hi I'm Tynan and I'm here to talk about the prusa mark IV I have definitely been
a fan of prusa in the past a lot of their printers and a lot of the experiences I've had with them have been
generally quite positive and the fact that they're in almost entirely open
source and allow users to hack it and
upgrade it along the way is a big selling point that I generally have been
quite a fan of as time has progressed there have been a
couple other printer manufacturers in the market that have made things more
difficult it looks like they sent us a couple of snacks
in terms of other unboxing things a nice little handbook for anyone who needs a
little bit more introduction power cable standard stuff but a whole bunch of
replacement Beds which is quite nice because this is one of the most common
consumables especially if you accidentally cut into it or something
like that when you're trying to take a part off and a bunch of packing
they do provide a box of filament which
is always nice assorted accessories which we'll open up after this big box
is out of here one piece yeah
all right there be the printer one more
little box to open up I have a suspicion yeah so this is a
nozzle adapter which normally doesn't come with it this particular one has two
sides so you can load multiple filaments at once if you want this is the pla
prusa Galaxy black which is persiment they should have a profile for it when
we get there so I haven't actually seen an improvement roll in a while but they
have a little filament catch on the end inside of the Roll normally I see it
like fed through holes or something like that they have a wi-fi system built in
which is a notable Improvement in previous versions you've had to either
attach a Raspberry Pi or some other single board computer or Wi-Fi adapter
to be able to connect these wirelessly but that seems to be out of the box
compatible now Yee there's two big upgrades that I'm aware of right now one
of them is the extruder set itself they've replaced the existing two gear
drive with one large gear and a couple of idlers that greatly increases the
amount of grip that the extruder has on the filament and to compensate for that
they have a planetary gear set that allows the stepper to operate well
within its ideal range but still have the filament move at a reasonable Pace
they have a force sensor integrated into the hot end so they can probe the bed
and get the actual measurements rather than having to do manual bed leveling
which is also a massive quality of life Improvement is anyone who's ever had to
mess around with that knows it's an adventure in a lot of the upgrade
kits you can get the printed Parts purchased as well but generally for any
of these they suggest just printing your own upgrade Parts they'll provide you
with the files and get you rolling to the point and also even on production
printers they print a whole bunch of components including the screen cover a
bunch of the other stepper mounts
and some of the mounting components onto any of the hardware boxes and that is
all of the hardware setup that we have to do before you get set up and start
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the build volume of this printer is 250 by 210 by 220 millimeters it's not the
biggest build volume out there but it'll get most of what you need done
and the self-test begins we will need your help with this test you'll be asked
to tap the nozzle don't worry it's going to be cold and it gives me a nice little
countdown and that's just detecting that the load
cell is working properly now it's doing a z-axis calibration goes all the way to
the top until it vibrates and then moves over to the side this is its initial
self-test after it's built or taken out of the box to make sure that everything
is attached properly and that it's detecting its ends this particular
printer doesn't actually have limit switches on most of the axes I think any
of the axes it detects feedback from the motors themselves they've been upgraded
to avoid weird artifacting along z-axis
okay so it's still going through tests and now it's actually starting to heat
things up so no one's particular surprise prusa uses prusa slicer it's a
great slicer and a lot of other companies actually make forks from prusa
slicer to develop their own because they do a very good job it has all of your
standard settings all the way down to 0.05 millimeter detail to 0.3 draft
standard you can upload a whole bunch of different generic or persimmon specific
or other manufacturer specific filaments into your presets and they also allow
different profiles for your printers and different nozzle sizes we have a nice
little Snorlax here that we're going to do our for our print while this is
heating up there's a couple of things to talk about about the nozzle itself there
is a quick swap nozzle with a couple of thumb screws inside the extruder so you
can take it out and swap a new one in very very quickly compared to any others
and also the nozzle and extruder section is fully metal with no PTFE pipe or PTFE
tube which means the entire hot end can get up to 300 degrees Celsius which
allows you to work with a lot more of the engineering style Plastics on this
particular printer all right and now here is our full self-test result
which looks like as one would hope everything passes happy printing thank
you this is another nice improvement over the previous versions where you
could only use SD cards to upload files you can now use USB drives and you can
also hook up a micro USB to I believe
their your laptop if you wanted to print directly from there
it should detect it automatically
lovely oh it does happen automatically that's quite nice
slight caveat for this make sure that the setting of the
plastic is correct for your nozzle temp or you're going to have a bad time so
it'll pull it in automatically and then ask you hey what plastic did you just
put in and then this is gonna these are going to be all of your presets for your
different types of plastic so pla pet G ASA polycarb now that that's all set up
we'll hit print and it's going to go if I recall
correctly this does have its own first layer cowl built in where it'll probe
