- Today, we have the FlashForge Artemis
a cube style, 3d printer.
I don't know where to go from here.
You thought all I knew
about was crappy RGB and crappy soundbar speakers,
but I can print a thing or two as well.
FlashForge, the sponsor for this video,
has sent us over one of their new printers,
the Artemis.
It's a little bit different
from some of the other printers available on the market.
I'm not entirely sure how it operates or what kind it is.
I know it's a big cube.
It's quite exciting.
Instructions, things like that.
And it also looks like we've got the bed,
we'll be looking at that a bit later.
- [Bell] So strong.
- Yeah. I was just gonna say, yeah
It's quite hefty, I'll tell you that.
Oh, it's so orange, I love it.
I just immediately rip all the cables out,
good job Dan.
So this piece of foam just holds the head
and carriage in there from moving around, got a whole bunch
of tap straps and things we gotta get out too.
Oh, look, they've sent us two full spools of filament,
that's really nice actually.
White PLA and a black PLA, I think we will
go with white.
It's all really nice and neat, if I'm honest.
Oh, this is gonna be sick.
Look at this thing.
Seems like the frame is really nice and sturdy.
This style's different cuz it's a cube.
Most of the other ones are like upside down
tee style printer.
We generally measure the printers in, in this direction.
So you've got your Z travel here and then your X travel
and then your Y travels this way.
On traditional printers,
which were like a rep wrap style, something like that.
The Y axis stays stationary and the bed goes back and forth.
And then your X goes, you know left and right.
With this one, the X and Y moves
and then the bed goes up and down itself.
Shouldn't really move this until that light come on.
It's bad for it.
This style's slightly different in
that it has two independent axes here, probably two motors
one each side, it looks like, yeah
the motor is actually on the X gantry here.
So we have our X gantry here, and our Y gantry here.
This has a full direct drive extruder.
So you're gonna get a lot of performance
out of the extruder rather than speed,
and should be nice and quiet.
For those of you that don't know,
directive extruder compared
to a standard Bowden style extruder,
There's actually a motor
up top here that pushes the plastic right next
to the nozzle, rather than having this tube,
which is where your filament's gonna come from
be at the back.
So the extruder motor's not on the back
of the unit.
FlashForge says that this extruder will do
up to 260 degrees, which is quite nice.
Or you can do your PET GS
and your nylons that, that sort of temperature.
It looks like a 4.4 millimeter brass nozzle.
So you're gonna be able to do your, your standard materials.
If you wanna do weird things
like wood in fill or carbon fiber type of filaments,
then you'll just have to upgrade it
to a carbon steel nozzle.
Moving around to the back of the printer,
it's all completely closed off.
So we can definitely have this
against a wall if you wanted to.
And our little filament holder, I think just slots in here.
Yeah. That's nice and easy.
And so that goes on, there.
Looks like it comes with a Borosilcate glass bed,
I mean, I would assume so. I hope so.
And it has this really, really nice textured
nano dot surface on the top.
Advantage of using glass beds, is that it's perfectly flat.
So there's no sort of undulations.
So your first layers adhere really well.
And they've also sent along
what looks like a textured metal bed.
And this one feels really nice.
It's a nice, smooth metal texture.
The nice thing about having a flexible bed
is you can peel this off the printer
and then just pop your parts out really easily.
Comes with this big magnet on the back here.
And it seems to have a self adhesive tape.
I think I'm gonna try it on the glass.
But it's not running on linear rails.
It's just those bald tube things which have a very,
very nice light oil on them from factory, which is good.
Get that out.
Ah, it even comes with extra nozzles, this is awesome.
What would you like to print?
- [Bell] Oh, I had what I wanna print,
I even found a print file.
- Really?
[Bell] It's a little frog with a cowboy hat.
- That's so cute, we're definitely doing that.
(indistinct)
(printer beeps)
- Oh God.
- [Bell] Well.
- I love that.
Looks like it is a touchscreen.
Nice and responsive, which is good.
Let's go to the home.
Ready? Let's see how loud it is.
Holy. It's whisper quiet.
It's incredibly affordable if you were gonna
put it in a school,
or if you had a younger kid at home who wanted to get
into learning how to use 3d printers,
this seems like a, a good model for that.
The build volume is quite reasonable as well.
Pretty standard, 200 millimeters high
of build volume by, believe it's 190
in the X direction and 195 in the Y direction.
Oh yeah, that's right.
It's got a light in the top of it, I love that.
