QIDI Tech X-Plus 3 – Setup and Initial Thoughts!

hey guys Rob here with 3D front skate recently cutie Tech sent me their X plus 3 3D printer to test out and review so I'm going to be making a couple videos covering that this first video is going to be the initial setup and some of my initial thoughts I'm going to go through actually taking the printer out of the box setting it up kicking off the first print upgrading the firmware downloading and installing their slicer slicing some prints with the default settings sending it over to Clipper using both their interface and the web browser they kind of hide the web browser component a little bit just using a different port I think they want you to use their slicer because it has some nice built-in Integrations I like to use both so I'm going to show you how to use both as well so to get started I'm going to show you some of the test prints that I did here first and then we'll go ahead and walk through the unboxing and the initial setup and then we'll jump over to upgrading the firmware and then going into the slicer component if you have any questions about what I covered or like to see any other videos go to leave a comment below or join us on Discord all right guys so here are some of the test prints I did just to see how it works this one right here was one of the ones that they had pre-sliced this was the first print before I downloaded the Cutie slicer and set all of that up then headphone holder business card holder a little spiral vase all of this was straight off of the build plate I didn't do any cleanup you can see there's very little stringing Bridge test overall it did pretty good there's still some tweaking I could do to get the bottom a little bit better but for just slicing that with default settings I think that was good a hollowed out pyramid obviously our calibration Cube it turned out pretty good overall there's a little bit of ghosting so I might have to play with the settings a little bit to adjust that just another type of calibration Cube here and then another test here that does a bunch of different things there is some stringing like right through here but overall uh I think it turned out pretty well I mean some strings expected especially when it's not tuned but like I said this was all just using default slicer settings and clicking print and letting it go um so I'm happy with it overall especially with things like this I mean this is very difficult to do on especially like on an Ender 3 if you don't have it calibrated properly because these are so small that if you uh hit it it can lose adhesion or just have other issues all right guys before we go ahead and start unboxing the printer I wanted to go over a couple key features figured I would use the site here as reference to talk to them the first one is the printing speed it says up to 600 millimeters a second most filaments won't be able to get to that I think if you use some of theirs you can get close I'm not entirely sure um support was saying around 300 is pretty good with most of their filaments if you start to use some of the cheaper ones you're probably probably below 200 it just really depends but I think the hardware of the printer can support it I don't think the filaments can but it's still a very fast printer the next one here is the temperature controlled chamber which is a nice feature for filaments that need it you can control the temperature and relay the environment as well so you won't have wind or gusts of air or anything blown into it that can potentially mess it up this is really only relevant to filaments that need it so if you're just putting pla you actually have to have the top off and the door open it still blocks most of the airflow and stuff that could potentially mess with it so it does help but this is a huge help for the filaments that need that extra control the next one here is the 0.1 millimeter printing accuracy I have noticed that the prints are pretty good but I've really only been printing with 0.2 millimeter and that's been good enough for me for most cases the next one here is talking about the high flow extruder which is actually really nice you can get a lot of throughput which contributes to the ability to hit that 600 millimeter a second print speed but it's also worth pointing out here that it does come with two hot ends you've got the one with the copper hot End by default and then you have the one with the hardened steel which is going to be used for the more abrasive filaments and then lastly this one kind of goes over several things but it is Clipper based and it does have the fluid web interface so I'll be covering that in the video it is pretty nice especially if you like Clipper they have everything already configured by default so you don't really have to mess around with it it's got the already talked about the high speed extruder it's got 6x6 automatic bed leveling using a laser it also comes with a leveling sheet so you're not guessing around at different thicknesses you use the one that they provide to set that offset which is great assuming you don't lose it and then it has a filament run out sensor which is located in the back and then the flexible HF board which is really nice it just pops out you can bend it and get the print off and put it back in place I do like that they put little plastic Stoppers at the back so you kind of just slide the plate in to hits that stopper and then set it down so it's in the right place consistently every time all right so let's go ahead and jump over to the unboxing all right guys so here's the Box the X plus three comes in it is quite large if you have to move it Upstairs Downstairs you might need a little bit of help I think