QidiTech X-Smart 3 - Exhaustive Review

welcome to another episode of Nathan builds robots today we're going to be checking out the Chidi Tech X smart 3. this is treaty Tech's answer to the bamboo lab p1p it's slightly cheaper slightly smaller and just as fast if not faster so let's open it up and check out how this thing performs there's a spot for every little tool in here but let's get to the real meat and potatoes of this video which is going to be the actual 3D printer and let's just pull it right out of the box here and at the bottom there's just a little piece of Styrofoam here's the whole printer it comes wrapped in a plastic bag let's take that off I'll just take off all of these little pieces of tape more tape all right and right here on the top it says when printing with pla or TPU please remove the top cover and I'm going to start out with some pla so I'll just set this aside we can reinstall it later if we feel like printing some ABS then we'll cut the zip ties cut some more zip ties remove a little cardboard from the print head and here we go you can see this thing has a tiny little build volume it's quite a bit smaller than the p1p's build volume it's about uh three quarters the size and if we take 18.5 squared versus 256 squared you can see it's probably about half the actual print area so it's a tinier printer which should help it print faster in theory it's got nice little guides at the back Corners to help you install this just right that was nice and easy to put into place and you can see it's fully enclosed if you have that lid on you got these side walls here and this front door that can close so you've got a nice enclosed 3D printer just straight out of the box you don't have to mess around buying extra panels and cobbling stuff together to make it an enclosed printer it just comes like this so I like The Styling that they've got here I just took the protective film off of the screen it looks like this thing's ready to go already seems like super minimal setup is required if we take a look inside of the printer you can see we've got carbon fiber rods here top and bottom and on the sides it's got Steeler rods so over here on the left and right sides we're dealing with steel rods there seems very similar to the bamboo lab printers the cable management is handled really nicely up here you can see at all four corners it's just really nice clean cable paths and the Bowden tube is unlikely to have any issues here even when you jam it all the way into this corner these cables are kind of tucked away inside of here and everything seems to work really nicely if we compare that to the bamboo lab we've got a little bit of cable and wiring sticking out the top and I've looked on their website I was interested in buying a cable guide like what comes on the bamboo lab X1 Carbon but they say not to install that here because it can damage the cable or something so there's not a manufacturer supported way oh so there's not a manufacturer supported way of having this cable nice and contained I would really like to have that trapped in there and put a piece of glass over the top just like this but it doesn't seem like that's an option supported by the manufacturer right now so it's nice to see that this comes with everything you need to run it enclosed and just have it all the cables neatly managed if you look at the back of the machine it's got a warning saying that the carbon fiber tubes cannot be replaced and to take care to avoid scratching them that's a message that isn't included on the bamboo lab p1p but I think if you were to scratch those carbon rods it would need to go back to the factory so despite the lack of serviceability of those carbon fiber rods it's nice that cheaty Tech is at least straightforward about it and tells you not to scratch them and also just is informing you that they can't be replaced with bamboo lab it took a little bit of back and forth with the support before they told me that but uh Chidi Tech seems to be relatively upfront and honest about that if we look here and here there's some screws that I need to remove which will unlock this print bed from the bottom of the machine so I'm just going to go ahead and remove those screws so since those screws have been removed I'm just going to take these stickers out because they're a bit of an eyesore and just get everything looking nice and I think we're ready to fire this thing up Chidi tech provides a special build plate leveling paper which is nice to see and let's see what else we've got here's our quick start guide so let's see all you got to do is switch it to the correct voltage plug the machine in power it up and you're good to go so I'm gonna get ready to turn this machine on I'm just going to install the spool holder back here which is nice and easy to install on the bamboo lab machine installing the spool holder took me about five minutes I don't know if I'm just incredibly slow but this is a nice and easy Improvement that I think any 3D printer manufacturer could use just have something that's super easy to install like this because all it's doing is holding a spool there it doesn't need to be over complicated or overbuilt I'm going to use cheaty Tech's own filament that they provided with this machine so let's take this out we'll cut the end of this off just because it's a little bent and then feed it into this which I assume is a filament run out detection sensor and that feeds it right up into the top of the machine through this Bowden tube and right to the extruder the switch to adjust the voltage is actually kind of tucked away down here so this is going to take a minute for me to get access to it's a slightly unfortunate location for that I'm just going to verify that that's set to the correct voltage because we don't need to fry this printer we've got to get through a whole review here so uh just going to make sure it is able to start up and run correctly now these screws thread straight into plastic so this isn't something that's designed to be taken apart and put back together a hundred times this is like something that you're going to want to take apart minimally now this is kind of annoying that I've got to take this whole thing apart but for me it's not that big of a deal because I'm reviewing this printer and I'd like to see what kind of control board they've got down here anyways so I'm just going to take this apart to take a look at that but if you're not a reviewer like me and you were hoping that you would never have to take this thing apart well that's a little unfortunate for you because you basically have to take this apart to check the voltage as it says to do it's a 350 watt power supply like we've seen on so many 3D printers in the past over half the 3D printers that have come out in the last I don't know five years come with a 350 watt power supply so this is pretty common stuff to see and you're really going to get in there deep like to inspect the voltage setting for this thing even from this angle I can't see it so I've got to tip it up and take a look in there yeah it says we're set to 115 volts so we're all good just to have that peace of mind you're going to have to take this whole bottom of the machine off which is kind of annoying it'd be nice if they had access to view it from the sides of the machine or the back of the machine but that's all right now if we take a look at this control board it looks like nothing I've really seen before we got three stepper Motors down here I mean I assume there's got to be four separate motors for this whole machine to work there's that MKS emmc this heatsink looks like it's on a little bit crooked no idea what's going on with that but yeah we'll just get a good look at all of this stuff and see what's going on there this must be some kind of special board that can run Clipper and power those stepper Motors because I don't see any auxiliary pcbs this is all you have got so this is all the brands and all the control circuit all built into one looks