It's got wifi, it's got languages, it's got a buzzer.
I definitely want the buzzer on it. Sweet.
What is the level do, what's gonna happen?
Okay. Let's see if it's gonna crash.
Oh, it did not.
Oh
(printer beeping)
Click the arrow to adjust the platform
so that it just touches the nozzle.
So now we're setting our Zed access offset.
Raise this platform and sit by the side
of it till we get next to it.
This is way easier than having to adjust yourself manually.
Because we only have two adjustment knobs
on the front, and none at the back,
it went to the center here,
and then we got it to touch.
And so now what I think it wants me to do, is turn the knob.
Yeah, there you go.
Unscrew the corresponding nut
under platform until touching the nozzle.
So we are touching it right now.
So I'm just gonna bring this corner
down by unscrewing the nozzle, no tightening the nozzle
tightening the nozzle, brings the platform away
from the nozzle, and I'm just looking
at the light through it,
and I'm just gonna undo it, bringing the platform up
and just till I can't see the nozzle anymore.
And we go next God, this is so much easier
than what I have to do at home.
I, (laughs)
I'm jealous.
There's the other side is done.
So that was incredibly easy to level this bed.
Let's open up some filament.
This is my favorite part of opening filament,
is fun noise.
You ready for the, didn't do it.
Never let go of the end ever, ever
because it'll get all tangled up and you'll ruin your life.
And it looks like the path is gonna come up this side.
So I'm gonna put my filament here,
and just stuff it in there, in you go, nice.
Like siliconized type tube thing.
That's not bad at all.
There's a lot of space in between there.
I would prefer a tighter Bowden tube.
Everybody likes a tight Bowden tube.
Blue? I loaded white filament.
I guess they test them at the factory
with blue or something like that.
Test file.
We have a tool Changn, and a file connect,
filter connect.
It's got a nice little display here,
of what you're about to print including the time,
how much filament it's gonna use, the layer height,
and the speed that it's gonna print at.
There, there, there we go.
Aw, he's so cute.
This is gonna be quite a challenging print for this printer.
I don't think I can print this.
I'm just gonna use their default settings.
I think that's pretty important to start with.
Default extruder width,
0.4 PLA, little cold
Maybe we'll we'll try that layer
height is 0.18 as a default, which is pretty detailed.
Normally I print it like 0.3
because I want my prints now, not in five hours.
So we'll see how the default settings look,
and see how fast it prints,
and see if it even sticks to the bed.
So we're gonna start with homing.
Oh, nice.
Look, Kyle, picture of the froggie.
Make sure our bill plate's clean.
Don't use your hand.
You'll get oils on it.
Use a cloth or something.
Nice. Slow first layer.
It's quiet apart from the fans, but Ooh, look at that.
It's doing the outline of the, the froggie legs.
- [Jake] I don't know if it's still there.
Sorry. I hope you guys weren't trying to do anything.
- Oh, cool.
- Yeah, we're filming a short circuit.
- Wow.
- No, you're not.
Since when do we 3d print things on ShortCircuit?
Dan, what are you doing?
- I'm doing a short circuit.
- Are you sure this table is really
stable enough for 3d printing?
- Yeah, no, this is fine
- Upside down. Oh cool.
- Yeah.
- Now that we're through the first layer,
speeds have improved quite a lot.
This is just our, our basic speeds.
The travel moves are looking pretty nice and fast.
It's whisper quiet, apart from the layer fan,
and the power supply fan, in fill looks good.
All the lines look good.
I'm not noticing too much
over extrusion or under extrusion on the first layer.
A little bit of wispy on one of the feet
during one of the travel moves, but it was quite slow.
So I would certainly suggest playing around
with your slicer settings.
First, one of the features that I wanna try is
the um, Linus protection feature,
where he comes and trips over my cord, like, oh no.
And now the powers come back on.
So let's see what happens.
Will it recover?
It's a boy frog.
(laughs)
Yes. Oh, here we go.
Resume the uncompleted print job.
Yes, please.
Well, would you look at that?
Not many printers have a resume from failure state.
Is it just continuing?
Yeah. It finished that bit of info there.
This is great.
And we're back after only an hour
and a half, and maybe four days later.
My beard's a little longer and I've
got a different shirt on.
Our little frog friend is done.
Look at that.
One thing that I wanted to test now, is the release
of this interesting little glass surface.
So just by grabbing him from his hat,
let's see how easy he pops off.