it weighs about 70 pounds based on what the shipping label said so it is well packaged you can see it has the corner pieces and everything so the Box doesn't get damaged but it is large it is heavy just because they have it already pre-assembled they advertise that it only take about 10 minutes from unboxing to your first print so I am going to kind of test it out a little bit see how easy it is to actually get started and then I'm going to drill into some of the basics using their slicer and then kick off a couple test runs to give you my initial feedback and then I'm going to do more in-depth videos once I have more hands on time with the printer itself giving you a more thorough review after using it more I want to get this initial one out just to let you guys see what it looks like and see how it works just out of the box but I do want to do a more in-depth review as well all right so I went ahead and opened up the top of the box one good thing just off the bat is the instruction manual and the USB card is up top so I'm going to go ahead and set those off to the side and then try to pull this printer out all right guys so I got everything out of the box and I just have it setting not really together here but as it was as you can see here it is a larger printer it has a it has a build volume of what is a 280 by 280 by 270 so it's a bit larger than like your Ender 3 Series type printer and it's fully enclosed so over here we have the instruction manual a special paper that they use for leveling so you're going to want to make sure you don't lose that the USB card or stick the dry box and then some filament over there for testing and all of the accessory kit so what we're going to do now is I'm go and take a look at the user guide and go ahead and get started following through that because there is some stuff in here that you have to unclip before you can actually get going all right so I did want to show you the user guide really quick it shows you step by step how to actually take it out of the box how to remove each piece or each box because they are kind of stored inside the printer as well just to reduce the overall box needed for shipping and it shows you what to remove so we've got to cut these zip ties and stuff in here so I'm going to go ahead and do that now just follow on the instructions we've got this one right there right there next page there's a couple on the bottom so the zip ties we need to remove from the top are right over here these two to get this box out for the hot end and over here here and then right over there so now that the top zip ties are off now we have to remove the four ties that are secure in the platform so we've got two on each side these ones are a bit more heavy duty so make sure you're not using like cheap scissors or they might break all right now that those zip ties are cut I'm going to go ahead and Power on the printer and follow the on-screen instructions right I'm trying to get as close as I can to the screen so you can see everything I'm doing but select your language then hit next so English next if you went ahead and powered this on first it's actually walking you through all of the unboxing so it gives you a guided setup process through the user interface which is cool so hit next there it's time to remove the zip ties we just removed and to remove these zip ties which we just cut those I couldn't actually remove them from the base because they're kind of secured there so I'm hoping once I've raised the axis they'll slide out easier and remove the four screws on the hot end so it's going to be right there there there and there so go ahead and remove those really quick okay now that I got those screws removed I'm going to next and then it's going to tell you to take the packaging out from the bottom here to zoom out a tad bit to show you then it will also let me get those zip ties you hear it's moving up the Axis and there's a pad down here at the bottom which is telling us to take out and then if you couldn't get these zip ties out now you can get to them [Music] okay with that done I'm going to go to hit next skin and now it's only to preheat the bed before leveling so just go ahead and do that and just hit the button here so it starts heating up and then wait for it to actually get up to temperature before moving on okay now that it's up to temperature we're going to hit next just make sure that the platform is clear next it's basically foaming the corner now all right so now we have to set the Z offset it comes with this special leveling card here you want to make sure you don't lose it and you're supposed to adjust the offset until you feel a slight friction when removing this card so I'm going to go ahead and do that really quick I'm gonna change the camera angle so you can see what's going on as well all right so here you can see the card and it is sliding under with ease so now I need to adjust this down okay so I'm at a point here where I have a slight friction that's touching it's rubbing it slightly but it's still sliding so I think we're good there I will make a note that that took more adjustments than I thought it would I was moving too slow to begin with um so if you have a big gap to begin with adjust the the layer height which you can see here it was at .05 first let's switch it to 0.1 now it's going to go through and do the leveling an outside level in this complete all right guys one thing I did want to point out really quick for Japanese is don't turn off the printer during the initial walkthrough make sure you have enough time to actually go through the guided setup if you do end up having to turn it off make sure when you turn it back on you hit skip you'll have to go through the