like we've got some Ram there or some kind of memory a little computer thing some capacitors probably another processor underneath this large heat sink I'm not sure what this is maybe it's uh some kind of wireless antenna and we've got an Ethernet plug now note this ethernet port doesn't really have anything plugged into it right now so if you wanted to set that up you might have to like kind of Bend this a little bit to get a CAT5 cable plugged in there we've got a little USBC plug this looks like it might be some kind of power it's got four pins on that plug but it's not being used at the moment and let's see what else we've got a little uh terminal blocks there's a lot going on here this seems to be a pretty nice design they definitely put some work into this it's got a bunch of extra plugs for expandability options here's our terminals they look really nice we've got Spade connectors on here so really well done on the electronics it's very professional in here I'm just gonna check these to make sure they're tight yep those are tight all of those are tight everything looks good here we've got two extra USBC ports an SD card reader I mean this thing's just loaded to the brim with expandability options so I'm guessing that Chidi Tech has invested in this board and it's really going to be what they use for a lot of printers from here on out just because there's so many expandability options that it's not taking full advantage of so you know when they release their next printers they have everything they need to build this out into another printer configuration so pretty cool stuff there if we look at this belt loop that we've got there's one stepper motor here and that powers two lead screws one here and one here and there's a little tensioning mechanism here this doesn't seem super tight I wonder if there's some way I can tighten that up just because I'm in here I might as well so to tighten that I'm just going to loosen this screw here I'm just going to push that to introduce some tension and then re-tighten the screw that seems like a good level of tension to me so I'll just go ahead and put everything back together here turns out the power setting was just fine but I like to check everything and make sure especially if you're in a 240 volt country if that's set to the wrong setting I can blow out your 3D printer and you're not going to have a good time okay so let's just put all this back together now oh wow there's a couple more things here it looks like there's some additional USB a plugs here all right here you can see this one is just routed to the side so you can plug in your USB port and send files to this over I guess this USB cable that plugs directly into the main board right under that there's another USB a plug and then this appears to be some kind of maybe it's a Wi-Fi chip or something it says tenda this is a tender version 5 model w311mi not sure what this is but we're just going to leave it plugged in it's neat to see the use of so many USB components on here because moving towards a standardized connector type whether that's USB or jst or whatever having a standardized connector type is going to make things a whole lot easier in terms of plugging in replacement parts like let's say this cable goes bad it's really easy to replace this because it's just a USB cable just like whatever this module is you can just pop that out and plug a newer one back in very nice to see this standardization around USB anyways let's just put this bottom panel back on this is uh not one of the funnest parts of owning a 3D printer but I'm tempted to just leave this off but I really should put it back on let's just get it done right there's not a whole lot down here that I want to be messing around with so let's just put the panel back in place anyways this whole machine appears to be made out of a majority injection molded plastic very low cost of production you're just paying for the plastic and slamming these out using their plastic injection mold all right that's all put back together now now I'm confident that the the power setting is correct let me just put that spool holder back on and plug this thing back in all right and let's turn this puppy on and see what happens it's not the quietest machine around if you compare that to what we have with the p1p the p1p makes almost no noise when you turn it on this chitty Tech on the other hand it kind of uh has some whirring fan noises and I have a feeling most of that is coming from that power supply fan and the main board fan in the bottom of the machine and yet both of those are making some noise so it could really benefit from using some silent fans I think that's an upgrade that we can put on here later but uh it's worth noting for now that it just makes a little bit of noise at standby so if we take a look at this we want to change our language to English unless you want to practice your Chinese or German today remove the zip ties yep already done remove the four screws underneath the machine we did that as well about to moving platform please make sure the platform is clean and unlocked yep okay let's see what we get go printer go all right and look at that it's moving nice and quickly there that little knocking noise that you heard was the print head starting to move okay uh for some reason the print head was kind of moving into the corner there maybe there's some kind of sensorless homing or something that is going on um not entirely sure what's going on here so it says remove the four screws that fixed hotbed okay so there's just these two little plastic blocks underneath the heated bed so we'll take those out and hit next wait for the initialization of platform and nozzle all right let's wait for it I was just saying how nice the spool holder is and I accidentally knocked it off so that's a little annoying you could print something out to help lock it into place which maybe I'll do that in a minute here but first I want to get started with the printing now handling the filament all the way at the back of the machine is a little bit annoying it seems like all the manufacturers are doing that now because filament is ugly looking and they want to hide it from you but I would rather have something that's a little more accessible just to make things easier on me that's just a personal preference having a spool holder on the side like what you have on the Ender 5s1 over here makes a whole lot more sense in my opinion but it seems like everybody's moving to this back of the printer design now here's our special build plate leveling paper we'll just uh make our little adjustments here until we can fit the build sheet underneath it okay so that's uh just starting to pinch onto this piece of paper I want it to be a little bit looser so there we go there's a little resistance between them that's uh that seems about right and hit next input shaper so we're going right ahead to doing the input shaper so I'm going to move the printer up a little bit and now you can see inside let's see how this input shaper does and you can hear it making its little input shaper grumbling noise now there's a lot of plastic panels in here that might rattle a little bit I doubt they're going to be rattling this much when it's actually printing but during the input shaver you can definitely hear it making a little bit of extra noise but that's true of virtually any machine that runs input shaper wow and I could see the Resonance of the belts they were kind of wobbling around very cool holy cow there's a input shaper resonance these belts are just like tweaking out a little bit so I assume it just did the x-axis and now it's doing the y-axis so I'm going to try and get you an angle on these belts so you can see what I mean when they're wobbling around oh yeah you can see that belt that belt's wobbling so as the frequency changes due to the different lengths and tensions of these belts different belts will start to resonate so you can just kind of look around at all the belts of this