the area that it's going to print in to get a good mesh map in case there's
deviations down or up so it'll automatically compensate for that
variation as it's printing its first layers it's good fun so this is a 45 minute one
at this point it's going to be heating up the hot end
and the bed and then once that gets to
temperature it'll go now it's going to go through and do its
self-test or first layer calibration it just triggered the load cell and I
actually noticed that there was a little dot on the print bed right where it
touches that's it detecting through the load
cell where it is and now if I understand correctly it's
going to go through and do a grid in the area that it's printing and one nice
thing about this is it only does the area where it's actually printing so it
doesn't always do the entire bed which can be a pretty substantial Time Savings
one of the things that it did here was it reduced the hot end temperature to
the point where the plastic would still be solid but malleable which means you
don't get those little dots left on the print bed as you're probing it
and now it's increasing the temperature up again to actually start the print and
the way it goes some of the other things I've seen floating around with the four
cell and this setup in general some people have suspected that they may
release active Force compensation from the plastic coming out of the nozzle to
detect if there's any variations additionally though never buy something
for a feature that might come I am pretty inclined to believe that any of
the features that could be implemented with this Hardware but isn't yet most
likely will over time or someone on the
internet might just figure it out and post it to everyone and if you wanted to use it you can though be aware of using
other people's code without vetting it first that is an extremely flat first
layer a lot of the times when you're doing your first layer if you over
extrude or under extrude while you're going over it you'll end up getting
little bumps that come up or little gaps in between the in between the layer
lines but on this one I don't see any of that at all
even from the outer profile into the intersection which is
solid all right and away it goes
we'll see you in about an hour
this print looks real pretty
yeah I don't have very many
yeah the bottom layer is very flat the print quality of this is very very
consistent and similar to what they say I don't see any banding or recoiling
when it's going around corners it seems to be extremely consistent on all of the
flat faces which is really nice now that we have a successful print on this thing
let's start taking apart and showing some of the cool upgrades that they've done using my nice lttstore.com
screwdriver that is interesting those are not magnetic screws
so this is that planetary gear setup that I had talked about earlier you can
see in the center of that is the post
attached to the motor you have two Planet gears on the sides and then an
outer ring this holds stable and it
moves the actual extruder gear which is in the side so these are the two thumb
screws that detach the extruder open things up on the floor oh hi there this
is the other two idlers for the extruder
and then on the inside you can see the large extruder gear that engages with
the plastic in general I'm quite happy with this printer and the history I have
with prusa and the printers I've used from them and that I've seen people
using from them I do believe that it is a very good machine though some of the
features of it don't quite seem to be fully implemented yet like the extruder
having force feedback or I have learned this is a touch screen
or at least the hardware is a touch screen it's not implemented as one but
maybe at some point and I think there are other a couple of other aspects of
the printer itself that will get better over time with more firmware and
software updates it is a good printer and I'm really happy with the overall
quality of the parts that come out in the overall space of 3D printers
currently I really like what prusa does I like all of the machines they've
launched but with some of the competitors like the bamboo that have
come out it's made the value proposition a bit more interesting this is a machine
that you can buy not have to connect to a network not have to connect through
anything hook up through your own Wi-Fi or your own Ethernet if you want to and
not have to worry about it connecting to any other servers so there's definitely
some value there but for the price of
about eleven hundred dollars for the out of box kit it is expensive looking at
the biggest competition in the price bracket the X1 Carbon from bamboo or the
p1p they are at 1200 for the carbon or
700 for the p1p compared to this which
is 1100 for the as built out of the box
or 800 for the kit that you have to assemble probably per myself purchase
the kit and then build it because I'm technically Savvy and have built several
3D printers before but if you just want something to take out of the box and be
good to go I would say that this would be a good purchase especially in the
long run if you have a Mark III already or a Mark III Plus getting the upgrade
kit is a pretty strong proposition at 580 for the upgrade kit plus a couple of
3D printed Parts you'd need to do yourself that makes a ton of sense to take a printer that's been around for
five years already and giving it a new lease on life with a new extruder a new
a whole bunch of new electronics and a bunch of other upgraded components
overall it is a great printer and I
believe that it does have some benefits over some of the competition in its
history as well as the dimensional
accuracy of the printer I know we've had a couple of gripes internally about how
much tuning is required for dimensional accuracy on the bamboo and historically
everything I've ever had from prusa that's never been a problem I maybe have
to do one iteration figure out accurate settings and job done thank you so much
for watching this episode of ShortCircuit do you have a 3D printer at home
and think that this is either an upgrade path or a replacement for what you have
leave your comments down below and be sure to like And subscribe