Hey everyone, Tom here, and this is one of the printers that i got really excited about
when it was announced back in mid 2015, and now it's finally here: The E3D BigBox.
(intro) Now, there isn't just one version that is
“the” BigBox: You can choose from a Plywood or Acrylic frame in various color combinations,
a full E3D v6 hotend and a heated bed or an E3D lite6 and no heated bed, single or dual
extruders and you can add a Raspberry Pi with an improved PiCam for Octoprint right out
of the box if you choose so.
In any of those combinations, the BigBox lives up to its name: It's big.
Like, really big.
It doesn't actually need a whole lot more “desk” space than most other printers
with a similar build space of 300x200x280mm, but having such a tall build space as well
as the facts that the printer is wider than it is deep and uses a box frame makes it very…
dominant, at the very least.
There is a spacious electronics compartment in the bottom area of the machine and plenty
of unused space around the actual print area.
The BigBox i have here is actually All3DP’s early bird kickstarter machine, which was
configured as a BixBox Pro, so it came with the full E3D v6 hotend and a heated bed, and
it also has the the acrylic frame and OctoPrint upgrades, still only a single extruder.
I personally would have preferred the plywood frame over acrylic and just painted than thing
- because, i mean look at the original Ultimakers, those were all plywood and are still regarded
by some as the best printers ever made - at least with the new “Plus” version.
For its mechanical properties, plywood is a phenomenal material, and while Acrylic does
eliminate the chance of any of the parts warping,it has one flaw: It cracks.
There's just no way around it.
The inserts E3D uses to create joints between two acrylic parts are probably a good first
step as a technical solution, but you still have to be very, very careful when tightening
the screws that hold everything together.
I used my cordless drills, as always, and had to limit it to the very lowest torque
setting, which is around 1Nm and just barely enough to keep the screws from coming loose.
This crack right here even opened up just from pulling off the protective film.
Also, the inserts themselves were driving me crazy, not only because there are so many
of them, but because they each consist of a plastic spacer and a square nut that have
a strong tendency of falling apart, some of the inserts even need to be taped into place
because there physically no way you'd be to hold then in place otherwise.
And the screws leak their oil coating into the surrounding surface of the matte acrylic.
But all that aside, when it's done, it does look absolutely stunning.
(b-roll) So yeah, the assembly is an absolute pain
to go through and something a novice user would be probably not be able to enjoy.
This unit was one of the early-bird machines, and as such, wasn’t quite as finished as
the ones that are being shipped now and in the future.
And while there are still some design choices in here that i would personally disagree with,
like how the bed assembly is severely over-constrained, the fact is: It works.
And pretty darn well, even.
Not only was the entire printing experience very consistent and reliable for me, but after
installing the latest version of the z-axis parts, the print quality is also at a very
high level overall l.
I’d attribute some of the artifacts that are still there to the way Simplify 3D slices
the files, but the printing quality you’re getting out the hardware itself is nothing
short of amazing.
Now, i did ask in the last video whether i should standardize my testing with Make magazine’s
test parts, but the problem with those or most other “objective” measuring methods
is that 90% of the quality they’re measuring is completely dependent on your slicer settings,
and those are something you can tweak and the manufacturer will likely also update / as
the machine matures.
And to be fair, as long as the motion platform, hotend, heated bed and electronics are all
solid by themselves, with the right slicer settings, the printer in its entirety will
also print really well.
Which is what I try to look out for, since the hardware is not as easily updated over
the air as a slicer profile.
And in that regard, the BigBox is well set up.
Of course, the v6 hotend and the simple direct-drive spring-loaded extruder with an E3D HobbGoblin
filament drive do deliver a very predictable and consistent filament-extruding performance,
and the v6 used here even goes a step further and replaces the often criticised thermistor
solution with a drop-in PT100 thermoresistor, which, overall, is a more robust solution
and at the same time expands the usable temperature range up to 400°C, so, short of melting the
aluminum heater block itself, you’ve probably got a wide-enough range there to print even
the most demanding materials, like polycarbonate or even PEEK - that’s what non-all-metal
hotends typically use as a heat insulator.
Right next to the hotend is the bed probe, which is a concept i haven’t seen before.
Instead of going with a mechanical switch or an inductive sensor, the BigBox uses what
seems to be a custom reflection-based optical sensor.