stuff manually not through the guided setup but if you don't hit skip and the position of the ZX has changed you're going to end up grinding it against the nozzle and I have to go through recalibrating it moves so that happened to me the next step is we got to go ahead and put the filament spool on the back mode some filament so I'm going to show you how to do that all right guys so this is the back of the printer we are going to want to connect the spool for the filament and this kind of just slides in place like this and then it goes down and then we'll open this up so we can actually put the spool on now let's go and grab the dry box all right so we have to assemble the dry box first thing we have to do which gives you the instructions here is pop this piece out and I'd recommend saving it so if you don't throw that in there and push down on both sides and then you kind of pull this piece out so then I'm going to store this [Applause] foreign it kind of goes over everything here as well I moved the box over to the side so we can work on a bit easier and I turned off the printer so you can hear me all right so now we've got to open this up and put the silica gel on here it does have an area where you can kind of tear it into that right here [Music] all right so we've got a big silicone gel packet the sauce goes in here make sure it's all the way inside now that that's in place we're going to put the filament in um the package should come with these two spacers I'm using the filament they provided so I'm going to put the space with the box and then one at the top it just helps align everything a bit better in there if you're using a bigger spool you don't have to worry about it so it's going to slide the filament through here I'll set that in place now and then we're going to put the top piece as well and then we'll put the cover back on and then now we can go and put this on the back of the printer okay here you're going to want to put it at about a 40 degree angle based on what it says here what you're looking for is these two grooves to line up here and and this flat part to be on the bottom [Music] when it binds up you can push it in further like that and then we'll get the lid go ahead and just put that on and return it now that that's locked in place we can use the piece of tubing they provide it in the accessory package and connect it here at the bottom of the Reel and then feed the filament through I'm not going to connect it over here yet I'm going to wait till I have everything fed through and then once everything is connected and you're actually grabbing the filament at the extruder then you can connect this over here so I'm just going to feed this through according connected at the bottom just pushes right in and then pull this filament out and then feed it through here until we get to the hot end then we'll go to the front of the printer and I'll show you how to go to preheat and Purge everything now that the film is pushed through we just want to go down go to our settings go to load preheat our hot end here I set it to 200. all right and then let that heat up once you're up to temperature we're going to select like 20 millimeters down arrow and that should Purge out about 20 millimeters of filament I would do that a couple times to make sure that it is all the way seated and then once you get there you can garden connect the tubing on the back if it's not fitting anything through you're going to want to go ahead and push the filament further through until it catches on the extreme all right next let's jump over to network and we want to go ahead and connect to the Wi-Fi so if you haven't already I'll just go ahead and select your network and then I just want to ask for the credentials you put the credentials in and then it'll give you an IP address back if you remember that IP address because you're going to need to enter in the slicer okay now that that's all done you can go ahead and kick off a test prep and I'm just going to go ahead and kick off one of the test prints they already had on the SD card so I went ahead and changed my camera angle piercings in the screen hand below not the best time lapse option but I already have this camera set up it'll work you'll be able to see what's going on underneath so it's just preheating now then it's going to kick off that front is done you can go ahead and take it off the build plate this is just magnetic so we just pop it up and it will off it's still hot um so I'm going to take a minute to pull down [Music] so here's the prep um overall it looks pretty good the tablet is turning here at the top bottom looks pretty smooth also might have to be able to fine tune but that was just a quick print with the tone that they provided and the test file they provided so obviously there's a lot that can still be done but overall getting started was quite easy so I'm pretty pleased all right guys now that we kicked off our first test Sprint I wanted to just go over a couple things that came in the box of accessories we got some miscellaneous tools here for I'm assuming cleaning your nozzle getting the nozzle off extra fuse it came with some glue here which I haven't had to use yet adhesion's not been an issue at all a screwdriver the hardened steel nozzle hot end here so right now what's in there is the copper one uh they give you a separate one which is the hardened steel which you can use with the more abrasive filaments which it's nice that it came with both with separate hot ends it makes it easier to swap things out some Allen wrenches there's some more over here and a nice little wrapper a putty knife to get anything off the bed if there's any issues a network cable if you need it and then