Much BETTER than Expected - AnkerMake M5 3D Printer
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2022-05-05
·
2,970 words · ~14 min read
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- We'll just be unkind to it here. Right? Stop.
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I'm trying to screw with you. Stop. - Screw with you.
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- As I get older, there's one thing that I want my 3D printers to do, work.
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And you, you think that's pretty easy but it really is not an apparently AnchorMake
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has made one that uses the power of AI to prevent spaghetti.
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Let's test it out and huge thanks to anchor make for sponsoring this video.
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Oh I've been using 3D printers for the better part of 10 years.
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And for about five of those, I didn't use 3D printers
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because they're so good at being just terrible.
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For a long while there, I only liked using laser cutters
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because then at least if it fails, you only waste an hour
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or two instead of a day. When you're working on videos like this,
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you can't waste a day. Oh In the last couple of years though,
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3D printers have gotten to the point where, well I enjoy using them again.
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They work well. They give me my parts and I just arrive the next day.
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And it's sitting there. It's fantastic. It's hopefully this one can do that and even better
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Apparently faster too. Although their 70% claims are kind of eh.
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Oh, fancy! Look at this.
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Apparently this thing only takes 15 minutes to put together. I guess we're gonna find out soon.
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I'm running out of table. I like the packaging. It seems like the whole thing arrived in intact.
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Despite you know, UPS's best efforts.
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This plate rate here looks really expensive. This is all aluminum.
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I don't know if it's hallow or not. Can we take it apart? Let's take it apart.
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We're supposed to be putting it together, but you know, sometimes things just start going the wrong way.
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Have an included tool kit. Very nice. Oh weird.
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Look at this. It's a changeable Allen key.
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- We'll see how difficult it is. Okay, bottom's plastic.
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That's good. I don't know the price yet. So I'm mostly just looking
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at this and hoping it's not too bad. Normally you don't compliment people on using plastic.
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But if this whole thing was aluminum I would've been pretty concerned about the pricing.
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It's just injection mold of plastic. The top though is a piece of aluminum.
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Wonder what the chances are.
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Heck yeah. Did we do it?
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Feels like there's a sneaky screw somewhere. Do you know how many units there are
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in existence right now Jono? - [Jono] No probably very little.
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- Yeah, very few. I know that this is all beta build stuff.
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So how many exist right now? We don't know, but it can't be very many.
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So we probably shouldn't break it. Found the last screw required to get this open.
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It requires a 16th inch hex.
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This right here does not reach all the way down.
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- [David] They knew what they were doing. - Yeah. They probably don't want us in here
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which look, fair enough. We're gonna be right beside AC.
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Ha ha! Damn afraid Jono this is gonna be expensive.
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There's no way this is cheap. That's a very nice and very expensive
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block of aluminum right there. One and a half, one and a half.
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Would've had to come out of like a three inch thick piece of aluminum.
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This has to be a beta version thing. This would either have to be cast
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or plastic in the final one. There's no way they're doing something this expensive
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or it's gonna be like a $5,000 machine. $429. Okay, yeah.
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There's no way that this right here is a part on the final version.
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If the early bird prices and that's what like a bit off. So that means the final is gonna come around 800 ish.
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- Okay. Yeah. There's no way this part's on there.
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This is a really nice part. Our Pantheon printer has a very similar like
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build plate that they put everything against.
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It's $8,000. If the product is this and it comes in at $429
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you should just buy it and take the aluminum.
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All right, now we can have a look at what's in here. We have a nice little power supply here.
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24 volts. Oh Jono, looks like we can change the output voltage.
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Should we try and over clog this thing?
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- That, that wouldn't work. Don't do that. You also have our nice little controller.
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I find it really interesting if they use type C. All right.
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We just got confirm from Anchor. This aluminum bit here is going to be cast
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in the final product, but it will be all aluminum which is sweet.
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Do we read the instructions, Jono? Or do we just go for it? - Yeah, this seems very yoloable.
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There's probably a good way to do this.
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This one has a bent pin. No, I didn't bend the pin. It came with a bent pin.
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Oops. Now it's more bent. Is there like a way you're supposed to do this?
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- How? I was definitely supposed to plug in those motors
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after it was through which would've made this way easier read the instructions.
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Don't be like me.
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- Yeah. Actually don't read the instructions. Make sure the first thing you do with every product
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you own is void the warranty. Yeah. I know people that kept the warranty on their things.
