So you want to print fast eh? Well I have a printer for you. And unlike most of the stuff
these guys put into my grubby little hands, this one won't actually break your bank account.
Thanks to Elegoo for sponsoring today's video. They've sent us the Neptune 4 Pro.
This 3D printer is quite exciting and has a lot of, I missed, a lot of really cool features for
the price point and hopefully it actually performs well too. Oh yeah, this is the first thing that
I'm really excited about. This quad fan layer part cooling thing that they stick on the back
of the hotend assembly. That's really exciting. I haven't seen that for a long time. And let's see
we've got the Z axis assembly. Morphome comes with a touchscreen with controls for setting all your
print settings and it even displays a little 3D model of what you're going to print, which is
kind of cool. They pack the hotend assembly separately. Look at this thing. This hotend can
go to 300 degrees. So they've included two of these 40-50 fans on each side, I guess to kind of
keep it from exploding. It also looks like it has a touchless homing sensor too, which is kind of
cool. Can we take this front off? Oh yes we can. Yeah, so this is their new extruder motor. It looks
like they've got a pancake stepper in there and a dual gear direct drive filament path, which is
really nice too. Looks like there's a teeny tiny fan in here too for, you know, layer cooling,
even though I'm not sure we're going to need it with those four giant ones on the back. And
lastly, it looks like they've also included a little light in there, which is super nice. The
one I have at home, I just kind of point a lamp at the bed and it's not quite as nice as having a
light directly on your print. I kind of like that this is just kind of, you know, no screws,
just fits on there. We'll see if that actually stays on. And last thing in here, I guess, is the X
and Y assembly. There we go. This looks really well built. We've got a nice tensioning thing right
there. And the favorite thing that I just noticed is it has a dedicated Ethernet port. So this one
actually supports a LAN with Ethernet, which is great. Power over here. Nice little small
stepper there. What else we got? Oh yeah, these rubber feet are pretty juicy. They're firm, but
not too firm. Got some give to them, which is great. Power supply here all neatly in a package.
And the control board seems to be here, which is also in a nice little package too.
Screws are easily accessible. They've given a full breakdown on the online manual. One thing that I
do notice on some of these cheaper printers is the bed, you know, heating cables are not well
supported. This is really nice and sturdy. This is a directly attached plastic thing. So I don't
expect any movement from there. The motion platform for the bottom here is kind of interesting. We
have two of these precision ground rods right in the center here. And then there's a couple little
V wheels, which run against them. That feels really nice and smooth. The bed is a magnetic spring
steel sheet with PEI coating, it seems. Oh, it doesn't have any of the stops at the back. I don't
always like that, but that's not the end of the world. So look at this gantry.
Now they've gone with the V wheel setup again, which I often don't like. Wow, look at that.
It's got a nice anodized finish with some screen printing on it, it seems. Yeah, this V wheel assembly
system is not my favorite. They're hard to calibrate and the wheels wear down eventually and they're
just kind of like a little bit confusing in that regard. But it looks like the X axis is on these
precision rails again, which is kind of nice. Everything's really kind of like built in and
it feels like a complete product. Most 3D printers these days kind of feel like, I don't know, they
were slapped together by someone at home. This feels like, you know, they've covered all of the
screws with little bits of plastic and everything kind of has that fit and finish that tells me
it's a nice piece of gear rather than just sort of like a toy. Another cool feature that I see here
is it's dual motor drive. So we have two Z axis motors, which will spin at the same time,
but the top of them are connected with a tooth belt. I'm not sure I've seen that before. That's
kind of interesting too. So you have less of a chance of, you know, tram problems when the bed is
here and your X axis or your nozzle is going like this. I mean, look at all this other stuff. Oh,
it's on the floor. All this other stuff. We've got a full tool kit. We've got a USB, got some sample
plastic detector switch. They even give us some like clippers. There's everything in here, spare
bit of PTFE tube, which I guess will go into the hotend top. The hotend says it will go 300
degrees. I hope that it's not PTFE lined. Otherwise you die of neurotoxin poisoning. These don't
have any markings on them, but that does look like a spare nozzle. It seems to be a little bit
longer than the standard E3D. I think it might just be a longer melt zone, especially for 300 degrees.
