How to use the Elegoo Neptune 4

today I'm going to be showing you how to use the eligon Neptune 4 uh to print something cool like this collapsing sword uh I purchased this aligo printer myself on Amazon and I've been really happy with it I wanted to show you exactly how I set it up and how I made some of my first prints so I'm going to take you through step by step exactly what you need to do to get your printer going and be able to print something fun like this collapsing sword so let's just start off with um the assembly process so obviously I already assembled this it did come flat packed um and so this part is flat and you do need to assemble it the instructions are pretty clear and there is videos that are available to take you through uh how to assemble it it took me about 30 minutes to assemble uh this eligo printer it was pretty straightforward and then it was ready to use uh so first thing first when you get your printer is you are going to want to load your filament so you can see the filament spool up here and a nice thing that is included with the eligo printers is this the filament detector piece so this will let you know if you run out of filament so if you're using filament they come in different sizes so this for example is actually a smaller spool so it only has 250 uh Gams of filament and so if you're doing a big project you might actually run out of filament and you wouldn't want your whole print to go to waste so this would this filament detector here would actually allow you to um change the filament over and restart so what you're going to do is you are going to take your filament and put it on the spool here and then you're going to slide your filament through this filament detector and you can see there's a blue light that comes on there and then what we're going to do is we're going to need to actually insert it into the printer head here and so there's a clip here that you pull back and then you insert the filament in you'll feel it go down probably about an inch and inch and a half into the printer head here now we're going to actually load the filament on the device itself so I'm just going to try to bring this up here so that you can see it so Neptune 4 has this touch screen and what you're going to do is you are going to go to prepare and then under prepare you are going to go to extruder and then you're going to go to load to load the filament here and that's going to start the filament coming out so I'll just try to zoom in here on my printer head so you can see I had yellow in here before so there's some yellow coming out but now there we go there's my kind of dark green color that's coming out and you can see where it changed over colors there so now I've got my filament loaded into this uh device okay so the eligo comes with uh this flexible uh print bed I definitely recommend if you're looking for a 3D printer to buy that you choose one with a flexible print bed most of the newer 3D printers that are coming out include these rather than a glass uh print bed um these print beds uh are so much easier to peel your design off of and so uh it's so much easier to work with one of these print beds than a glass print bed you can see there's a little bit of film on my uh print bed that's from using a glue stick which is included with eligo um and helps with adhesion so what you're going to do is you're going to want to level your print bed it's really important to do this so that you get a nice 3D print if your print bed is not level then you're either going to get a whole clump of filament that's going to clog up your uh print head which you don't want to do I'll just show you so this was a previous print head that I had and what happened is I had a huge filament Jam mess this print head completely had to be replaced because I hadn't leveled the bed properly and so this is what will happen it will totally ruin your 3D printer if you don't have your print bed level so what you're going to do is you're going to go into this touchcreen again and this time so I'm going to go back you're going to click level and then it's going to say that it's going to return Return To Zero action so the print bed will return to zero and then this screen is going to come up here and so what you're going to do is you are going to press automatic for it to automatically level your print bed it's going to go to multiple spots on the print bed and um adjust as needed so I'm going to press automatic and then let's watch a sped up version of how this leveling works okay so that leveling process took about 8 minutes and so now you'll see on the screen here that it wants you to confirm that the nozzle is about the thickness of a sheet of A4 paper under um close to the print okay so I've got the paper in but it is really tight and so I can't even really pull it at all so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my Zed offset here and I'm going to raise it a little bit and it's still pretty tight so then I'm going to raise it again still pretty tight raise it again and I'm going up by a small amount each time just 0.01 mm so that I can really fine tune now I'm starting to feel a little bit less tension but it's still hard to move the paper you only want a little bit of tension uh between the nozzle head and the paper so I'm going to keep going until I get that right tension and there we go can move it pretty easily but I definitely feel a bit of tension that's what I'm looking for so now what we're going to do is we're going to just uh exit out of the level and it's going to say save and restart to apply the Z offset value and measure the data of the auto level and then can confirm so it saves all that data so now my printer is all set up and ready to go but I need to find something to 3D print so I'm going to take you over to the computer now where I'm going to show you where you can find designs uh that are available to download for free online uh so that you can start printing some designs so you can either design your own file or you can go to these online databases to search for files so my favorite website that I enjoy going to to find 3D print files is printables thatcombines that are available to download for free on this website there's thousands of designs I find that I get some really nice and Unique Designs from this one but there's some other websites as well like