leave a bit though in case I want to tighten the future and now we can give it a quick test so that end works well and if it goes to here still got enough perfect so now we've got everything wired up now it's time to plug it in and get everything leveled so before we plug it in we're going to make sure we pay attention to the voltage which is quite important so there we go uh the default Factory voltage is 230 volts and because I live in British Columbia we use um 110 volts here so I just want to go make my way to the back of the printer here like it says in the instructions and you can see the factory default is 230 so what I want to do is I just want to bring this switch over to 110 or 115 and there we go so now it's set to the correct voltage so we can plug this thing in and turn it on I'm going to turn it on fans come on here we have a boot up I'm just going to peel off this oh yeah nice peel already I can see it's a different loading screen instead of a progress bar like on the Neptune 3 Pro we got a circle there and that's one of the things I love about this these printers both the Neptune 4 Pro 3 plus Max Pro whatever the screen on them is super nice okay the system is currently starting please wait okay there we go so now we've got it set up here but before um I want to do that I have to level the bed and so it goes over that enough here but the first thing so we can see when running the Mach um so you want to press on the level so we'll go to the level level menu and the these user the user the user interface on this is really clean very intuitive so this operation will trigger so this will just home it confirm that so now it's just homing all the different axes which is good there we go now it's HED okay now so it's already looks like it's got some Factor stuff but let's do so so automatic and auxiliary so we want to do auxiliary so let's see what it says here the method of Auer leveling can't read it from this side is to so basically what this means is unlike the Neptune 3 Pro where it just had the automatic leveling you can see this also has leveling knobs and springs so you can Al so you can manually set the level and then you can use the automatic so you can get really really nice F first layers because if for some reason if with the Neptune 3 Pro if your bed shipped and let's say there was uneven or something there a slight angle uh there's nothing you could really do about it because you can level it but with this you can set the level so now so we want confirm and so what's nice about this is on something like on I had an Ender 3v2 you would have to like home it and then move it and kind of go through the hassle sometimes if you're bed wasn't level it would scrape the nozzle and ding up your bed but with this it's just you can point which corner you want to go to so let start with two and it'll take to that corner so I don't have to mess around with that then I'm just going to get a sheet of paper here so I had to run and grab a piece of paper is what it says to do so I'm just going to rip off a piece of that and so you want to set the height of the nozzle off the print bed to be roughly the size of the roughly the thickness of a sheet of A4 paper so what you can do here go over to this side so I can see I'm just going to try and feed this underneath and it looks like we're too close so I'm just going to turn it this way okay should start to see a gap there we go so now I can see the the nozzle moving up slide this underneath that and I'm going to bring it down and I'm just going to kind of go back and forth like this until I can feel some resistance so that right there that feels good to me so now we can now two is done go over to three and this is so nice like compared to like some of the Ender and just any every this is so far the easiest out of every manual bed leveling that's ever done it's just awesome let see again it's too close so when doing this it's kind of hard to see but to lower the bed you want to tighten the spring and to make the bed go down you want to loosen the knob so that's a up fair bit I'm can put that underneath there you start to bring it down and just moving it back and forth like this slowly and I'm starting to feel resistance that's too much bring it up a bit more so I can feel resistance but it also kind of can barely move so that's number two done let's move on to number one there we go perfect now we can finish it off do the fourth segment here okay that feels about right so now then it wants me to push the button in the middle this is going to home it is something I mentioned earlier was using the grease to grease the rods there um I'm not gonna I'm not I didn't do that for this because it's not really heavy wear it's just kind of barely moving but in general uh you do want to do that before you print because it will add wear onto it let's see here automatic leveling Cas now says automatic leveling again after completion of the auxiliary leveling operation of each point so now I can go back now it's roughly leveled please so now we're going to go to auto leveling so it's going to return to its zero point it's it's going to go to its home point and so now it's heating up and holy smokes that's a lot of points so on the Neptune 3 Pro it was a 36 point mesh bed leveling system so a 6x6 this is an 11 by 11 so there is a lot of points so this is It's kind of nuts so I'm we're just going to let that do its thing that heat up and that's something that I didn't mention so it comes with a so it comes with this 8 gigabyte USB flash drive and so you can this is one of the things I really like about this printer is um being able to print with the USB flash drive with with um the micro SD cards I find it's quite finicky and it it's kind of hard to find it sometimes with USB it's nice and easy plop it in um yeah I think that's going to be really handy and then it also comes with the micro SD card and