They've even included an Ethernet cable. This is ridiculous. I guess now the real question
is can I put it together without looking at the instructions? A lot of this style can often suffer
with excantry wobble, and so you kind of have to brace them, but this feels really in there. It does
have, I always say, med-besh leveling, so I think I'm just going to call it that in future. But model
that we have here for kind of sampling is only 36 points, but the consumer one will do, which is
121, so it'll do 11 by 11 of individual points, which is great. We've got these four corner knobs
over here, and they're giant, and they even say which way goes up and down, which is awesome.
I always struggle with that because you're kind of above it, but when you tighten it,
it goes the wrong way, and so it says right on them which way they go, and they've also used
these really tight coil springs. My understanding is that these springs are from plastic injection
molding machines. I use these on my printer at home, and they were the best upgrade that I've
ever put on it because I never have to like level the bed. I don't have mesh bed living on mine,
and I just never touch it because these springs are like, they're really sturdy and quite strong,
so that's awesome. I love that. What next? I don't know. Manual. This is tight.
Cable routings here interfering slightly. Hopefully that's not my problem. Instructions are
not the best, but I've seen worse. Yeah, that feels like it's seated on something, which is nice.
This is probably like a locator of some kind. That feels really sturdy now. Like, wow, okay,
really sturdy. So it's not a toolless shroud, but it is a two screw shroud. So we've got three
little holes here that are tapped for us, which is nice. Everything seems to be going into metal,
which is really kind of cool to see. I mean, this is obviously a plastic injection molded part,
but the screws are going into metal. There's heatset inserts embedded directly into the
hotend assembly, which is nice. This isn't a cheap printer, but it's a cheap printer, and
I don't know how they do that. I think maybe they have the manufacturing capability to like
release a printer and just go full bore into supermass production, make 200 billion of them,
and then they cost nothing each. But I don't understand how some of these companies can make
money with a product like prices competitively. Now we have the screen. How does this go?
Okay, cool. It's just magnets on. Every single step has its own individually labeled bag,
which is great. There's some T nuts here. These are very irritating. I hate T nuts. I think
for a change in this instance, it's actually a welcome thing, because now I have the choice
of where to put this on the top rail. So good idea, good design choice. And then we have this
guy who just screws in there. And now I know what this is. This is the filament run out sensor.
Another thing I was not expecting to be included in this printer. That's kind of awesome. So yeah,
this thing, you just stuff your filament through it, and then it makes sure that you still have
filament and can tell the printer that you don't. Now I think it's time for cables. So this one comes
up, and then it goes like that. And then it goes through here, something like that. Yeah. So this
bracket we installed here, I think is for the cable to sit in. Maybe it doesn't feel like it's
wide enough. I don't know what the rest of these do. And none of them are labeled. I mean, X is
labeled, and also X is labeled. So we have the X X is micro switch, and then the X axis stepper.
Let's get that powered in. Oh man, we're getting so close now. There's a cable plug too.
Okay, I don't care. Should we see if it actually does make plastic squirt everywhere?
Ayo. Oh, I have it in 230 mode. Hopefully I didn't immediately destroy the printer
by having it set to the wrong voltage. One thing that I'm immediately super happy about is the
responsiveness of this. I mean, you even see this in cars and stuff where you like hit a button,
and then like a second later, the manual change, this one's boop, and then we're here.
You know, it feels more premium, and it feels more responsive when it's snappy like that. And I see
no reason why any interface from any manufacturer can't have this kind of snappiness. I'm already into
this like detachable thing, because now I can stand over here and like talk to you.
Language, temperature settings, light controls. Yeah, that's right. It's got two lights in it,
which is pretty exciting. We have the headlight, which is right over top. And then we have the
observation light, which is that little light that we saw in there. That's a little bit anemic,
but when it's like right next to your print, I think that's totally perfect. So we have fan control.
Oh, she blows.
So I think I'm a little disappointed because the fans at the back here are...