here are actually some rubber feet I think I'm going to put these on um it doesn't say anything about them in the instructions they add it as optional it's definitely not needed but it's going to help damper some of the vibrations from when the print is moving when this thing is getting up to speed it's shaking this desk here pretty actually quite a bit so I'm thinking about putting these on see if it makes a difference all right guys so to go ahead and update the firmware the process is really easy we just go to the software and firmware section which I'll link to below we select our printer so I've got the X plus three and then we'd go ahead and download that so just go over to where it says download go ahead and grab the latest which is this 425 and just hit download and go ahead and save it and then I got my downloads folder here we'll go ahead and extract what we just downloaded and we'll take this we gotta extract it again all right and then this QD update folder uh we're going to put this on our SD card just like that and then it also says to rename the drive so if you have a name of the drive go ahead and just remove it so that it's blank um I'm assuming it will throw an error if the name is not blank so they call that out explicitly in their documentation so I could take a second here to update but if you look at their that's the video if you look at their guide here so it says here go ahead and extract get the QD update folder put this on your USB drive and rename it with space or just no name on the keyboard so it should have like a space here I left it with no name it read it just fine this is specifically saying a space like I said I left mine with no name and it worked okay I think it's just wanting no characters at all there and then um from there we'll plug it into the printer and then I'll show you the rest on the screen so once we got the USB drive plugged in we need to go to the about page so let's go down here go over to about and it should say update files detected and then updating so before we hit that now just keep in mind when you do this you are going to have to go through and recalibrate the printer so the first time through for me was just an initial setup make sure everything was working right from the factory now I'm going to go ahead and update it make sure that we're on the latest firmware and then do the recalibration again all right so once it's done it's going to give you the screen so we'll go ahead and power off the printer for 20 seconds and power back on okay now we're powering it on we should be able to go into the menu confirm that we're on the new version of the firmware and it's actually going through and updating everything here now on the screen and it looks like this is going to take a couple minutes so I'm going to turn off the camera to the rest of it all right once it's finished updating and I will note that it did take it probably a solid half hour it's going to say update finish just hit confirm and if we go back to about we should see that we're on the latest firmware now let's go and run our calibration again so we want to go ahead and do calibration Auto bed leveling go to preheat and it's going to be the same process as before so I'm not going to do all of it on camera but I'm just going to go ahead and reset the Z offset let it run its mesh and then let it do the sharper towel versions all right guys now that we've got the firmware updated and we kicked off a test print on the USB drive that was provided let's go ahead and download the QD slicer I'm going to show you how to set that up and then I'm going to talk to a couple things as we're going some of the things I noticed about the slicer I'll show you how to set it up for a non-network printer and a network printer I like the integration that it has with Clipper which allows you to send the G-Code file directly over and start the print all in the same interface I do wish I made Clipper or the fluid dashboard a little bit easier to access outside of the app I will show you how to get to that as well though you just have to specify the port all right so we're back to the software and firmware page let's go ahead and grab the slicer now there are two slicers here we've got the print slicer and then the standard slicer I'm not really sure what the difference is as far as what they provide except for the standard one here is the one that is called out for the X plus three or their latest generation one so this is the one we want so we're just going to go here and go to download and then let's grab the latest one I did notice some differences as far as speed on slicing going from uh like the 1.0.2 which was on my USB drive going to the 104 which is why I'm showing you to grab it from here to get the latest versus just downloading it from the USB drive all right so go ahead and save that and then extract it and go ahead and kick off this install so here's the file we'll just go ahead and extract all and then just launch this I uninstalled the slicer so that I can show you a clean setup I'm hoping it didn't cache any of the settings but if it did I'll Point them out I just go ahead and select your language hit next and then accept the license agreement you can view it or you can do a quick install or custom install the quick installation is just fine so that's what I did and then run now all right so it did save some of my settings so let me just go ahead and delete those really quick so devices I'm going to just delete both printers to set it up like it's new the first time it launches you should be presented with this screen I just going to hit next select your printer like I said I've got the X plus three so I hit next then you can define a custom