Neptune 4 Pro - Closer Look + Wi-Fi Setup!

this is the elegu Neptune 4 Pro elegu's first go at a Clipper firmware powered 3D printer this thing has a lot going for it it's continuing what elegue has been doing lately of fdm printers that pack a lot of features into pretty affordable packages but this is not in any way a review of this machine this video is for people in the future because currently only reviewers have these machines and there's one glaring thing that I keep seeing people mention about it already and that's the lack of Wi-Fi on it so I'm going to teach you how to add it and for the rest of you not in the future I'll give you a quick rundown of the specs for those of you who are in the future how is it has AI taken over yet anyway there's timestamps in the description so you can jump to the Wi-Fi section if you want for the rest of us here in present day just worried about the AI apocalypse Let's do an overview of this machine I don't have nearly enough time on it yet to do a review and I may not review it at all we'll talk about that later It Feels Like Only Yesterday LED launched an uptune 3 Pro and we already have the 4 Pro if you were to put them side by side side they would look really similar but I promise you there are quite a few differences under the hood a lot of what I find interesting about this machine is what it's packing in at the price so I might as well get that out of the way this machine right here in the US is 299 dollars flat with free shipping on elegu's website let's start off with the bed because it's more than meets the eye it's 235 by 235 on X and Y it has a spring steel Pei coated bed sheet on it but underneath of it is a segmented PCB bed heater meaning this has separate heating zones so if you don't need the entire bed heated it won't heat the entire bed this is a feature I've only ever seen in higher end machines so it's really unique at a machine at this price point I haven't looked deep into how they're controlling or operating it yet I don't see a slicer setting so I'm assuming it's on the firmware side but I don't have a thermal imaging camera to really test this out any deeper unfortunately stick me out like a sore thumb behind the direct drive tool head is this big box on the back of this Gantry that is auxiliary jewelry cooling to add a curtain of air across the bed to improve cooling when printing faster simple but effective four 40 20 blower fans are deducted to blow forward just underneath the nozzle not down onto the bed to provide additional Park cooling the way it's wired is pretty basic it's tied into the same circuit as your tool head part cooling fans so when those are turned on whatever they're set to so is the auxiliary cooling system you can bypass it and turn it off but it's a manual switch on top of the unit kind of basic but at this price point I get it I can also get turning it off because it's not the quietest thing through the menu system you can adjust its noise level during a print for mute normal or violent mode but that will limit how much airflow is coming out of it depending on what you choose now what about that tool head setup Fast Printing needs flow and the Neptune 3 pro has a fairly anemic hot end design in it I said in my Neptune 3 max review that it really needed something better this is way different despite looking very much the same on the outside it's got a similar dual Gear Drive extruder system but it's now using a Nema 14 stepper motor and some minor tweaks to get the weight down the entire tool head weighs 24 percent less about 90 grams less than the Neptune 3 Pro Tool head that extruder is feeding filament into a higher flow hot end this is a very similar design to the Ender 7 or Ender 5s1 that have a not volcano but in between a Mark 8 and volcano length of nozzle in it and does absolutely increase flow rate I've only run one one one flow rate test with this cookie CAD unicorn pla filament and a 20 millimeters cubed per second on that single racetrack test continuing our changes the X and the Y gantries both use these metal roller wheels on here instead of v-slot roller Wheels I don't know if there's a standardized name for these at this point I've seen them previously unlike the xtool D1 laser that I have they do feel really smooth and solid and elugu claims these are helping them to achieve higher speeds on this machine next up let's speed run through a few things that's silly to say it are starting to feel like standard features on a machine like this we've got a filament run out sensor direct drive extruder assembly auto bed leveling and manual adjustment so you can fine tune it LED lights on the tool head and underneath the top bar or the machine to illuminate the work area dual z-axis motors easy belt adjustment on the X and Y axes and a pretty solid touch screen interface but what's definitely different for elegoo if you turn it to the side you'll find an RJ45 port to connect this wired to your local network that passes through to connect to your main board which in this case is a clone of a maker a skipper board that has a single board computer and