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They're all dead now.
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Oh yeah that make it way easier. Yeah, if you look at it, yeah,
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it would just hold it kind of like I have it right now. Actually, we can still do that.
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Okay Jono, can you put the foam under it?
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You, you had it right the first time I think. - No, I think it was this way.
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There you go. - Yep. Okay that's easy.
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What are these four bolts for? It's for the filament hold Oh, that's a filament holder.
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This makes so much sense. I was so confused what this thing was. Yeah. So it goes here or here.
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I found a pre-production thing Jono.
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- The screw don't go through. - I think it's safe to say you won't have to do this step.
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Okay. Maybe safety classes are a good idea Jono.
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Alright we did it. Alright now we can attach this.
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I love pre-production things they're always so much more fun.
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Back to the filament holder though. This little one that they gave us, clearly no problem.
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Now we have our regular sized role here and that fits pretty much perfectly.
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Although if you're going for the mega roll
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It, yeah not so much. I don't really expect it to be able to
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hold something like this. It weighs about as much as the printer.
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If you want a big roll, you're gonna have to buy one of the $20 Amazon roll holder things.
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Hey Jono, can you ask 'em how they do their leveling? They have 49 points of auto leveling, which is awesome.
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It makes your prints just work so much more of the time.
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Cause you know, if your bed isn't quite correct then maybe on one side, your first layer doesn't stick.
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And then it doesn't really work. First layer is kind of all that matters once you get that
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everything else is good. There's two ways to do auto leveling though.
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You can either have like a capacitive touch probe which is pretty good,
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but now a lot of them are using strain gauges, which is even better.
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Think we're about ready to boot this up though.
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Is it on?
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It is. Okay. Let's have a little look at the control that we have here.
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So if I hit home, where does it go?
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There I guess. I'm not entirely sure how I feel
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about having the controller on the Z axis. It is going to be moving
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but it shouldn't be moving very much while it prints.
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Level before printing. Turn that on.
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Oh, nice. So it is using the actual extruder.
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I'm not quite sure how they're doing it. Okay, we're doing the auto leveling now.
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I guess just had to heat up first. It takes a little while to do it
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but I would still just leave it on for every single time that I run a print.
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It's just cheap insurance. That means it'll work more of the time.
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Okay, let's see. Cut the end of the filament on a 45 degree angle.
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Now we're just gonna put it in here, and hopefully
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I was kind of hoping that we could get a print started using what's here and oh, I got it through.
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Yeah, that's just kind of not great.
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I had a little bit of try trouble getting the filament to go
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down to the extruder. All I needed to fix, it was take off this little clip.
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You can pull this tube out and then look down in and feed the filament down.
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- Hey. All right? So what am doing is just
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connecting the 3D printer (Ankermake)
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with the app. What should we call this?
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Poopsmouth. - Sure. I was gonna say Printy boy number five.
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- Oh I like that, that's better. All right, PrettyBoy 5. Cool.
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We just want to make sure that this has all the latest firmware.
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That's cool, you can actually have files on your...
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Smartphone! And we can upload it from there.
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- You're taking too long. I already have G code on here. - Okay fine.
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You can control it.
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- I love that they have their speed as five times even though it's just 250 millimeters per second
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which by the way, 250 millimeters per second. Very fast.
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That is awesome. I just find it silly how they did it.
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So let's, I wonder what this is. Let's just go see what happens.
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Oh, one thing.
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Oh yeah. - [Jono] Oooooooo. Satisfying. You have to Auto-Level again? - You don't have to, but I turn on auto leveling every time
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just cause it makes your prints more consistent. If this just works, I'm gonna be pretty impressed.
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I have done literally none of the things that you
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should probably do with 3D printer. Like not even an alcohol wipe,
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we definitely should have done that, but whatever. If this just goes then fantastic.
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What do you guys think this is? We're just putting mystery G code into this
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which I do not recommend, but it's from anchor. So I'm sure it's fine. Okay. Do they do a little extrude thing at the start?
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Nope. That's really fast for first layer.
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I'd probably turn it down a bit but I guess it's what it's doing.
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First layer's almost done, but I am impressed with the speed
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especially for just outta the box. This is looking promising.
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Let's come back in about an hour or something.
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All right. It's the next day, and I have to say, I'm very impressed.
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This print took two hours and 24 minutes tells you right there.
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And this is, oh, comes off very easy.
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I was afraid that would be a bit of a challenge, but it wasn't. This is like, look at this.