machine while it's doing this calibration and you can get a an idea of why it's important to do input shaping just because all these components especially the uh the more springy components like these belts they're not very stiff you can get resonances that can be pretty large and uh you've also got other components that can resonate as well like the metal bars here and these carbon fiber rods even and all the plastic components those all have their own resonant frequencies that could be activated by these rapid motions now it's all done okay so input shaper is done and it's going to save those settings all right keep pushing filament into the filament run out sensor until reach extruder okay I can do that it's a little Annoying since it's on the back side of the machine but let's do it okay so we pushed it until it's reached the sensor we've push it all the way in there and then hit next check left side button to start heating nozzle temp okay here we go oh we're going to keep pushing this filament in oh uh if you push that filament too hard then it kind of pops out the Boating tube back here so let's just reseat that boating tube yeah that's not the best Bowden fitting in the world but it's not really it's not like a super important click below button for loading until filament come out from nozzle okay it looks like some filament already came out of the nozzle but that's red filament and I've got black filament here so that might have just happened to come out from the factory test that they probably did on this machine okay you're just going to want to keep pressing this button just keep pressing this button until uh you get some filament coming out the end keep pressing button keep pressing button all right there we go now our filament's coming out sweet I'm just going to keep extruding until we get our black filament coming out the end and this seems to melt the filament quite nicely there we're going to hit next guided tutorial finished all right now that our guided tutorial is finished um I guess we're ready to start printing so here goes nothing I'm just going to go ahead and print any kind of files that are already on here I can turn the lights on and off let's see I just press the light button and the lights are still on so we'll give it a minute it's homing the device moving to the front corner looks like it's using sensorless homing too so that's pretty cool we can turn the lights on and off we can turn the beeps on and off um let's see what else we got no USB drive detected we got some manual controls here and languages so let's plug in a USB drive I think one came with the machine and they're not cheaping out on the USB drive either take a look at that they give you a 16 gigabyte USB drive so uh I'm just going to plug that in down on the side here in a USB drive detected yet maybe I gotta go to the other screen and go back yeah there we go um let's see slicer software now cff G-Code all right we'll give that one a try I can't see what exactly it does but let's just print it see what happens maybe it's a speed benchy 40 minutes is a decent amount of time for a speed benchy that's how fast I was printing with my p1p and my Ender 5s1 that's on a Sonic pad and I was getting pretty decent results from it so uh now it's time to see what the treaty Tech can do at that same speed now you'll notice there's a little feature at the front here at the very front of this build surface I don't know how well that's going to show up on camera but you can see there's a little um it's like a little cutout I don't know if that's for cleaning or maybe that's for their manufacturing processes but I imagine the nozzle can wipe on this little piece and it's somewhat spring-loaded and I just pushed on it while it's starting to print so I might have messed with the print job it's kind of hard to notice that it actually started printing though because of how quiet it is at least the motors are very quiet on this machine now these fans in the base of the machine could definitely use some work there's no reason they should be this loud I definitely like to see that fixed using some quiet fan mods but other than that this machine appears to be doing a nice job and running nice and quiet it's going pretty slow for this first layer but that's typically what you want to do and on the higher layers you can really speed things up now I noticed I didn't have to level all four corners of the bed it just had me level the middle and it looks like we've got solid posts down there if you take a look under here we've got some some metal looking posts no Springs to be found down here so you're not going to have to adjust those yourself they're just going to come pre-adjusted from the factory I'm not sure what kind of bed leveling system they've got going on here but it seems to be confident enough to just get started I didn't really do any special bed leveling or calibrations here and it's it's gone ahead and just started printing this uh this little Cube or something that we've got here now it looks like the first layer isn't coming out perfect if you're looking for tips on how to get the perfect first layer you should head to perfectfirstlayer.com but let's see I'm gonna move the printhead I want to move it further away from the bed here so I'm not sure how to do that maybe I just fixed it we'll see I think I'm going the wrong way now hmm we'll see how this turns out it's doing some weird math up here where it's like plus minus you're adding a negative number or something that's a little bit too much math for me so let's just let it print and see what we come up with here I'd like to see it printing a little bit faster than this so maybe we can turn the speed up here I guess I'll turn the speed up on the next layer we'll let it finish this one just because I'm not sure if this is like maybe it goes slow for the first two layers or something but just take a listen to all the fans on this machine I think it's a little bit loud for what it is okay so this is clearly way too slow for this machine this machine is built to print fast so I'm going to go in here I think it can handle way more than what it's given itself credit for here so I'm going to set it to 500 percent I think that'll be a nice speed increase so we'll hit 500 hit that check mark let's see if it goes any faster there we go what's the point of having input shaper and all these high quality components if you're not going to use them and I think we can go even faster than that let's uh let's bump it up to 800 percent there we go 800 percent that's more like it oh looks like we've got a little bit of under Extrusion at 800 percent speed so let's turn that back down to 500. oh my goodness it's going fast well the motion system can certainly handle the speed I'm not sure if the uh the hot end is keeping up forget about the uh the concerns here with I'm just going to turn this up to 260 degrees we're just printing pla right now but I think we got to heat things up here you know we'll turn that up to 200 60 and then we'll increase the speed to a thousand percent uh well well let me go to a thousand so I just gotta go to 999. there we go that's more like it all right let's cancel this print yeah let's stop it [Music] Okay so clearly we got a little bit of oh my goodness that was scary you definitely don't want to put your hands in there while this thing is operating because it's fast so it looks like we had a little bit of under Extrusion I think I could counter that by turning the like the hotend temperature way up and we're just going to give that another try unfortunately our first layer was not perfect it was being pressed into the heated bed a little bit too much if you take a look at this it's like kind of wobbly and weird so yeah it's definitely too close to the heated bed let's get that cleaned up there was a little bit of oil in the printer when I unboxed it so if we get some alcohol wipes or something maybe we'll get slightly better adhesion results I always use these little