If we have to use a spatula or anything
look at that, nice and released.
Not a huge level of surface defects in the base.
No real elephants feet
around the edge, which is when you get a
little bit of a lip around the side.
Maybe some of it, but I only bed leveled
it in like five seconds.
So this is looking pretty good.
Yeah. Little partner there.
So we'll put 'em aside,
and move on to some of the other things.
I'm a little bit concerned
that the hot end assembly and most of this is proprietary.
Un-upgradeable, unrepairable for yourself.
And if you wanna be learning about 3d printers,
you're gonna be wanting to do your own maintenance
and repairing it yourself, so.
One of the things that's interesting
about 3d printing, is you can change a lot just
by changing the nozzle.
And if you have to buy all of them from FlashForge,
then you're limiting yourself
to some fun exotics that you might not get access to
if FlashForge doesn't provide you with that type of nozzle.
Cause one thing that I'd like to have a look at,
is how they're doing their motor drivers.
If it's an all in one system, which you can't replace
if one of them burns out,
you gotta buy a whole new main board, or if they're
standard drop in styles, that you could experiment with.
Try different ones.
Yeah. I'm just a dumb ass.
Our motherboard is this nice little green board here.
This is our power supply.
We've got our Zed access motor here.
And this is the assembly
for the these little touch screen that plays songs
at the front.
Looks like our motor drivers are all
soldered onto the motherboard,
so you won't get any chance to upgrade that.
They've all got some pretty nice heat sinks on there,
which is good.
We've got a little 40 millimeter fan
which is nice and easily accessible here.
Looks like we've got some extra ports here,
for a couple more things.
Maybe sensors.
There's a secondary fan port here.
So you could put another one somewhere else.
If you were into that.
Okay. We're back on the top side now.
I wanna have a look at how this
hot end assembly is put together.
Let's ruin this printer.
Okay. I was wrong, they're not linear bearings.
They're actually bronze bushings, which is very interesting.
I don't think I've seen that in a printer before.
They should just pop out quite easily, then.
It looks like they're held in by just pressure snap.
Yeah, there we go.
Those actually roll really smoothly.
They're silent, there's no noise from them.
And the belt tensioning system here is just friction fit,
so that all comes out really nicely.
And our hot end assembly is out, so easy.
There we go.
I'll just pull that out of the way,
and now we have access to our hot end assembly.
And just like that, couple cables,
couple screws, I have,
(beep)
sorry, I'm learning from Linus.
Just like that, we've got our hot end assembly.
It's really nice, all in one,
almost plug and play style thing.
Got our layer fan here, which is pointed sort of directly
at the Silicon sock, which is a odd choice.
I'd like to see that a little bit lower maybe.
And there's our L E D
and we've got a little plugin driver board here,
which is basically just making everything plugin easily,
so that this main cable can send it all back to the brains.
Looks like our nozzles is gonna go all the way through that.
And, butt up against the top of the heat brake there.
It's a really nice little assembly, I think.
It's not very heavy, it's a pound.
After ripping apart the hot end assembly,
which actually wasn't that difficult,
we found a couple interesting little notes of things.
Nozzles are a weird size, but seem very easy to install
and remove, the X carriage is not supported
on linear bearings, but bronze bushings,
which is a very interesting choice.
It seems to run nice and smooth, and true.
And they're really easy to take in and out.
There is a separate control board, right on top.
Which is basically just a bunch
of plugs that transfer everything
over to this data cable for power,
and sensors, and a little light underneath.
It's, it's quite elegant, honestly.
I do like the fact that it sings.
That's pretty cool.
You can get in there nice and easy.
It seems well built, all the plastic injection parts
on the hot end assembly and underneath seem to
have heat set inserts, which is really nice.
So you can be taking this apart constantly,
without having to worry about the plastic tearing out.
I think if you're not really into doing much
of the tinkering or if you really don't wanna get
into the mechanicals of how a 3d printer works,
and be changing out parts, and worrying about that
if you just want something that prints reliably
and quickly, ish, if you wanna be playing with settings,
I think the printer's a really,
really good offering in the space.
It's quite competitive at the 600 ish us dollar price range.
And this one I think fits into that very nicely.
For once, I'm actually quite impressed
with a printer of this caliber.
It's, it's real sturdy.
And I really like it.
Thanks to FlashForward,
for sponsoring this video.
If you liked it, throw a like downstairs
and yehaw in the comments for our little froggie friend.