How to use the Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro 3D Printer

hi everyone so welcome to my tutorial today on how to use the eligo Neptune 3 Pro I'm going to show you today how I made this really fun articulated 3D print with my eligo 3 Neptune Pro I'm going to take you right from the basics uh all the way to printing this really fun design so this is my elu Neptune 3 Pro printer I purchased it myself off Amazon this is not a sponsored post I really do love this printer and it's been one of my most reliable printers for using uh to make my 3D designs the assembly process was fairly straight forward there are some videos from eligo on how to assemble this it does come flat packed so this part here needs to be assembled and um then of course you need to also assemble your filament spool so once you have it assembled then I'm going to take you through the process of leveling and loading your filament okay so let's start with loading the filament on our eligo printer so I'm going to be using this filament that I'll link in the description it's a really cool dual color silk shiny filament and you'll see how the final project turns out I think you're going to love it so the filament spool is set up here on the printer and what I'm going to do is I'm going to thread the filament through this filament detector up here so let's do that now the filament detector uh means that if you do run out of filament during a print it will automatically pause the print which is a really nice feature so that you don't if you're you know doing a big long print that takes hours maybe you even need to actually have multiple filament spools you didn't waste that whole print uh it'll automatically stop it's a great feature that's included with the eligo Neptune 3 Pro so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to load the filament into the extruder so nice thing about the eligo is that it has this touch screen that's actually removable so what I'll do is this is the main screen what you're going to do is you're going to go to prepare and then you're going to click down here to the extruder and you're going to load the filament my nozzle temperature is already at 200 because I preheated it but if you if it wasn't already at 300 sorry 200 then it would take a little bit of time for that to get to that temperature so I'm not going to quite press load yet because I'm first going to actually insert the filament into my print head so just take it insert it in the hole here got to push down with this clip until it's nice and in the print TI now I'm going to press that load button and you'll see my my filament coming out of the print head so let's zoom in here on my print head and you can see the filament is coming out of the print head there so I want to make sure there we go that I have the right color if I had a different color that I was using before i' want to make sure that it changed colors so very good now I've got my filament loaded now let's level the print bed so let's take you through leveling the print bed leveling the print bed uh is I think probably the most important step in 3D printing in order for your 3D print model to come out correctly you need a level print bed and you need your print head to be perfectly aligned with the print bed as you can imagine if the 3D printer is printing a layer and it's like a few millimeters above the print bed that's not going to turn out well you're going to end up with a gooey mass of filament or if it's too low and it's actually pressing into the print bed you're going to end up with really thick thin and and not um your Design's not going to turn out well so leveling is very important um you should do it every few prints um especially if you're having errors with your uh print so on the main screen you're going to click level here and then it's going to say that it's going to trigger the print head to Return To Zero you're going to click confirm and so what you're are going to do is you are going to to click this button here which is going to auto level your print right in the middle there calibrate the bed confirm and so now let's watch it level do the auto leveling feature you'll see how the print head moves across different points on the bed to calibrate this so the auto leveling uh calibration is now done so now what it's telling us is to pay attention to the distance between the nozzle and the bed uh this is going to you're going to need to adjust now your Zed offset which is the distance between the nozzle and the bed like I mentioned before you want this to be very precise so that your 3D prints come out perfectly and what they're recommending is that there's about the thickness of a sheet of A4 paper between these so I'm going to stick my paper paper underneath my nozzle here and what you're looking for with this is you are looking for just a little bit of resistance so this is not resisting enough right I can easily move this paper so I'm going to adjust my Zed offset so that I just get a little bit of resistance now I can feel a little bit of resistance on that paper maybe go a little bit oh that was too much so I'm going to go back yeah that's perfect so that gives me a little bit of resistance when I pull this paper and that's exactly what I'm looking for all right so our machine is ready to go now but we do need to actually find a 3D design so let's hop on over to the computer and I'll show you the process of finding and slicing a 3D design so my favorite database to find 3D print files is printable .c uh this website has a whole load of really awesome 3D print models they're all available to download for free so I'll just scroll through and see some of the top designs on this website there's thousands to choose from I have printed off so many cool designs from this website just make sure of course that you check the copyright restrictions and rules whenever you're printing uh a lot lot of these designs are meant only for personal use and not for commercial sale so I have found a design that I want to print and that is this cute articulated shark I think my kids are going to love this and so I'm going to go ahead and download this file so what I'm looking for here is an STL file so I'll go to the file section here I'm just going to scroll down there's a few versions I'm just going to go with the a version