your microcontroller on the same board and that's the star of the show which has the Clipper firmware installed out of the box here but that's also the heart of our problem here you see the board is using one of the maker base MKS pies effectively built into the board that like many Raspberry Pi clones does not have Wi-Fi built into it meaning if you want to connect this machine to the network you do have to use the wired network connection or an external USB Wi-Fi dongle but that's not as easy as just putting one in and going we'll get to that explanation of how to set it up in a second but quickly I want to defend this machine I've seen plenty of grumbles about the lack of Wi-Fi making this machine a bit of a non-starter and I understand where that's coming from in a traditional Clipper install something like my voron 0.1 that is run headless it has no controls directly on the machine I completely operated over my network through a web browser on on my computer this machine can be operated that way if you wire connect it to your network you can access the fluid web interface and run it that way if you hook up the Wi-Fi that I'm going to show you how to do in a moment you can do it through there as well but you don't have to do it with this machine I mean zero offense with the next words that are about to come out of my mouth but it's the best phrase that I've come up with to explain this machine in my mind in my eyes this is baby's first Clipper Machine by that I mean if you have enough to 3 Pro and you pick up one of these four Pros to go alongside of it you will feel right at home the touchscreen UI is almost identical and it operates the same way you can run this machine like a Marlin printer but get the speed benefits of clipper so you can take the USB stick put it in your computer slice your G-Code put it on there put it here and print and not have to use the web interface I will say the menu system is not very deep we can't adjust things like acceleration rotation distance or input shaper values through that touch screen and usually I would knock a company for that but about it is this machine is only an included network cable away from accessing all of that and so much more fluid web interface is already installed on here with no additional Hardware or software configuration connected to your network and you can access everything you could ever want on this machine this would allow somebody who's not used to Clipper to just get going with it get Printing and running the machine and when they feel ready to they can start looking into the advanced options or they don't ever have to and they can just run it air gapped from their Network and never connect it if they don't want to unfortunately when you do want to access those Advanced functions getting this thing onto your Wi-Fi network is not nearly as simple as I wish it was it's not as simple as just throwing a dongle into the USB port so let me show you what you got to do step one you have to find a Wi-Fi dongle that actually works I tried four and only one worked on this machine you see this is running armbian Linux as the base operating system and that distribution of Linux only comes with certain Wi-Fi drivers pre-installed and unfortunately finding one that's going to work for you not as simple as it should be there are lists that will tell you oh these ones work on armbee and Linux but what happens very often in Tech and what happened to me twice is the packaging will be the same the part number will be the same but they'll change the chip inside of the product and it will no longer work to save you some trouble the one I found that ended up working I put an affiliate Link in the description to this one it's five dollars with free shipping on AliExpress I actually robbed it out of the Chidi x-max and I gotta put it back in that machine with the Wi-Fi dongle that's going to work in hand we got to plug it into the USB port on the front of the machine and with the magic of video editing I got it right on the first try the rest of our configuration work will have to be done via terminal on a computer so we are going to have to connect this via the wired connection at least once plug it in get it onto my network and now we can head to the computer we need to use some type of program to SSH into our client in this case the Neptune 4 Pro I'm on windows so I'm going to use putty to do this to SSH into this thing we are going to need to know the IP address that is assigned to it by our Network when using the wired connection elegu has made this very simple we go into the settings menu hit about machine and at the bottom it'll tell us the IP address of it write that down and that's what we'll need to use in our terminal with our IP address in hand we plug that into putty and connect that'll open a terminal which will ask us for a login we have two options here the default one which is MKS or if you want root access for other things you can use root it'll then ask for the password in this case it is makerbase thank you elegoo for not changing the default login for the MKS Pi first we want to make