Why is it you turn it on and then... Oh, okay. I see. I'm happy again. That's kind of nice. I mean,
I'm not as happy as I would like to be, but the Layer Fan is now one single control. So I think
that simplifies a lot of the G-code things like that. So you're not managing two types of Layer
Fans, but it's not an on and off switch. You have to do manually. The on and off switch here
connects the two Layer Fans together. So you can either have both of them or manually turn off one
of them, which is better than the alternative that I thought it was. They basically just like
glued a switched fan to the back, which they didn't, which is cool. That is... It's whisper quiet!
You know, for how beefy all of these fans are, we expected them to move a bit more air.
God, I like this interface. It's nice. Will it let me move it without homing it?
Pulls it away, brings it over. Nice, quiet stepper motors. And let's do that Z. Z, please.
All right, here we go. I just threw a little test print on this included USB stick,
and there's the USB at the front. We also have USB-C, and then we also have an SD card slot.
So you get like everything. You get Ethernet and all the accoutrements. No Wi-Fi at least. I don't
think I have a problem with that. I want Ethernet anyway rather than Wi-Fi. We've got some models
in here. Oh wow, look at that. Beautiful little display of it. And is it this one? That's the one
I wanted to print. Okay, let's confirm that and see what it does. The filament are about to run out.
I mean, okay, I haven't done it yet.
Elegoo also sent us over some filament. We've got PLA Plus, which is kind of a newer material
to the scene, which is pretty sweet. And this is called Rapid PLA Plus. So this machine is rated
to 500 millimeters a second, which is kind of too good to be true on a v-wheel Cartesian thing,
you know, with stepper motors. That's kind of insane. I don't know if that means that 500 millimeters
a second for movements, or if that's printing speed. They're recommending 250 millimeters
a second printing speed, which is ridiculous as well. These filaments will claim that they can
be printed up to 600 millimeters a second, which is kind of a lofty claim, especially for a printer
like this. Even on some other printers that can print that fast, they're really limited by the
volumetric flow rate of the plastic itself. So seeing that there's like a special Rapid PLA
specifically designed for printing fast might actually make this possible. I also have some
just other PLA that I found laying in the warehouse, and that may print it differently.
Because if they've got special plastics specifically designed for fast printing,
then why can't any printer do that, I guess? And I'm going to plug in the screaming computer again.
Unless that's the computer. Oops. Okay. I didn't destroy the printer by pulling out the
brain of it in the middle of it trying to do things. I've just asked it to do a full automatic
cycle, which is a lot nicer than going through all the points and like doing fueler gauges and stuff
like that. But you're kind of supposed to set the original zero because of the hot end nozzle offset,
because it's not using a direct through nozzle probe. We'll see if we can adjust that z-height
for the first layer while it's printing. They've included an interesting feature. I think
some other brands are trying to introduce zoning heaters where each little tiny section of the
print bed can heat up individually. What they seem to have done is like two. So you have a middle
section, which is maybe about this big, about 125 ml, and that'll heat up with about 100 watts of
power. Or you can set to 250 watts, which is just the whole bed. So it's two zone, but it's kind of
nice that, you know, it might be faster to heat up the center if you're just working in the center.
Why am I heating up the whole thing? I don't know if that's going to affect any warping or stuff like
that. It looks like the whole thing is on like a five or six mil sheet of aluminum. So that's like,
it's probably, it's probably going to be okay. It might be okay. I don't know. My main concern is that
this hot end assembly is quite heavy and there's a lot of stuff in it. I'm not sure how it's going
to be able to move it that quickly without like it ripping itself apart. One thing that I forgot
that I actually had to not have to do is calibrate the tension of these V-wheels. They seem to have
come factory calibrated, which is great. I didn't even think about doing that. I think that's kind
of why I'm really happy that they've like physically joined the two Z-axis motors together. Setting the
temperature is really nice and easy. Instead of having like up and down numbers, you kind of just
have like a preset or you can tap on the number and then type it in. See if I can stop it. Oh,
that's really powerful. Holy crap. So this is probably their new direct drive extruder. And if
you're printing, oh yeah, there you go. I've used two hands to like stop that. If you're printing really
fast, some of the issues is you get a lot of back pressure. And so having a nice direct drive extruder
to be able to like really force the filament through the nozzle is going to be like
super important. So I'm just looking at the way that the filament's coming out of the nozzle.