lens cleaning wipes to clean up my printers heated beds just because they've got a little alcohol in there and they're nice and clean and sterile they got a little scrubby action so they do a pretty good job of cleaning up the heated bed that'll definitely make sure you remove any little bits of oil on here that could mess with your bed adhesion all right and let's try that Brint again I'm not sure what the Z offset should be that's one of the annoying things about setting up a printer like this the p1p offers a little bit of an easier experience because it sets up your first layer for you with this machine and basically anything that uses a little probe like that you need to like get in there and adjust it by hand it's a manual process and your success will depend on your level of skill and your level of luck so it's not ideal to say the least and I wish it was just fully automatic like what you have on the p1p and the Ming the magician X was one of the first to do it and there was a printer by creality that did the same thing as well we'll see how this first layer turns out it's looking pretty nice I think I might just leave it on that setting however we are going a little slow so I'd like to turn this up maybe we'll go to 300 percent or 333 [Music] oh this is a lovely noise I don't know why it's making this noise I think that's just the rattling between the carbon fiber rod and the print head lovely noise they've got going there [Music] all right I think we can bump the speed up again let's go to six six seven because uh we don't use that number oh yeah and then I'm gonna have to turn the extruder temperature up let's go to 280. I don't want any under Extrusion oh no we've come loose again it looks like we had really good contact with the bed this time so I'm not sure why it came loose it feels like the the bed didn't heat up at all why are we using a cold plate here that's ridiculous what kind of G-Code are you loading on this machine GD Tech you gotta load some good G-Code on here not this crap that doesn't even bother heating up the bed that's not good at all okay well since that model that they're providing is completely useless I'm just going to go ahead and slice my own stuff and send it over to here so um to get this thing plugged into all right and we're connected and our IP address is one nine two one six eight one two three one so I'm just going to type that in on my computer and I should be able to load up access to this printer all right so I tried typing that IP address in on my MacBook and it wouldn't connect we'll try it on my my Windows laptop this also can't connect very strange isn't it I'm gonna type that in wrong 192.1681.1 231 yeah that's not good cheaty Tech what's going on here I feel cheated now let's check out the uh automatic bed leveling procedure here says to make sure there's no filament on the tip all right and uh I guess it's gonna do its thing now while that's getting sorted out I'm going to slice another model here all right so now I'm just going to slice my files and upload them the old-fashioned way I've got my USB drive plugged into the computer here this is slightly bigger than the voron zero but you know what it'll do let's just try out some of these voron zero profiles and what I'm going to do here is go to printer settings let's change our bed shape to 185 by we'll go to our platter our delicious platter here and we'll drop some files in there let's do a benchery and then after that we'll do one of these calibration prints so benchy first let's slice it one hour and 24 minutes and we can do faster than that oh these are some garbage print profiles maybe I need to install the new configuration assistant all right so the configuration assistant has been updated let's try the voron V2 now there's really not a whole lot of settings here we're doing this the old-fashioned way just because I couldn't get the things running there but right now it's telling me to do some bed leveling stuff so let's go ahead and do that use the up down buttons to calibrate the thingy I mean this touch screen isn't super responsive which is making this more annoying than it needs to be all right this seems just about right and when you're trying to figure out which direction to move things just remember down is telling you the direction that the bed Moves In a lot of times it can get kind of confusing because Everything's Relative but you're going to want to move it in the direction that the bed is moving so if you want the bed to move up you press up if you want the bed to move down you press down and that's a little bit confusing because basically when you press down it's making the Z coordinate go up so nice and confusing there that's one of the reasons why I prefer the p1p's bed leveling system where it just does everything for you because uh I don't like having to be smart to be able to use my printer and right now it's doing the bed leveling the automatic bed leveling if you take a look under here there's like a little blue probe towards the back of the machine and that there is your inductive probe it's really hard to see because of how dark it is in there but I think you might be able to see it if you look hard enough yeah there it is and because you're using an inductive probe instead of the actual nozzle itself touching the bed you're going to have to program in that offset yourself so they call it the Chidi Tech X smart 3 but really you're the one that has to be smart to get it to work so uh here's our little bed mesh I don't know why all the numbers are offset by 2.3 millimeters from zero but all right we'll go with it yeah it just can't connect to that IP address so there's not a whole lot we can do there really unfortunate that the networking isn't working right out of the box it seems like something that they could test at the factory just to make sure you don't have any fiascos like this now you've got the uh the most important reviewer in the world which is me of course I'm being slightly inconvenienced how dare they there we go 100 millimeter benchy now the internal perimeters are going at 100 millimeters per second I don't have my preview here because I'm not using the cheaty Tech slicer which I guess I'll try that a little bit later 84 minute benchy so I'm not sure why it's saying it's a 40 minute benchy here kind of an odd thing to say don't you think maybe it just says everything takes 40 minutes now while that's messing around I'm going to install the cheaty Tech slicer that's included on the SD card onto this burner laptop I don't do anything important on this laptop it just runs all these sketchy Chinese software that the 3D printer company sent me so let's get that started oh my goodness oh my jeez okay anyways GD setup 6.5 let's go now this was last updated on March 30th so this should be a pretty recently made file hopefully everything works uh yes we'll go ahead and run it English next I agree install so maybe using this software I'll be able to communicate with the printer here all right let's open up cheaty print and see what we got oh no says Uh there's missing a dll so I can't run the cheaty software that's kind of unfortunate Now isn't it yeah oh well all right I got it okay let's just move on okay so the cheaty software isn't working on my laptop but that's all right let's go ahead and just we're going to run the uh the files that I sliced in prusa slicer using the voron slicer settings so all right that's fine let's go takes a minute for the USB drive to get detected hello all right so it's no longer detecting the USB device well that's not good all right I'm gonna go ahead and restart the machine see if that fixes anything foreign all right cheaty tech let's go this thing only takes a few short minutes to boot up um yeah this is kind of long good old treaty tech let's boot up what the system starts abnormally please turn off the machine and wait a while before restarting uh oh you really got to give this thing a big hug when you're trying to turn it on