sure that the machine is seeing the Wi-Fi dongle so we'll type LS USB this will check all the USB devices plugged into the unit and we should be able to see a real Tech controller in there that is the Wi-Fi dongle that I'm using side note just because your Wi-Fi dongle appears in that you USB list does not mean it will work the ones that I had that didn't work still appeared in this list to get this configured we need to use the network manager unfortunately it doesn't come installed on this machine so we're gonna have to install it we're going to type sudo space apt space install space Network Dash manager our board will install the network manager for itself and we are ready to move on now we're ready to access the network manager to open it we type in nmtui and hit enter once it's open the second item on the list will say activate connection we want to select that when it opens if our Wi-Fi dongle is working properly we should see our wired connection followed by a list of the network ssids available to it hopefully the first one on the list is your strongest Connection in my case my studio Wi-Fi I'll select that one and then I can enter the password for my Wi-Fi to get it logged in and now I can disconnect the wired connection and use this thing on Wi-Fi but I need to find the IP address of it it so I can do that you can often find whatever devices are connected to your Wi-Fi through your router's interface and it'll give you a list of the devices that are connected to it at any given time or you can use an application like Angry ip scanner as long as the computer you are using is connected to the same Wi-Fi you don't have any weird security protocol set up which let's face it if you're running those type of security protocols you probably don't need this guide at all then you should just be able to hit start and it'll search for all the devices within a IP address range and tell you what's what this machine should show up as mkspy dot local domain note down whatever that IP address is and we can plug that into a web browser to access the web interface for this machine and operate Clipper through that or if you don't want to do any of that just plug the network cable in it's going to be more reliable in the long run and it'll be easy to find the IP address right through the touch screen we are dealing with cheap USB Wi-Fi dongles here I did have one time while filming this where it wasn't able to detect my Wi-Fi and studio all I did was unplug it from the machine plug it back in and restart the machine and then I was able to get connected again so the wire connection really is going to be more reliable a quick note I tried a cheap USB 3 Hub I got off of Amazon I was able to plug the Wi-Fi dongle the stock USB stick that came with it and a LogiTech C920 webcam into it that's only getting about three FPS but all three are working at the same time but guide out of the way let's talk about some final thoughts and the fact that I won't be reviewing this machine or possibly any machines moving forward quite simply I've come to the realization that the way that I review machines is unsustainable at my scale I don't have an LTT lab team behind me to produce the testing data and then analysis of it for me every step of the process is all me spool after spool of filament hours of print time hours of production on videos means that when I put a review out it's generally weeks or months after a product has least and other reviews have already come out where somebody just printed a half dozen models and then moved on to the next machine they are going to get the bulk of the views which means they're going to get the bulk of the money my reviews simply do not pay me back for the amount of time let alone filament that I put into them unfortunately we are still going to have a ton of fun with 3D printing on this channel moving forward we're just going to be making more things building Fun Machines and focusing Less on the minutia and detail of things like how these machines work which tickles my brain a little bit but we're gonna have some fun building some fun projects moving forward alright folks I hope you found this video interesting if you did maybe you'll enjoy my elugu Neptune 3 max review might be my last review for quite some time so maybe check that out or this video that YouTube thinks is best for you get subscribed to keep up to date with everything that's coming down the line and to ensure your 3D prints don't fail it's not a guarantee but it can't hurt see you folks [Music]

Channel: MandicReally

Views: 70,962

Keywords: mandicreally, 3d printer, 3d printing, 3d printed, elegoo, elegoo neptune 4 pro, klipper firmware, best 3d printer, elegoo neptune 4, neptune 4 pro, neptune 4, elegoo neptune 3 pro, neptune 3 pro, neptune 3 max, anycubic Kobra 2, kobra 2, sovol sv07, sv07, diy, maker, anycubic kobra, anycubic kobra 2, kobra 2 review, prusa mk4 vs sovol sv07, sovol sv07 review, sovol sv07 klipper, prusa mk4 klipper, bambu p1p, bambu lab p1p, bambu x1, bambu x1 carbon

Id: wXD3EmKy3J4

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 03 2023