thing of verse is another popular 3D print uh file website all of these designs are free to download um but of course you do need to pay attention to any copyright restrictions a lot of them are not for commercial use so I am going to choose uh today a collapse ing pirate sword uh I've tried a few of these print in place swords and they're a lot of fun my kids love them so I think it would be fun to print one of these with my eligo Neptune 4 so what I'm going to do is I am going to go down here to the files section and I'll see the STL file which is that 3D print file and I'm going to click the download button here and then it's going to download to my downloads folder and I'm going to use this file for the next step in 3D printing which is the slicing phase and so this is the slicing phase we're going to be using igu Cura which is the preferred slicing software for the igu Neptune 4 printer you can download this from the aligo website or you just Google aligo Cura and you'll be able to download it once you have it downloaded it will look like this I already have my eligon Neptune 4 printer set up but if you needed to to do that you would go here and click add a printer then go to add a non- network printer and then choose which eligo printer you're going to be using so I would have choose um chosen the four here and then you'd click add but I already have mine so I'll just click cancel so I have a Neptune 3 Pro and a four so I'll click the four for this one and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to open file and I'm going to click on that collapsing sword and it's going to put the model on my print bed here and so then I can go through these other settings I'm just going to stick with generic pla but I could change the settings if I was using a different type of filament I like to work with PLA and they also have some uh options for different brands here go with the generic PLA and then I could also uh change these settings here these are the printer settings so I'm just going to go with the completely normal profile here I haven't made any changes the only thing that I sometimes do change here is the support or the build plate adhesion um this design does not require supports so I'm not adding any extra supports but usually I have to look in the description of the file I've downloaded to see whether the designer recommends using supports and then for the build plate adhesion I've chosen a skirt which is just a small thin line around my design just to make sure that I get my filament coming out nicely uh I don't need a brim or a raft for this design it prints nicely without those and I find that those can be difficult especially with these print and place designs uh a raft can sometimes be difficult to peel off so I'm not going to use that so I'll just keep with the recommended settings here so I'll just minimize this and then I'm going to click slice and now it's going to slice my 3D model here so what this is doing is it is going through and slicing this 3D model layer by layer and it's going to give instructions to my 3D printer a code which will tell my printer how to print this model layer by layer remember 3D printers work by melting plastic filament and then very precisely putting that filament on the printer bed layer by layer to build up the model and so right now what this software is doing is going through and figuring out how to very precisely make this design layer by layer okay so our file has now been sliced and as you can see it says it's going to take 5 hours in 49 minutes which is pretty fast for a design of this complexity and this size keep in mind that the eligo Neptune 4 is a really fast 3D printer and so if I was using one of my older generation printers it would probably take twice or three times as long it's going to use 152 G of filament and 50.9 1 M so again you could calculate to make sure that you have enough filament uh based on the size of your spool and also you could calculate how much it's going to cost you to create this design based on the percentage of the filament that you're using in the spool so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to save it to F I'm going to save it to my USB drive the elu Neptune 4 has a USB port USBC port and a Micro SD port and so I will save it to my USB so that I can insert that USB into the printer and get started with printing our design okay so now we have our design on our USB so I'm going to stick this into my eligo printer and now let's get ready to print so I'll pull up the touch screen here and I'm going to click on print and then it's going to show me all of the files and designs that I have uh put on that USB and so I'm going to look here for the collapsing pirate sword I'm going to click that tells me it's going to take 5 hours and 49 minutes and I'm going to click confirm and now my print's going to get started does take a bit of time for the print bed to heat up and for the nozzle to heat up so expect it to take you know four or five minutes for till it starts Printing and you absolutely do want to watch your print especially the first few layers you're going to want to watch and then you're going to want to check on it several times throughout the print because if you do have a print error and it causes a jam that can be a problem all right so let's watch a cool time lapse video of this print all right so now we have our clasing sword I already did peel this off the printer I just flexed the print bed here to peel it off um with these print in place designs you do have to sometimes fiddle with them a bit to loosen them up so that they slide in and out easily so I did that and then now I can show it to you easily um these print andplay swords are super fun my kids love them I love this filament I'll link it in the description it's kind of a nice dark green and a bit sparkly um so here's the print I think it turned out great it's got uh lots of great detail really happy with this eligo Neptune 4 printer I love that it's so fast compared to my aligo uh Neptune 3 printer um but still has the same quality um hope you enjoyed this video on how to use the printer don't forget to like And subscribe for more content

Channel: Everything STEM

Views: 5,630

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Id: wxc8dZRpJzg

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 25 2023