and off the power buttons way back there although it says to turn it off for a while let's just you know we'll give it a minute all right so we gave it a minute we're going to turn it back on all right cheaty Tech I believe in you let's boot up it's time to boot up all right it booted up right this time so I guess that's a good thing let's go over here and let's print our 100 millimeter bench tree oh why are you doing this what are you doing oh no cheese holy cow ah okay oh my gosh I guess it it didn't home itself first or something this is the first 3D printer that I've ever used where you have to manually home it before you get started here all right let's go ahead and home the machine holy cow so I'm guessing that it needs to be homed in the starting G-Code otherwise it's just going to go all crazy on itself so that'll I think everything's fine we're just gonna continue on with the review here don't worry everything's fine let's start up that 3D Bent Tree all right so it just had to home before it got started I guess we're all good now so and just leave it there I like how wide this door opens it opens all the way open up like that so it gets nice and out of the way and we're ready to start printing this is all great just forget about that little thing that happened earlier we're not going to worry about that so this Banshee is going to complete in well it's not showing up here I guess it's using some other type of G-Code system with the cheaty slicer that the information wasn't saved to the SD card properly using prusa sizer but we're going to go ahead and turn the speed up I think we can handle 400 millimeters per second so we're just going to go to 400 here and we'll see how fast we can go now our heated bed is actually up to temperature so hopefully this thing will stick a little bit better I know this thing can handle some more extreme speeds and accelerations but let's just go ahead and let this run and see what kind of results we can get well oh it looks like the screen actually displays a live estimate based on how fast it's printing so now it's predicting there's like 34 or 35 minutes left on this print and that's just based on the number of lines of G-Code or something I'm not sure how they're calculating that but it looks like this will turn out to be about a 40 minute bench right now I'm about an arm's length away from the 3D printer and I'm going to get a sound level reading on my uh on my phone so we're going to see what kind of decibels we're putting out right now all right so it looks like we're about 53 decibels when the print head is moving pretty slow and during those rapid moves it's speaking up to about 58 decibels so not the quietest machine in the world but not the loudest either all right and our print is done so let's take a look that actually looks pretty fantastic if you ask me so let's pull that off that's some pretty good bed adhesion all right so let's take a look at this benchy that's some pretty good quality there it's a good Jump by uh Chidi Tech you know nice high quality benchy in 40 minutes very sharp details super nice quality just a tiny little bit of wisps here and those will clean up nice and easy so good result good overhangs clean details all along the outside that's what we call a good result and that was finished in 46 minutes so not the fastest bench in the world then again we could have sped it up a little bit and it would have been fine probably I guess I'll do one more benchy but I'll actually turn it up to insane levels actually I'm going to cancel that and I'm going to make sure that I've homed the machine first because there's some kind of startup G-Code that this printer needs to run in order to prevent itself from crashing into stuff and my prusa slicer isn't providing that G-Code so I've got to just figure that out for it not the end of the world but then again we're going to have to wait for it to heat all the way up before it lets me change any of these settings so it looks like when you cancel oh my goodness it keeps doing this okay so this machine needs to home itself more often it needs to figure out where it is relative to everything else so just go ahead and home it between everything that you do with it and if you're writing your own custom G-Code make sure to have it home itself at the beginning and end of every print because you don't want it to be all smashing into stuff like this all the time it'll basically be testing out a bunch of the different aspects of this machine so we'll see how it prints this thing out now this test print I do on a lot of other printers here's the one that I printed using the sovall sv06 it's not quite as good you can see it's got some layer shifts there overall the quality is really nice it's just you know that layer shift is kind of a major issue and also when you get to 70 degrees of overhang it starts having some issues there but overall print quality was very high for this sv06 that I was testing just you know it failed a couple of spots there so we'll see how the cheaty Tech does we're going to run this exact same print and see what kind of overhang and stringing and retraction tests and bridging tests we'll see how all that turns out here and I'm just going to let it run at the normal speed that I sliced it it'll be printing at 100 millimeters per second on average so we'll see how it performs oh yeah that's nice and just to switch things up a little bit let's get another angle so that you don't have to look at it from the same point of view every time so I'm actually going to bump up the speeds and we'll print this slightly fast we're gonna go to 200 speed so this means on most of the perimeters it's going to be printing at 200 millimeters per second this is pretty cool there's some red LEDs in the back of the printhead so there's obviously some kind of little breakout board in there it's a pretty cool little design so there's this buzzing noise that's actually pretty bad and I think that's coming from the uh the interference fit between this carbon fiber rod and the brass bushings or whatever they have on the inside here all right and I just set up the microphone so that it's right at the tip of the camera so you'll just be listening to the printer from here on out and actually I'm going to turn this up to 400 speed oh no oh no when it prints this fast it definitely has to heat that nozzle up a little bit more so I just turned the temperature up to 260 and you can see it's helped alleviate a lot of that under Extrusion issues that we're having so hopefully it can recover from this by just putting some nice plastic down on top of that nasty stuff we just laid down [Music] we we [Music] do foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] I'm gonna turn things down a little bit so I'm going to set the temperature back down to 225 degrees and I'm going to set the speed back down to 200 so now the maximum print speeds we should see will be 250 millimeters per second on the infill so it'll just go a little bit slower now but you know this isn't all that much slower it's still quite fast [Music] this printer sounds absolutely awesome when it's running it just sounds really badass laughs [Music] all right so we're just gonna let this thing print go in this speed we'll see what kind of quality we get in the end but I mean as you can see it's moving pretty fast [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] moving on [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] move it up [Music] foreign so here we have it this is the printed part it's looking pretty nice really good overhangs all the way up to 70 degrees with virtually no artifacts and this was printed at a pretty high speed so quite impressed there we see the first signs of any kind of issue at 75 degrees and then at 80 degrees we're seeing a little bit of artifacting I probably wouldn't want to print this fast with this much overhang in terms of stringing there's virtually none bridging tests turned out pretty good the detail and the