the adapter for that one of the things I have seen are I know this was for the neptun 3 Pro I don't know if that's going to be a problem with this one but there are some problems with the included micro SD card with this it's a looks like it's a different micro SD card and I think this is probably for see here for the software setup so I don't think that should be a problem because it's a very new printer there aren't profiles and like slicers like Pria slicer or Kira um like default profiles and the default Kira Pia slicer but you can certainly make your own or you can just use the included uh elura which is B is the same it just has a slightly different UI and I found that works quite well for the Neptune 3 Pro see on the screen here it's going through so now we on number nine out of 121 so it's been about 2 minutes and 30 seconds and we're more than halfway through the auto leveling process here and I just think it's a good time to talk about some of the features so one of the things I mentioned earlier was it's on Clipper firmware and basically if you don't know most printers ship with something called marlin firmware or Marlin 2.0 and that is just what's running on the board with this it's running clipper and I've noticed on I mean one of the biggest Trends now is like Clipper on these budget 3D printers these I3 style printers because you get much better performance you get higher speeds and you can allow for things like input shaping which can help increase speeds as well um and it also allows for web interface so with this one it comes with fluid is the web interface but um there's also for Clipper you get main sale and one of the tricky things about Clipper is you have traditionally you'd have to get on a Raspberry Pi which up until very recently have been very hard to find with the shortage and then you have to configure it yourself and it can be quite daunting for a beginner but with this it comes with firmware on the board so you get access to that web interface you can still edit the config files I it comes with a input shaper on it but on the main board it has spot Bur accelerometer so you can tune it as much as you want so this is like a a great first step for people that want to get into Clipper firmware and learn about that and work with it because you don't have to deal with the huge hassle of configuring it on a Raspberry Pi and raspberry pies they're not cheap they cost I mean all in all about 80 80 Canadian dollars for like a Raspberry Pi 4 with shipping and everything and so that can be an expensive upgrade and with this it just comes baked in um which is really handy and you also get the bonus of the screen which is really nice and one of the things about this though is the trade-off for high-speed printing is the noise on the Neptune 3 Pro it runs super quietly um way quieter than stuff like the Ender 3v2 and other printers that I've used but this there is a trade-off with the high speeds and better cooling is you've got these big fans which are very loud the one thing I will say though is you can turn it off so if you don't want it you don't let's say you're not printing at 250 millimeters per second and you don't need this crazy high speeds if you're just printing something slowly like 100 millimeters per second which is still pretty fast you can turn that off and then you don't have to worry about that other than that yeah I think the sounds like the power supply fan might be a bit louder the main board fan but it's it's not bad it's pretty it's pretty average for 3D printer um the movement it's not super loud it's it's very it say it's very similar to a Neptune 3 Pro just from unboxing it I think it's going to be a pretty good printer pretty excited to log some more hours on it um and just oh perfect timing looks like it's finished here so on the screen so basically for setting the Z offset so you've got too high and it'll be spaghetti too low and it kind of scrapes and it won't get as good coverage and you want it to be yeah again the sheet the want to be as high up as the width or the thickness of a piece of paper so go confirm and so now it's at negative 1.7 and see looks like it's a bit low so we're going to raise it up we're going to go 1 millimet at a time okay now it's pretty high up so we can start to bring it down okay so there we have pressure so I'm going to go to 0.01 millimeters oh oops so I bring that up BR down one another one there we go that's feels one more yeah perfect that's feels good so now it is all leveled to and ready to go so see here save and restart to apply the Z opposite value okay so now it's saving so now it's saving that data to it so it knows for when I print how high it should be perfect so now we can load up some filament and do a test print just going to load up some filament here for a test print this is some blue hello 3D pla just load that up through the put it through the filment sensor light it's good bring it through just to the top there p a little Tab and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go to prepare I'm just going to move the by wow that's fast quite responsive we're just gonna one of the things is you just kind of pull this push this down and you can it's not quite at the right temperature oh yeah it's been it's cooling down oops so we going to set the nozzle temp 210 to let that heat up and so you can see the user interface is slightly different and that's cuz you can see the different heat beds you've got the two different segments here going to repat it to pla so right now it's going to do both to 60 we let that heat up there we go so now we're at 200 so now we can start pushing the filament down through so you can push this lever and you just push through that go bit this is just purging out any Factory anything that was in the hot end before and so you can see there we got some some green green stuff green filament there some more of that