There's a couple things that you can look for when you have like a new nozzle and to make
sure that nothing's clogged and just to kind of gauge the quality of the melt zone. Like it's coming
out very, very straight. Sometimes if there's a little bit of something in the end of the nozzle,
twist slightly, and then come back to center as it droops. But this is, this is looking good.
Let me just, can I do it on the fly? Layer adjustment? Yeah, Jesus Christ. Okay, look at that.
One, two, three, four, five. Come on, squish down. Oh boy.
Like, can they f***ing see? The hot end assembly really covers a lot of it. Oh, that's loud. I mean,
we're quick. But are we 250 millimeters a second quick? So we have this really nice little display
down here on the bottom left, which actually tells you how fast you're printing. So that's 95 meters
a second, which is doing our bottom layer. So let's take the movement speed up to 175 millimeters
a second, which is pretty fast. That's ridiculous. How is it doing this? It has three fan settings,
which is kind of cool. So we have mute, which is what it's at now, normal, and then violent. It's
now saying it wants to move at 625 millimeters a second. I don't believe that it's actually doing
that. But oh my God, it's moving. Oh my God. Hey, look, it's done. And it didn't explode,
which is kind of amazing because we were really pushing the sprinter. I mean, you can see that
it's got some, it's got some blurby bits. It's got some snot on it. Let's see how it releases.
And we're off. That was nice. Yeah, we're getting some of that under extrusion, I think, on the super
fast rapids, just as it's accelerating out, which is kind of interesting. But I mean, it was really
ripping it around. And what's interesting is the interior faces are all pretty okay, except for
this little lump right there. I wanted to do this print because it was kind of small and had a bunch
of different types of areas. We had some really long sweeping curves and like some more fiddly stuff.
This section right here, where I think the system automatically slowed down to like,
you know, get through those tight curves is nearly perfect. Some minor under extrusion
and some stringing and stuff like that. But I think it was printing these externals at like
nearly 200. So whatever they're doing with this fast PLA plus is nuts.
I think it's a little small. Oh, there we go. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. It survived,
it didn't break. So yeah, cool. So yeah, the print settings for that, it lives up to its claim.
I think that's kind of amazing that they can be like, it'll print 500 millimeters a second,
but you know, you should probably only do 250, but you should only do 250 because the prints
look like s***, not that it can't do it. Like it didn't fail. If I tried to push a printer this hard
that wasn't this one, it would just be missing steps the whole time and like
just destroying itself. But this made it through the entire print, which is kind of incredible.
Maybe we'll try something a little more conservative. That's maybe still not too
conservative, but I also want to try non-special Algoo PLA as well. We've got the Ethernet cable
plugged in now and I have the Clipper firmware loaded up on my web browser. And this is where
it gets really cool and exciting. Here we have all sorts of really interesting graphs and like
all sorts of controls. So we don't have to use the touch screen even though it's kind of nice.
We can also set up a whole bunch of different macros and things like that. Flashlight on.
I can just home all the accesses from right here, which is great. I use a similar version of this,
but I use Repitier host. Repitier, I don't quite know how it's pronounced,
but I don't use a browser source for that. The nice thing about using Clipper firmware,
we run it in the, we run it in Creator Warehouse for our little Vorons. They're these little teeny
tiny desktop machines that also print like about the speed, but they're CoreXY machines and they
are kind of like hand built by the engineering team. It's an open source kit project thing.
They run a similar style of firmware. This one says Fluid at the top. I don't have a whole lot
of experience with these types of custom firmwares. I am far more basic than a lot of these other
people who really want to go fast, but I still have dealt with these before and they're really,
really powerful. We can also adjust our printer limits set up here directly for 500 millimeters
a second. So it's got the square corner velocity and accelerations. So like this square corner
velocity down here is really, really slow. So it's normally printing at like 200, 9500,
whatever, really fast. And then if it gets to a square corner, because you don't want super
rounded edges, it'll slow down and like make sure that line is squared properly. Accelerations are
kind of more like what I assumed, 5000 millimeters per second squared, which is
pretty good for a Cartesian style printer. The CoreXYs can go a lot faster and this one also has a
really, really, really heavy hot end assembly. And so swinging that around back and forth is kind
of where you're seeing those slower accelerations to kind of make it go fast. But you know, the Y-axis
has more and that's kind of good. We have a, see what else we have here. We've got a console,
so we can send it like gcode commands just ourselves, which is great. So G1, Z, 10.