text is all readable not perfect but it's readable if we look at the text on the front here that's looking pretty good you can see some slight ringing though so not all the ringing was taken out of the system with that vibration compensation but altogether an extremely impressive result especially at the speed that this was printing at so I think we've got a fantastic piece of Hardware here with the X smart 3. however one little issue that I have is if we look at the belts they seem a little bit loose this is just one reviewer's opinion that these belts seem a little loose I mean just take a look they're just kind of they're okay you can strum them a little bit but they just seem kind of loose to me so I'm gonna try and tighten that up so I've been removing some of the screws on the back panel here I'll take off the spool holder I took all these four screws out and it looks like we popped this lid piece upwards so I'm just kind of prying it off just like this but everything on here fits together really tightly so this is somewhat difficult to do it can be done if you've ever taken apart like a computer monitor one of those LCD monitors they are kind of put together the same way with these plastic clips just kind of Pop everything off the top here all right and then we've exposed this sheet metal frame you can see all around here this is a nice little bit of sheet metal work and hopefully this will allow us to remove this back panel so I've taken out several screws it looks like this piece here is kind of hooked up to it but we can get a pretty decent view of everything that's going on here from up above looks like they've added plenty of stiffening features so you add kind of like this beaded thing into these sheet metal components and that'll stiffen things up a little bit because if it's just flat there it's easy for it to fold and vibrate so you just kind of press a bead into it and that stiffens it up nice cheap slash free way to add some better mechanical properties into your sheet metal Parts but the big question to me right now is how do i tension these belts because I want to tighten them up a little bit they just seem a little loose to me and I'm trying to figure out how I can do that now it seems like these belts have been clamped into this plastic piece in between this part and this part there's kind of some belt Nubs sticking out here so I think that's probably how I'm going to have to adjust this tension there might be some other way to do it but just looking around I'm not seeing anything that's obvious these these belts seem rather loose to me I didn't get any instructions on how to adjust the tension here I'm just assuming I'll have to do it by loosening this stuff up and just kind of reclamping it so let's give that a try it looks like there's a little removable panel here and let us take a look at the electronics and we've got a little breakout board there it's always nice to see little breakout boards just to make the electronics work a little bit easier I've got a nice little light here so I'll toss that in in position so you can kind of see what's going on there let's give it a little Zoom action zoom zoom okay so you can see the little breakout board right there it's looking pretty nice I'm gonna go ahead and take these four screws out to remove this white piece and hopefully that'll give me a better look at what's going on in there now one thing to note about this machine is they make extensive use of these little plastic threaded screws there's nothing wrong with that it holds the machine together just fine however if you're doing a lot of assembly and disassembly eventually these screws might start to wear out and the Machine might not go together again after maybe 20 or 30 assembly and disassembly Cycles now I don't expect most people to have to take this apart all that often and if you are taking this apart you're probably just gonna fix it and put it back together or you're going to replace this whole hot end with something else however I'm just noting that this isn't like an infinitely serviceable machine just because of these screws and the choice of carbon fiber rods so let's uh take a nice look at things in here and this is what we've got under the hood this is a pretty nice little hot end here it's just a little breakout board it looks like we've got one cable which is just a USB cable coming into here looks like this cable is being pinched slightly but that's just the plastic housing kind of pinching onto it I don't think that's likely to cause an issue in the long term because these USB cables are pretty thick and they have some metallic shielding usually so it's unlikely for that to wear through in any short amount of time then we've got our hot end over here no this is our inductive probe over here and that plugs in just right there kind of in a funny way we've got it split up into two little connectors um we've also got all of our fan plugs our stepper motor plug and a hot end kind of heater plug there so this is a really sweet hot end design it's got its own little microprocessor oh it looks like a little Raspberry Pi symbol on there so this must be like one of those Raspberry Pi mini things but in any case we can see right here these are our little belt nubbins that are sticking out the side so I'm thinking if I loosen up let me just unplug this USBC if I loosen up these little clamps I think I can pull on those belts and set them to be a little bit higher tension so I'm going to give that a try right now all right so this top belt is rather loose I mean just listen to it kind of loose sounding so I'm going to go ahead and uh loosen up these bolts so that's nice and loose now and I'm going to grab it with some of my pliers and just pull it tight and then re-tension that little clamp so here goes got my little nippex pliers we'll grab that and pull oops all right that's not working too well so I think I'm gonna have to completely remove this little tab so that I can have better access to that little belt nub in there and again these are more plastic screws there's no metal inserts on the other side here we're just threading this directly into the plastic casing of this sled so we'll see how that works and hopefully that holds up long term so now I'm going to grab this belt and just give it a nice little pull to set a higher amount of tension all right and that's pretty good the only issue is now I need an extra set of hands here because this is quite difficult to do all of this with a mirror two hands shoot so I think I'm gonna have to hold this uh it would be nice if gravity was working with me here but the way that I've got this situated so that I can film it it's kind of tipped up and back so we are not doing this on easy mode and I don't want to drop this screw because it will fall into the abyss if I let go so holy cow this is difficult ah no okay well I gotta fish that out and I'm gonna reposition this to make it a little bit easier to work on so I think what we're going to do here is I'm going to flip this around now gravity is on our side so our old friend gravity is here to help so let's give this another try we just gotta grab this oh geez now I'm not even sure if this is the right way to be doing this operation but um in the absence of anyone telling me what to do I'm just gonna go for it all right so I'm gonna just try and re-tighten this now drop one of our little screws in there okay there we go we got it started um oh wow I actually broke a little piece off and broke off this little bit right here that was holding onto this little foam block that helps secure the USBC cable hopefully it's not that important though let's keep going for this repair job so we've got one screw in now we'll put the other end and there we go I'm not going to let go of this belt until this is all tightened down because I do not want to mess this up nope okay we'll tighten that down and you don't want to strip those screws either all right so now this belt is a heck of a lot