It was hardly a surprise but my good lady wife bought me a new 3D printer for Christmas.
It has been sat downstairs, teasing me for the past month or so (we bought it as a Flashforge’s Black Friday bargain) but I know it was only a token box and that Santa would bring me the genuine article on Christmas Day.
Space was made in the office / Lego / model railway room and the printer was carefully unboxed.
There was a bit of assembly but it was eventually put together and fired up. All seemed to be correct (apart from a missing cable clip – not a major issue).
In preparation, I had already printed parts to make an enclosure for the new machine so spent a while putting these together.
My original, AD5M, printer has a black enclosure but the new one (AD5X) is printed in bright yellow.
I have named the printers, somewhat unimaginatively, Black and Yellow !
As well as the enclosure, I have added a Zigbee touch switch to the front which controls a smart socket which feeds Yellow so it can be switched off (and on) remotely.
Along with Black, the new printer shows up in Home Assistant, along with camera views.
To test the capabilities of the new machine (which can print in up to four colours) I chose a rather snazzy looking dragon. After slicing I was told that it would take something like twelve hours to print. So be it.
Printing with multiple filaments takes (a lot) longer as each time the colour is changed the system has to be purged of the old colour and the new one made ready. The waste that this produces is ejected out of the back of the machine. This material is known as Poop. I shit you not !
The printer ran all night ( a little noisy even with the enclosure but I will print some soft feet to deaden a lot of the vibrations – same as I did on Black). This morning I was rewarded with this …
Similar to the AD5M, there are places on Yellow for fans to recirculate or extract air from the chamber. On the old machine these are sort of controlled by the software but I am printing a modified enclosure part to house switches that will control the fans and the LED lighting strip.