Jay's Blog

Assembling the printer

After unboxing the printer and taking an in-depth look at all of it’s components, it’s time to put it together.

One thing I’m not going to do here is write about how I put it together or even take photos of the process. Due to the way the kit has been put together, there are very few steps to the process. You put the uprights on the top part, attach the bottom parts and then install the effector. Job done. The manual supplied by Anycubic is very detailed for each step. They also have a video you can watch and follow which details each of the steps.

So of you’ve built a linear plus as I have, which was easy enough in itself, this is even easier. It definitely puts this printer in the newbie category.

Loading the Filament

Once assembled, the next thing to do is load some filament and calibrating the bed. I think in the video is shows how you should cut the filament into a point but doesn’t necessarily say to do this in the manual. It’s a very good method of aiding the loading of the filament. I loaded the filament in as far as possible, rather than just into the extruder as the manual suggests.

Cleaning the bed

Before you start to print anything, I would suggest cleaning the bed. Heat the bed up to 100 degrees Celsius and let it sit there for 5 or 10 mins. You may notice a chemical smell but this is normal. Then get yourself some cleaning alcohol and a cloth and wipe the bed. You’ll thank me for it later down the line. There seems to be some sort of film left on the bed from the manufacturing process which prevents the filament from sticking.

Calibration

On to calibration then. I personally am impressed by Anycubics method of calibration on their printers. The way it’s mounted, under the hot end by a magnet, makes it very repeatable and non susceptible to effector tilt. The only downside is that you have to manually fit the switch to run a calibration. If you want to run it at the start of every print you have to be there, you can’t just set it off and walk away. Also, the position of the screen at the top of the printer is too far away from the hot end when you’re going through the first few steps of the levelling. As part of the process, you have to set the distance between the hot end and the bed using a piece of paper. Once set, you then fit the switch and it goes through the levelling process. But every time you want to level the bed you have to go through the process of the paper check with the hot end. If you’ve used any other form of auto calibration on other firmware’s, you’ll know that you shouldn’t have to do this every time you want to check how level the bed is. Luckily, you can bypass the paper thickness by connecting to the printer by USB and running G29, but it shouldn’t be this way. The whole levelling process also seems to be the wrong way round. The typical process is level, remove the switch, lower the head to the bed and check the offset, adjust if necessary and then relevel. For this firmware you set the nozzle position, level the bed and then adjust the nozzle head during the first print. It just seems odd, but unfortunately, due to the type of electronics used, this can’t be changed without changing the whole controller.

All the calibration completed, I printed the calibration test piece. Nothing to say about that so on to something I’ve sliced. One thing I will say though if you watch the video below is that the flying extruder vibrates a lot when on the very outskirts of the bed.

The manual comes with some suggested settings for Cura. It’s made slightly difficult due to the fact that the version of Cura used for the screenshots is a lot older than the current version. This means all of the screenshots are out of date. In reality, there’s not much to change and the manual can be followed.

The first print

The first thing I decided to print was a calibration cube, just to see how it looks. It has some overhangs etc and I find that square things tend to suffer with ghosting from acceleration and jerk.

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It looks better in person. I also know there’s something strange going on at the base near the ‘X’. I think what I need to do is tighten the belts etc. But as a first print, I think its very good.

And here’s a video of the same print.

I will say it now, this printer is very noisy. Straight away you will notice that the fan for the power supply is on all the time. Then, because the controller board has A4988’s, the stepper motors are very noisy. It took me back to my first printer about 8 or 9 years ago.

I next decided to have a go at printing a benchy. Again, I think it was rather a good print. There was little to no stringiness from the filament, so the retraction suggested in the manual, of 6mm at 60m/s seems to work very well. See some pictures below.

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If you look around the opening of the door and around the port hole at the front, there is some ghosting evident. There is also some salmon skin effect on the hull. Now with the ghosting, there isn’t much you can do about this due to the fact that the controller is so locked down. Its very difficult to edit the acceleration and jerk settings. The salmon skin is also going to be difficult to eliminate due to the type of stepper drivers installed.

Conclusions

Great first start but limited by the controller.

There is nothing but praise that I can sing for the frame of the printer itself. It is rock solid, with no movement when printing. The hot end is great for PLA due to the PTFE liner going all the way to nozzle (but it’ll be poor for ABS etc). The effector is solid and we’re all well aware of the limitations of the delta arms supplied. Without a shadow of a doubt, the biggest limitation to this machine is the controller. If only Anycubic had fitted something like a cheap Bigtreetech SKR controller with swappable drivers. If they had, this machine would’ve been perfect. They may have supplied it with A4988’s and some poorly tuned copy of smoothieware or marlin, but it would’ve allowed us to tweak these machines until they sung.

The verdict is, I don’t think the print quality of this machine will get much better with the controller it’s supplied with. If you’re happy with what you see and you just want a machine which works and is middle of the road, then I say buy this. If you’re wanting to improve the print quality further, then just make sure you know that you’ll have to change the controller to achieve this. Fortunately, its only £50 for an SKR controller, with drivers and a screen.

Hopefully Anycubic will listen to their fans and so something about it. But until then, i’ll be upgrading the controller.

It has been pointed out to me that Octoprint doesn’t work out the box with the Anycubic Predator. Fortunately for us, Anycubic has been shipping the new trigorilla pro controller board in Mega i3’s since last year. Since then, Foosel has been able to work out whats going on and get this board to work with Octoprint.

To cut a long story short, install https://gist.github.com/foosel/77e4792921db744a157764f66d1d72a5 the add in from here as a plugin in Octoprint and away you go. I can confirm it works as I am printing from Octoprint on windows as we speak.