tighter it might even be too tight but we'll see I I don't really know how these core XY systems go or how tight the belts need to be I just have a tendency to over tighten them if anything just because if it's loose that's going to cause kind of some low frequency ringing versus if it's too tight it might cause some higher frequency ringing but I'm less worried about that it also might increase wear so yeah there's some potential issues that might come up so on this one I just removed one of the screws and now I'm going to see if I can just kind of pull this through that might be a little bit easier than fully taking this thing apart not sure if it'll work though let's find out it's not going so great I'm going to loosen this screw up just a little bit oh and now you can see that uh that belt is pulling itself out so I guess I'm going to have to loosen that a little bit more and maybe I don't have to take this screw all the way out I can just back it up to the point where it's kind of out of the way and then I can get in there with some some pliers yeah there we go so we'll just pull this I'll just pull this roughly to the same amount of tension that I had on the other belt so it looks like I'm adding about two teeth here and don't quote me on this I have no idea if I'm using the right procedure at all to adjust belt tension maybe there's a belt tensioner somewhere else on this machine but uh we're just going for it oh geez all right so we'll see maybe I can just tighten one of these down and that'll hold it in place and then I can use the pliers to grab that other screw I just dropped there we go all right and there we have it so uh shoot these seem roughly to be the same tension [Music] one of the belts is tighter than the other so I'm going to adjust this and let one tooth out from this this closer belt just because I tightened it more than the other one and I just want to have them be a little bit more equal so I'll grab it with the pliers just like this loosen up this little thingy here let one tooth go in and then re-tighten it and these uh Allen keys that I'm using just suck so bear with me but you can see on this one it just spins freely so that's not good see I'm just spinning this around in a circle I guess I have to use the other end of the Allen key but no that just spins freely as well so I have this other Allen key that seems like it's on the larger end of the tolerance range and it's able to turn this screw this is one of the things that I don't really like about these 3D printers from China that uh I have never really worked on anything else that has so many issues with low quality Fasteners this isn't just a cheaty Tech issue virtually all brands that I've done extensive assembly and disassembly on have these issues where they've got just low quality out of spec fasteners but uh we're just going to try and get this tightened in and this is a big reason why you don't want to use this type of like plastic screw for these important components on the 3D printer because if those plastic screws strip out then what do you do do you just throw the whole printer away or figure out how to put a heat set insert in there I mean sure they're saving a little bit of money on the assembly costs so that saves a little bit of money when you're assembling and Manufacturing this thing but you know this whole thing's just stripped out now and I can't really tighten it so that's going to be really bad for long-term repairability but if you just look at the tolerances on these things I haven't checked this this will be you know we're doing it live we're seeing what kind of dimensioning we got here so 0.145 and we'll measure this other random Allen key that I'm using and this one's 0.148 so that's a pretty significant variance between one tool and another 148 versus 145 it's like these things that are small especially need to be made very precisely but you don't really see that in Chinese fasteners like this that's just the way things go and on top of that this is threading into plastic so as soon as that gets stripped out uh do you know what you you're going to do with this machine I have a suspicion you might be throwing it in the trash you know you could make this a little bit more durable by at least having those Fasteners be a little bit longer like these ones that they've got here these ones are pretty long oops like these ones they've got a longer section in terms of the threaded part and these are just used to hold this plastic cover on these ones that are important for holding the motion system together you'd expect them to use a higher quality fastening system so here's what I'm going to do this one right here is kind of on its last legs so I'm just going to try and extract it we'll see if we can get it out there we go so hopefully this doesn't fly apart when I take this screw out it's all good so just compare these screws side by side and tell me which one you think should be used to hold the belts on this machine which is you know under tension and it's a very important part of the motion system you've only got like a millimeter or two of teeth dug into plastic to hold that on so I'm going to instead of using this very minimal amount of plastic threading I'm going to use this longer Fastener to plug in right over here hopefully that hole goes down deep enough for this to work this is probably a terrible idea that's um but you know we're just gonna go with it and see what happens it's kind of hard to thread in but that just means it's digging into more plastic so we'll tighten that down and that should be much sturdier than what was originally in there which is these tiny little screws I'm tempted to replace all four of those screws but these three were actually kind of decently seated in there so I'm not going to mess with them so uh there you have it tiny little screws like that we don't need them let's get everything put back together now our belt tension is a little bit tighter and you know they could have used these Fasteners here it it'll cut down on the number of unique Fasteners on this device because you're just using these ones that are also used to hold this back plate on so reducing Fastener count always a good thing or at least reducing the number of unique fasteners um so yeah I feel good about that let's put these back in place the easiest way to do this is probably to pre-load these screws into this housing and of course I'm missing one now so we're just gonna screw three of these in and again there's nothing wrong with threading these Fasteners directly into plastic as long as you're not planning to take this apart and put it back together a hundred times yeah just don't take this apart all the time and you should be fine I didn't get a chance to see what kind of bushing is being used in here I'm guessing it's a brass bushing with graphite inserts the same one that bamboo lab is using but I was not able to verify that and essentially we just tightened this up by removing one tooth from this belt loop on both the top and bottom belts and now when I strum these belts on the side you can hear it okay it's not super tight but it's a I think it's better than what how it was stock so hopefully this is an improvement we'll run that same print again and see if that improves our print quality and while we're at it let's just flip this back upright so if we take a look at the extruder here looks like we've got a pretty nice little setup we've got large diameter Drive gears for the filament and it looks like all plastic gears the gear coming off of the stepper motor looks like it's metal actually so I'm not sure what's all going on inside of here but there's some kind of real compact magical stuff going on in there to help make this a super small and lightweight tool head and I'm just going to go ahead and put this back on it goes on nice and easy it's just held on with some plastic little clips but it seems to work quite well all right so I guess I didn't really need to take this top piece off I'm