printer profile but I did not um this is for offline mode um if you're going to be using it online or tying it in with Clipper I'll show you that next but just go ahead and hit next here just select the default filaments that's the ones I had selected were fine for me you can always go back in and modify those later if needed uh check for updates so that's next I'll just go ahead and hit next here if you want all of your STL files and stuff to automatically go to this slicer you would associate it with this like STL to the QD slicer I also use secure quite a bit so I'm not going to do that so just go ahead and hit next and then you can change your mode here simple selected by default then you can actually change it over here simple Advanced expert so it's easy to change so just go ahead and hit next and then you can switch this to use edges instead of millimeters if you want okay so here like I said this would be assuming you have a offline printer you're not going to be able to actually connect to the device from here it's going to show you how to actually set up a printer for online usage which we'll do here in a second so if you're just wanting to slice something put it on a USB stick and take it over to the printer this is what you need to do and you can go ahead and skip this next section for those of you who want to use fluid or the Clipper UI go ahead and follow these steps I highly recommend it it's the easiest route to go it makes printing much easier but just go over to printer settings go to add a physical printer go ahead and give it a name so just X plus three or whatever you want to call it now you have to enter your IP address of the printer so when we connected earlier to the Wi-Fi I showed you where to get the IP address you want to enter that and then hit test so this is going to connect to Clipper using the Moonraker API and then when you're actually connected to it it's going to use the fluid interface all right so just hit test all right so you can see here everything works correctly so we got a success and go ahead and hit ok now you have the system presets and the physical printers so you want to make sure you have your physical printer select it then if you go over to devices if it doesn't load I'll just go ahead and restart the slicer so I'm going to exit and then launch it again now if we go over to device we now have our fluid interface I want to point out here that the camera is not enabled by default um I was hoping it would have a camera built in I actually reached out to after sales support uh they said they're working on it they set everything up so if we look in the configuration they have uh the webcam the configuration everything there so if you just plug in a USB camera it will work you have to enable it down in settings so if you go to settings cameras this is going to be disabled by default you can just go and enable it and that will put it on the dashboard so you can see it after sales support told me they're hoping to have some sort of option in about a month or so that will work inside the chamber the issue they're having is when they actually close off the chamber and have it preheated a lot of the cameras start to have issues when they get up to that temperature is what they're saying which I can see that being the case but if we go back to our main dashboard here we'll see everything that we would expect and everything that's already set up and ready to go which is nice so you don't have to mess around with any of the printer settings or anything like that because they already did that for you so this is the integration directly in the slicer if you want to view it from a web browser or like your phone which I've had to do a couple times when I was checking the status of a print if you go to your IP address uh colon one0088 it'll bring up the fluid interface for Clipper I use this to check the status of a print a couple times from my phone when I wasn't around my computer just a little tip it's not necessary you don't have to do this but if you're around the house and not by your computer and you wanted to check that's going to be the easiest way to do that then if you go into history you can see all of your recent prints you can kick those off again it saves those in here which is nice until you run out of storage but that's not going to happen anytime soon with these small files all right so let's go ahead and go back over to the slicer let's talk about a couple things here first I typically leave the advanced settings I don't leave simple it only adds a couple more settings not much a couple things to point out here are your supports infill and brim if you want quick access to those that's here they have more settings in here for those one thing I wanted to show you around supports if you wanted to use a tree support and it's enabled you would switch it you switch it from grid to organic so that will create a tree support and I typically leave that setting uh selected because I don't like normal supports I prefer the tree support Stitch it's easier to get off overall the slicer works good there's one other thing I wanted to show you in here which is related to speed um they have the speed kind of capped out at 300 millimeters it's going to be based on your filament you're using I know that they're advertising up to 600 millimeters a second I don't see how you can get that unless you're using very specific filament the hardware is awesome it's all lightweight good quality so from the hardware standpoint I can see it actually being able to achieve those speeds but the limitation is going to be the filament if you're using cheap filament you're probably going to be under 200 millimeters a second when you