through that looks good I'm just going to get a screwdriver here and take that out there we go so now I'm going to take this time to add apply some grease to the rails I'm just going to don't apply too much that kind of looks good and then we also need to put some on the Y AIS here it's kind of awkward to get into this go should be good looks like going want to put some on the bottom too side the applicator here okay should be good now we can plug in this USB drive first try got a print so find files here okay so here you got some folders this is just software and stuff so you this is the Buddha it'll load the real image of it here same one is on the nepon 3 Pro only 31 minutes it took like an as I recall like an hour and a half on the nepton 3 Pro it's definitely faster so I just want to grab this out of it here there we go now we can turn on the light it's not letting me turn on the light oh there we go so now oh okay that's nice so we got so not just a LED light bar up at the top here we've also got a light in the actual hot end which is pretty cool I think let's see can turn on I don't it said to configure that menu I'm just going to try and see here speed fan okay so here we've got silent let's go normal whoa that's on normal and you can see that is pretty loud holy smokes but this thing is fast some fast movements there it's already from the brim that's man and that's it 80% so let's turn it up to sport to see what it's like I mean that's really not that bad I'm sitting right next to it but in reality you're probably not going to be running it that fast and if you're putting this in enclosure will probably reduce the noise a fair bit like I've got uh my printer it's going to be running in my closet so I don't think this will be a huge problem but then again that definitely there's definitely a downside to the high-speed printing like so you've got the high speed but it's not perfect it's there's there is like you get the high speeds you get it finished faster I mean you shave off a ton of time but then you also have the louder part cooling fan to facilitate that I'm just going to turn that to normal and really you for most of the time you probably won't be running it at sport unless you're really really printing at like ridiculously fast speeds and if you've got lots of overhangs and stuff but normal is fine and I've seen a lot of people don't even bother with the span like it's it's not necessary with the flick of a switch and turn it off and you've still got those for this I'm just going to turn it on just to see what it's gonna be like yeah that's that's pretty cool you can see our speed here that's actually really neat so it actually shows you what speed it's currently printing at so it's not printing at 250 see for infill it's going at higher speeds but if you're um doing like a wall or something you it'll slow down so you don't get underere extrusions or anything keep keep the print quality on the outside but on the inside see this for infill it's going it was going at 250 mm/ second so that's where it's this is a tuned profile for that and it's also got the fan symbol here running 80 I always kind of thought was funny was the uh kind of looks like a radiation symbol and this is actually this is pretty cool um on this one it also shows you your X and Y position but it also has this this status bar where it shows you the roughly the percent that it's done now this is not 100% accurate on most printers because it does it based off of like glare and stuff but also shows you like a rough time on how long it's going to take to finish it which I which I like so we've just about finished the test print so about a minute left uh 90 97% finished let's finish this test print uh pretty quick it only took around um the exact time here it's only printing for about 36 minutes which is pretty fast considering what it took on the Neptune 3 Pro um since while I was off camera kind of tinkering around found the quiet setting too I it says silent I thought the silent just turned it off so I showed the normal and the sport but this this silent mode is actually there's still a good amount of air flow coming out so you're still going to get pretty good partk cooling I think and it's uh much quieter which is nice um one of the things I probably put a bit too much of the grease on the sides here I mean it really not going to be going there it's more crucial to have in there where the wheels are going to be moving but I'm I'm just going to when this print finish is it's going to move to the sides and home it so I kind of distribute that across the axes there um yeah so far this print's looking really good print quality is I mean not much to say there it's really nice so there the print's finished uh I say that's good first impressions and overview of the Neptune 4 Pro uh over the next coming days and weeks I'm going to be um experimenting more with this going putting more print time on it with materials like ptg TPU just kind of stress testing it seeing what kind of speeds it can do hooking up to a network and then I'll be posting that as like a full review on my channel so you can check that out when that's done let me pop this off the print bed and take a closer look or I could have wait still pretty hot kind of singes your fingertips back down there we go so there's the first print print quality looks good um no layer shifts or anything yeah looks looks really good so yeah that's the Neptune 4 Pro uh so far it's it's definitely a very promising 3D printer I think it has the potential to be a uh very solid uh both beginner and more advanced 3D printer and uh yeah I'm really excited to test it some more some different materials and just see what it can do

Channel: Ben Myhill-Jones

Views: 10,799

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Id: piiyPF_S1L0

Length: 48min 6sec (2886 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 18 2023