Cool. I think I smushed it into the bed. Nope. Okay, never mind. We're good. GZ, 50.
So it's in absolute positioning mode, which is great. We also have direct access to jobs,
so we can upload files to it directly and you can kind of pick whatever you want to go. We even have
a history in here. We can see that this took, well, it was going to take 42 minutes, which is pretty
damn good for a part that size without many layers on a Cartesian machine. And then what's
really cool is we have this 3D graph of our mesh bed leveling output, which is like, I don't know,
every time I see this, I'm like, I need this on my printer. That is so cool. Having just, this is
just the nerdiest on the f***ing line. I swear to God. I mean, look at this. It's like this beautiful
heat map of everything that's wrong with your bed. And then, you know, okay, so this, this X00
corner, I think it's over here, that's a little bit higher, you know, the deviation is a little bit
higher. And so that would kind of tell me that I maybe need to turn this knob a little bit. And so
you can kind of get immediately into, you know, really fine-tuned printing. And this is like
just firmware. Like, why doesn't every single printer have this kind of interface? So you're,
you're getting a really solid foundation. And then you're getting an amazing piece of firmware.
It's just great. Yeah. And for our whole system, we have all the configuration files like, let's,
let's pop this one open. Yeah. And we've got all our stepper pins and full steps per rotation and,
you know, the pulse duration and all that sort of good stuff and like
everything, everything that I want in a printer that I own, I have access to break it as much as I
want. Do I have the ability to retract the filament on here? Like I want to do a filament change.
So I don't know if it has a macro for this, but I can certainly have it pull the filament out for me
now that the hot end is up to temperature. Yeah, that looks good. No, uh, no real concerns with
that. So let's change this out for the red stuff and we'll print again and start messing with it
in clipper, which is pretty cool. So I can just start pushing that through. This is also a really
good test to, to feel like how competent your, your hot end is actually melting plastic is to
just like push it in. And if you feel like a lot of resistance, then, you know, your melt zone is
probably not too good. This one feels pretty damn sturdy if I'm being honest. And it seems pretty
short too, because that color change was not super hard. Let's see how easy it is to start a print
here. I can, I can see what's on the USB stick exactly. So let's print this. I can edit it.
What is editing it do? Oh, it's downloading it. Oh, it's just giving me a big thing, a G code. Wow,
okay. And print. First layer speed is looking nice. We're getting a real time output for
all of our temperatures and our percentages and our current speed. That's what I love about clippers.
It tells you how fast you're actually going. This print right now, uh, this operation is 60 millimeters
a second, which is still pretty fast. My printer at home, I can push to about 30 millimeters a
second. And that's normal printing speed. This one's doing it on the first layer. Adhesion looks great.
We noticed no curling on this other one. The texture is great. No elephants footing. Maybe a
little bit right here, but then I think I started springing up the speed. The reason it's slowing
down for this edge here is it's actually an overhang. Um, and that would allow it to have
more time to cool. That sort of thing. And now we're going a bit faster. Man, this is performing
far better than expectations. My expectations are low, especially for a $300 printer. I think this
should be everybody's first printer, especially having clipper, because clipper is complicated
enough that you can break things, but that's not necessarily accessible. If you just want to like
make a beer holder, but making a beer holder is not worth, you know, $1,200 investment.
This is God, how's it so cheap? I don't get it. And it's got Ethernet in it. Thanks again to
Elagu for sponsoring today's video and sending us this printer. They've also released a resin one
as well, which has a 12k screen, which is kind of amazing. They didn't even know k's could go that
high. If you want to have a look at their new lineup, head to the link in the description.