just going to go ahead and smack it back on here it's just held on with plastic Clips as well so that's one of the ways they were able to get the cost down just injection mold this whole thing so that it just snaps together and there you go there's a couple screws missing from the back but I honestly don't think they were that important I'm just going to run it like this so let's plug her back in and run some test prints so it's plugged in we'll turn it on it says booting up please wait sometimes this takes a little while so let's just stand by all right you know the boot up was successful when those lights turn on every time the lights turn on it basically boots up right after that so that only takes about a minute let's go into these settings and we'll see if we can rerun that uh input shaper so right there it's right in the calibration menu we'll just press input shaper and let it do its thing so right at the start of the input shaper operation it homes the whole machine which is nice to see they actually use uh sensorless homing for a lot of the stuff on this machine wow that sensoryless homing didn't work correctly because it was all the way at the back there and it bumped up against something uh yeah they really got to work on the firmware just a little bit on this machine it's not completely horrible but it's not the best either so now it's input shaping but it's not in the middle hopefully that doesn't have too big of an effect on things but yeah this machine uses sensorless homing for the X and Y and it looks like it uses a little sensor back there you can see it kind of right back there for the z-axis so let's let this thing do its vibration compensation vibrating thing and I'm going to run the same test over again and see if I get better print results all right so now I'm homing this one more time so that I can start up this next line of G-Code and really I think this machine is expecting a homing operation in its start and end G-Code so that's why it's going through this process where I basically have to manually home it before I fire up the street code because it's not really designed for this machine this is G-Code that's designed for a voron which I assume runs its own homing procedure before you start a print so we're going to go to our 100 millimeters per second calibration G-Code and we'll hit go and I'm also going to turn the speed up to 200 which is the speed that this last calibration print ran at so basically the idea here is to just print this again with the tighter belt tension and see if that improves the ringing performance here so I noticed some ringing it's not an unacceptable amount of ringing but it's more than I'd like for a machine like this so we'll give it a shot see how it goes alright so now we've got the next test started it looks like the first layer has gone down pretty nice even though I just had this machine flipped over and I was working on it seems like it held zero quite well so let's just go ahead and let this thing print and we'll see what we get out at the end now the fun thing about this printer is you can crank this way up so I'm just going to test this out a little bit we'll set the extruder to 260 degrees and you can see thanks to that ceramic style hot end it heats up super fast and now we're going to set the speed to something like 600 percent and see what happens that should be printing at speeds of roughly well very fast speeds it might be acceleration Limited at this point let's see it go this machine does a great job of laying that plastic down quickly and accurately and it sounds awesome while it's doing it this machine is just stupidly fast and it's really fun to turn it up to those super high speeds but for the sake of consistency and to make sure that I get a good result for these tests I'm going to turn it back down to 200 percent and we'll turn the temperature back down to 215 I think it was um maybe it was 210 I think it was 2 15. but anyways um yeah we'll turn that speed back down we'll get our next print results and hopefully they'll be a little bit better thanks to those tighter belts and thanks to that re-tuning of the input shaper right now those perimeters should be printing at about 200 millimeters per second and this infill stuff should be printing at between 250 and 300 millimeters per second so very fast printing at really good quality here so that's definitely one of the strengths of this machine just excellent Hardware that's able to print super fast all right so we'll switch this one into time lapse mode and then we'll analyze the results when it's done all right time to sum up my thoughts on this Chidi Tech X smart the pros are that it's well built has high print speeds High print quality and a very low price it's about a hundred fifty dollars cheaper than the creality K1 and 250 dollars cheaper than the bamboo lab p1p and in terms of features the p1p the K1 and this x smart 3 are all pretty similar they all feature high-speed print heads that are able to move very fast and one thing that I really like about the mod ability of this machine is that they're using standard jst plugs so if you wanted to plug in other random stuff onto this printer it'd be much easier than what you have on the bambo lab p1p or even possibly the K1 however there are some significant Cons with this machine the build quality seems a little bit lower than the competitors that being the K1 and the p1p and the entire enclosure is made out of kind of cheap feeling injection molded plastic the bamboo lab p1p and x1c are pretty much all metal Construction so they feel a lot more premium and solid and the creality K1 is all metal with some plastic panels and it overall feels like a very high quality construction as well so this machine kind of misses the mark in comparison to those other machines however it's a much cheaper printer so that's where you're saving the price I think this printer is capable of incredibly fast speeds though so you know you're sacrificing a lot of things but you're keeping that high print speed which I think is really this machine's most outstanding feature also you can interface with the machine using a pretty much stock flipper interface so I don't know if you call that a fluid or a Mainsail interface or whatever it is but you can log into it and upload your files just like you would with a normal Clipper machine or the creality Sonic pad so that's a pro in my opinion I don't like having to go through the slicer and using Cloud functions to be able to send Parts over to my printers also compared to the other printers that I mentioned the K1 and the p1p the induction probe requires a little bit more setup to get everything dialed in this is very early days for this machine and there's probably going to be some software and firmware updates that are gonna get this machine all the way up to the level that it needs to be so I wouldn't be too worried about some of the software issues that I was having in this video that'll probably all get cleared up in a couple of months but it's clear to me that their priority was building an amazing printer and putting it together at basically the lowest price possible and it comes with some great electrical and mechanical Hardware so just be aware if you want to be an early adopter to this machine there might be some little gaps in the software and firmware experience and if you're looking at this review at a much later date then may 2023 then you might want to look at a more recent or up-to-date review to see if they've fixed any of those software firmware issues but with all that said I think it's a great printer overall I'd probably recommend going with the K1 or the p1p over it just because the build quality on those two machines is so much more premium so thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next episode

Channel: Nathan Builds Robots

Views: 12,135

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Id: zwx62NttfdI

Length: 86min 11sec (5171 seconds)

Published: Mon May 08 2023