I’m not entire happy with its performance, as it’s highly dependent on your bed surface,
so even if you quickly switch from plain glass to a transparent hairspray-esque coating,
you do need to completely readjust the offset, and since the LCD controller on the BigBox
is a completely standard Marlin interface, that’s not really too comfortable to do.
Speaking of the controller, there are two more things that are bugging me about it:
One is, the clickwheel uses every increment between physical clicks as one input step,
something i actually show how to fix in my video about these kind of controllers, and
it makes precisely inputting values more difficult than it needs to be.
And it also has the rotating direction set the opposite way you’d expect.
Easy to fix, but it should be correct right out of the box.
And the other thing is the SD slot, from which it is incredibly hard to get SD cards out.
A pair of pliers can help you out in that regard, but really, the acrylic part should
just have a bigger cutout and i fully expect that a new hardware revision will fix that.
Moving on to the heated bed: Because it is kinda special what E3D are doing there.
Of course it’s got a standard sheet of borosilicate glass on there, clipped to the bed with what
looks like clips from a picture frame - not your standard binder clips, and i think E3D’s
solution works really well here since the clips extend much less above the bed and still
keep the glass plate easily removable.
But the real star here is the heated bed itself, which actually produces more heat towards
the edges of the bed to keep the entire print surface heated more evenly.
If you look at thermal images of a “classic” heated bed with a glass surface, you’ll
see a pretty severe dropoff in temperature towards the edges, so that concept really
makes sense.
And details like these can be found throughout the entire printer.
The “dump bucket” where the hotend is parked, primed and wiped before every print
is one example, the “cable spine” running from the extruder all the way down into the
electronics compartment is another, as well as, thankfully, drag chains, for the X and
Y axis.
The stepper motors for X and Y as well as the extruder are finer 0.9 degree ones, giving
the printer an improved positioning resolution over standard 1.8 degree motors without having
to rely on microstepping.
And there’s a ball-bearing supported spool mount directly integrated into the back of
the printer - which doesn’t work perfectly with every spool, but you can definitely make
it work.
So you might have noticed i didn’t talk about the electronics or linear motion platform
yet - and that’s for a reason.
They’re all not really special.
At times, the BigBox feels like an experiment for how cheaply you can still build a kickass
printer.
The control board, a Geeetech Rumba, is probably the least interesting one you could possibly
pick, since it’s just the ancient RAMBO and an Arduino Mega squashed into a single
board with a few standard Allegro drivers plugged in.
It works, but it's still using the same horrible polyfuses from the RAMPS and questionable
connectors for the supply and heated bed, but it does support up to three extruders
if you plug in an extra stepper driver.
The linear guides are all based on ordinary 8mm rods and LM8UU and the longer LM8LUU - which
aren’t bad and give a lot of bang for your buck, but they’re by far not the stiffest
ones and don’t really fit the “Hi-Spec” tagline.
So in the end, that “value” or “bang for your buck” proposition does work out
for the BigBox.
Sure, i personally would have liked the components to be a bit more high-endish, but that would
definitely have pushed the price up even further as well.
At 750 Great British Pounds plus tax and shipping, the base BigBox Pro offers good value # if
you are willing to stem the 10 to 15 hour assembly yourself.
But once you start throwing on those addons like the acrylic frame, a Simplify 3D license,
the OctoPi kit or even buy the printer assembled, it does start to lose its edge as it's now
competing against machines that are trying to be a bit more of a professional tool than
this one, but then again, with the BigBox, you’re getting an increasingly fully-featured
printer.
And lastly, the BigBox is also going to be fully open source, currently only kickstarter
backers have access to the source files - which are not yet released under a Creative Commons
license, so i can’t even reshare them at the moment.
I guess you’ll have to wait for those until all the kickstarter machines are shipped.
And overall, while the BigBox is probably not the best choice for, like, PLA-only casual
users, it is a very appealing machine for the enthusiast - the printer offers pretty
much everything you could wish for and there’s already a very active community around the
machine, even with just a few handful of them shipped, so the platform itself will only
be getting better.
So that’s it for today, thanks for watching, as always, feel free to leave this video a
thumbs down or thumbs up if you enjoyed it.
Consider subscribing if you haven’t done so already or, to support this channel directly,
even using the Amazon or Ebay affiliate links from the video description for your regular
shopping.
Unfortunately, you can’t buy the BigBox through Amazon yet, so if you want to grab
one, i’ve also put the links to E3D’s shop in there.
See ya, have a good one!