so I'm going to click this and then it's going to start my download to my downloads folder and that's the file that I'm going to use next for the next part of working with the eligo which is the slicing part so here I've opened up my eligo Cura software you can download this online from the eligo website this is the slicing software that is recommended for this 3D printer so first you have to download that and then what you're going to want to do is set up your printer I've already got my elu Neptune 3 Pro Set up here but if you want starting from scratch you would go here and click add printer then go to an add a non- networked printer and then click eligo and choose the printer that you have here and then click add so I already have my Neptune 3 Pro here and so what I'm going to do is I am going to open up and that file so that shark STL file and it's going to place it on my print bed here so there it is um I can quickly adjust any settings that I might need to adjust although I tend to just go with the standard settings that are recommended by Cura so I'm using pla I'm going to keep with the generic pla if I was using a different type of material I could adjust it here or if I had a specific brand of pla that I was using I could click it here but I'm just going to keep with the generic pla here and then over here this allows you to change like the printer settings uh speed travel infill generally I don't change any of this when I'm printing the only thing that I might do is add support if it was a model that required it so usually when you go to printables and you download Your Design the author uh creator of that design would tell you whether you need support structures in this case you don't need support structures for this model so I'm not going to click this and then also build plate adhesion there's a few different types of build plate adhesions there's a skirt there's a brim and there's a raft and so those are different um layers of plastic either a raft is a full layer of plastic under your model a skirt is just around the edges or a brim is just around the edges and a skirt is just a line around the model I don't believe that I need any build plate adhesion so I'm just going to leave it like that so I didn't make any changes Here and Now what I'm going to do is press slice it's going to be processing my file so what this is doing is it's taking my 3D model and it's slicing it layer by layer to give instructions to my 3D printer of how to print this 3D object one layer at a time remember 3D printers work by melting plastic filament and then very precisely placing it on the bed layer by layer to build up your model so it's telling me that this print is going to take 2 hours and 51 minutes on my Neptune Pro and it's going to use 26 G of filaments and 8.55 M so if you were running low on filament you could make sure that you had enough because you don't want to run out of filament halfway through your print uh and you could also calculate the cost of how much this is going to cost you in filament um by taking a percentage of your spool so what I'll do now is I'm going to click this to save it to file or I can also save it to a removable Drive the Neptune 3 Pro uses a Micro SD card so I'm going to insert my USB with a MicroSD component to save this file to my micro SD card so that I can put it into my printer and now I'll take you over to the printer and show you the final step of printing this design okay so we have got our design on our micro SD card so now it's time to actually print our design you might notice on my build plate here that I there's like a thin film on it that is from the eligo build platform glue stick I do use this uh you know every few designs to help with adion to the build plate especially for something like this design that we're printing which is articulated has a lot of uh small parts sticking to the bottom of the build plate I find this to be really effective you can also just use regular glue stick um but eligo does give you a sample of their build platform glue stick with the printer so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to insert my micro SD card into the slot here and then I'm going to click print and I can see my curled shark option here so I'm going to click confirm to print this model and now what it's going to do is it's going to start heating up and then it will start printing so now I'm going to show you a Time Lapse video of this print okay so here is our printed item on the printer bed so elu comes with a nice flexible uh Pi coated printer bed which I love so you simply uh Flex it off the bed here and you can see it already popped off a little bit and then I love to just bend it like this you hear that nice crackling sound of the 3D print coming off the bed and then we'll just pull it off the bed and here we go we can take a look at our print okay so this is the final 3D print this articulated shark turned out great I'm super happy with this design I love these articulated designs I just think they're so cool a that you can just print them in place and they you know hook together like this without needing to assemble them at all they're super fun fidget toys for kids my kids love when I print these designs out I also um love the pla that I use so this is a shiny dual color pla we got both the blue and the green here and I think it turned out fantastic as well when you do print out your 3D design you might have some you know extra pla maybe little hairs of pla coming off your design or um have some errors in your print and you can try to fix those with post-processing so you can use sandpaper to smooth out your design or you can use tweezers or Clippers to cut off any little uh strings of pla filament but my printer and this is what I love about the eligo 3 uh Neptune Pro is that you know I think I got a great design just right off the bed without really needing to do anything afterwards so super happy with how it turned out um hope you enjoyed my tutorial today on how to use the eligo 3 Neptune Pro please check out the rest of my channel for other 3D printing content 3D pen content and coding for kids and don't forget to like And subscribe

Channel: Everything STEM

Views: 2,270

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Id: iAVlKXHzi0g

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2023