Unfortunately, this is just another nail in the trigorilla pro’s coffin.

Update:
To install the plugin, you need to do it via SSH rather than the web interface.
So log into the machine and issue the following

cd ~/.octoprint/plugins
wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/foosel/924a6518b2dea77c9a6ff1f2561b8bb7/raw/46dcd2cd651817683746772907917b72d0c201a5/strip_m110_parameter.py
sudo service octoprint restart

Hope this helps

So now that my printer has finally arrived, I want to start the hardware review. Here, I will detail each part of the printer, with photos etc to make sure you are able to make an informed decision if you decide to buy one. These printers currently retail for £500 on Amazon.

Electronics

One of the important parts of any build is the type of electronics that are installed. Equally important is the type of firmware that is controlling the machine.

Here’s a picture of the insides of the printer.

The above picture is a close up of the board. The printer uses a trigorilla pro board, which is the same one used on the newer versions of the Mega i3. Positives are that its a 32 bit board, so can handle complex delta printer calculation more easily. It also has the ability to resume from power loss thanks to the massive capacitor in the middle of the board. It also comes with a colour touchscreen similar to the MKS TFT’s. That’s pretty much where the positives end with this board. It doesn’t run any form of mainstream firmware, opting to run the manufacturer chitu’s own firmware. http://www.customize-3d.com/chitu-g-code-explained.html is a lift of all the available M codes to use as they don’t follow accepted conventions, so don’t try and use M codes you would typically use with Marlin. It uses A4988 drivers which have been around a very long time to drive the motors, which results in a very noisy printer, although there are guides on the internet to show you how to fit TMC2208’s as they are pin compatible. If you’re expecting to find a board that can be flashed with a different firmware such as Marlin or Repetier, think again. As of yet, no one has managed to change the firmware on these boards.

Surprisingly, the heated bed is driven from a mosfet add on board rather than through the main controller.

The LCD looks like an MKSTFT and I wouldn’t be surprised if it secretly was one.

Almost forgot to mention that it has a filament runout sensor, which from the feel of it when you install the filament, is just a mechanical switch which is either open or closed.

Power Supply

The power supply outputs 24V at 1000W (41 Amps). It is switchable between 110v and 240v inputs. The fan runs all the time so it is quite noisy.

Motors

All 4 of the motors used have no markings apart from XY engraved on the back. There is no information about what their step degree is but I would guess they are 1.8 degrees.

On a surprise note, the end stops are optical end stops made by geeetech https://www.geeetech.com/opto-optical-endstop-end-stop-switch-p-682.html rather than the mechanical switches used on the linear and linear plus delta’s.

Hotend

The hotend is unfortunately an E3D knock off that has the PTFE liner going all the way through the heat break. This is the same as the E3D lite. At some point you may look at moving to an all metal version if you are planning to print more than PLA. On a positive note, they do provide you with a spare hotend, some spare nozzles (0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7 and 0.8mm in diameter) and some cleaning rods to assist in clearing your nozzles if they get blocked.

Extruder

The extruder is some form of cloned E3D titan extruder. I did try and look for the same one online but I couldn’t find it. Not much more to say really. So far it seems to print ok but it did skip when I was initially loading the filament.

Effector

Fully aluminium. This has 3 fans rather than the 2 found on the linear and linear plus. 1 is used to cool the hot end and the other 2 are used for cooling the part. The let down here is the cooling duct has been 3D printed and poorly at that, which is a backwards step when the linear and linear plus had injected moulded ducts.

Rods

As per the linear and linear plus, they are carbon fibre rods with ball joints on the end. Not measured them yet so I don’t know how accurately made they are, but I would suggest they are no better/worse than those that were supplied with the linear/linear plus were. You also get 2 spare rods, which is helpful if any drop to bits.

Heated Bed

The heated bed seems to be custom made for this printer. I say that because of the 3 wings which have been added to allow it to be secured to the frame. The way it has been secured is a lot better than on the linear delta’s where its held in place by 6 clips (which weren’t the right size). This does mean that it can’t easily be removed, but as all of the electronics are now at the top of the printer, this doesn’t matter. As can be seen from the image above, it can be ran on 12V as well as 24V, but in this instance, 24V is used.

Frame

The frame is very sturdy. The top section where the electronics are uses 2020 aluminium profile. They are connected together using custom plates and covered with steel sheet. The bottom section where the bed sits uses 2040 extrusion. Again held together with custom steel sheet.

The uprights use a profile I have not seen before. You can see from the cap on the end what the shape is like. Needless to say that this is one continuous piece. It’s around 40mm thick and 105mm at its widest point. All the runners come assembled, with the motors and belts etc in place. They also have built in belt tensioners. No more springs on the belts to tighten them.

Looking at the above picture, you may well ask where are the linear bearings. This is where I have to say that unfortunately they don’t have linear bearings. They have bearings which run up the inside of the extrusion.

Now I can hear you crying at this point and I was too when I first realised what they had fitted. But at the moment, all I would say is that the jury is out. They have no slack or movement in any direction and feel very rigid. Lets just hope I’m saying that after hundreds of hours of prints. The belts are the typical stuff, with toothless idlers at the bottom (the motors are at the top of the machine).

Conclusions

The frame is very sturdy. No plastic is used except for the top cover, on a couple of bits fitted to the effector and the extruder. We just need to see how it performs print wise. On to part 2.

My new Anycubic “D” Predator has been delivered. Woo!
The review will start soon.

The title says it all really. The printer is delayed by another day to tomorrow (Tuesday). DPD didn’t get to the depot in time to catch the van to the next depot. Woo! It’ll only be 3 days late for an Amazon Prime next day delivery!