start getting up into Hatch box or some of their filaments you'll be able to achieve these speeds which is they're good speeds they're just not 600. all right so let's talk about the slicer here for a second so it's pretty similar to Cura in a way where you have your play the settings on the right and then a lot of these settings here for sizing I did notice some odd things like here let me just pull this in real quick so to pull it in you would just do the same thing you did with Cura or you just drag it over and drop it in or you just go to open and select the file one weird thing that kind of threw me for a loop when I was doing a testing was scale so right now this is at 100 scale right if I drag this it says it's 235 percent scale now if I go back over and go back into this it says it's at 100 scale again so I don't know what my actual scale is if I'm trying to reproduce it by just using these this drag feature I point this out because it does have your scale factors over here so if I switch this back to 100 it'll go back to the original size so really I guess what I'm saying is go ahead and just use these features or these controls over here and don't try to drag the size because you're not going to get anywhere near what you're looking for they have everything over here though and then if you're in expert mode it's also going to show you the physical size and an estimate on like if there's any errors or anything or what it can Auto Repair but let's go ahead and slice this really quick so up here it gives you a breakdown of each of the components the total time for the print this is with the tree supports you can see here as it's set to everywhere um actually for this print when I printed it I did no supports and just did a brim but it's fine for this example but like it shows you all of the different breakdowns of what it's doing and what the fill is how long it takes total which has been pretty accurate and then if you look over here regardless of which mode you have active it gives you the slice information so amount of filament used estimated print time Etc and then this is going by the default printer settings so this is a two millimeter resolution or layer height you can go up to 16 or 12 or create your own which I'll go into that in more detail in the next video I do where I've had more time to be Hands-On with the slicer and the actual printer itself but here this is what I like with the integration so if you just you can export G-Code save it to file whatever go put it in the printer or you just go over here send to printer now you can just do upload or upload and prep if you upload and print it's going to send it over and automatically start preheating that bed if you just do upload which I'm going to do now pushes it to the printer so if you go over to devices and then go under jobs here you'll see what we just uploaded and then you can just click on that hit print or preheat for the print or you can even do the preview G-Code which generates that preview I've showed before in different videos but if you're in here just scroll down and then you can see the preview here it goes based on each layer it's going to build it up but overall I feel that integration in the slicer is really nice but there are times where I have had to connect to it outside of the slicer so knowing what port to use to connect does help as well but talking about this slicer specifically I know this is a version one so pretty much like the first release of it um overall it works there are some little quirks you just have to get used to it you got to get used to the layout which is kind of the same with any slicer um but I haven't had any breaking issues with it um I just know that there are little corks here and there that I would expect they'll fix over time just to make things a little bit more user friendly some of the settings are just I mean they're here but they're hidden if you don't know exactly what they are so it could be almost overwhelming if you're not used to working with slicers or I have no idea what you're looking at but if you're just looking to slice and print I mean the reality of it is you don't have to go in there you just drag your file on here go ahead and make sure your size is right your infill is right and whatever supports you want to use and then um just go and send it to your printer all right guys so that covered everything you need to know to get started with this printer overall like I mentioned throughout the video I think this printer is a really good bargain for the price you get a lot of great Hardware um if you're in the market for a cheap 3D printer this isn't necessarily your printer you're going to want to look at this I would say is more of a mid-priced so it's going to be comparable to some of the higher end reality or going into the producer line but it's a lot more stable and reliable than the one or two or even 300 printers overall I gotta say I do like the printer I am going to be doing a more in-depth review once I've had a little bit more time with it I've only been using it for about a week week and a half so I wanted to get something out kind of showing you my initial thoughts but I will be doing more videos on this some of the things I learned along the way and a more in-depth review

Channel: 3D Printscape

Views: 6,283

Keywords: x-plus 3, x-plus 3d printer, qidi tech x-plus 3 3d printer, qidi x-plus 3 3d printer, x plus 3, x plus 3d printer, qidi x plus 3d printer, qidi x plus 3d printer review, r qidi technology x-plus 3d printer review, qidi slicer, qidi slicer software, qidi slicer software download

Id: Eb3unyrvZos

Length: 36min 26sec (2186 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 19 2023