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There's barely any stringing between these guys. There's like a tiny bit
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but there's just a bunch of super challenging things in here.
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So like a ramp that just goes up to a 15 degree angle.
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It gets a little bit weird here but if you ever used a 3D printer before
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you know that this is not easy to do
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we've got a bunch of weird little overhangs in here and a whole bunch of little dimensions.
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So let's check it out. Something like this ramp is challenging
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because we aren't using support. So that means that it kind of just has to print it
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and keep on going and have all the layers stick properly so it can do this overhang
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because it is just going up and up and up. So there's nothing supporting it under, underneath here.
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Same with these little spires are very difficult
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because of the filament. You know, it's very easy for even when it stops
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for a little bit to just keep on coming out. And then when it goes between them
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you get those little bits of filament in between it. So like if this printer wasn't working very well
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it would get a whole bunch of stringing in between these. And it would just kind, gonna look
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like a nest as opposed to a whole bunch of little spires. I think that what this is is it's a cylinder
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and a hole of different sizes. So this is 0.5.
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That must is that half a millimeter. You can see it's a cylinder that comes out of the hole.
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- Yeah. And so this one's 0.3, that one comes out.
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Okay. For whatever reason, 0.4 comes after 0.3
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but sure that one comes out too. They need to figure out how they're doing it.
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But 0.2 of a millimeter that one's not coming out.
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Okay. It looks like each of these are 10 millimeter increments.
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The way that it's printed it's kind of hard to tell exactly how accurate it is.
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Like I can show it as 10 on here
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but it might be a little bit off 24.9.
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I'm sure that was supposed to be 25. Very good. It's off by this much in a lot of cases.
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- But that's, that's barely off Jono. If you want your stuff off to be
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within a thousandth of a thousandth of an inch, then
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- Yeah. Pay 10 times more. There's a number of other cool things that we have here.
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Jono, do you wanna bring over the app? We have a video feed of your print.
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Hello myself over the internet. Okay. I guess.
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Oh, balls. Yep. I broke it. I broke it.
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Start this one again. Print. - (Jono) Oh, cool. - And it starts.
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Speed. Boom. Six times. Sure. Save.
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- 300 millimeters per second. That's to the point where you're going to run
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into extruder issues, unless you have things really dialed in,
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like just how fast you can move the plastic out and
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stop the plastic becomes a problem when you're going that fast.
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Now there are a lot of things that we don't know about this printer. The biggest big question mark is the slicer.
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AnkerMake are going to have their own slicer. And it's probably fine.
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It probably has a great profile for this printer but how good it actually is and how powerful it is,
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we don't know yet. A slicer is what takes your 3D model,
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Like say, we had a 3D model of this. It converts it into the 0.4 millimeter or whatever layers
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going all the way up and turns into the code that the machine runs
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- It doesn't make coffee unfortunately. You could definitely write G code to make you coffee.
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I don't know if you could do it in a slicer and the main test I want to do here,
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once it's done doing a it's auto leveling, is just try
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and screw with it a bit and see if it can ping Jono's
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phone when it screws up. Actually we try and screw with it.
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I'm gonna take a spire and just put it in here. Maybe it'll run it over.
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Ah, no, it's not good of the way. Darn. We'll just be unkind to it here.
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Oh, Stop. I'm trying to screw with you.
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Stop - Okay. Okay I, I know what we can do here.
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Stop working. - Oh, I could just clip it.
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I'm sorry Mr. Printer. Will it realize?
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Yeah, it seems like it still is printing.
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It's supposed to stop. I wonder if it stops if it detected in here.
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- Okay. That makes a lot more sense. - Yeah. It does make sense
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that they would have the filament detection over here. Cause then you would still have plenty of time to,
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you know, take it out, swap the spool put it back in and not have to worry about your print.
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Getting all screwed up overall though especially for the price.
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I'm quite impressed. Right now there's a Kickstarter on
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where this is 43% off. So that's $430. For that price I think it's a very easy buy
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at the usual price of $760 still very great.
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Like this was incredibly easy to set up. It seems to print well,
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it has lots of features that allow you to easily print
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from just your phone and stuff. I'm actually impressed. And thank you, AnkerMake for sponsoring this video
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and also for making a good product 'cause then it's not awkward that you sponsored it.
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We like honesty here. So hit like get subscribed and
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if you want more maker type videos, let us know.
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See you later. Bye.