What you see before you
Is the first bed slinger that runs klipper firmware as stock.
This is the biqu hurakan.
And this is about to get.... interesting.
I didn't mis-speak just then, this is the first klipper bed slinger style printer.
It's actually the second klipper stock printer, it was beaten to that title by the flsun v400.
And we'll talk about that in a moment.
The biqu hurakan is bold, blue and in some ways, a little aggressive looking, it has
the aesthetics of a printer that means business.
It's absolutely not inspired by a car with the same-ish name.
To run over the features...pun not intended, the hurakan is a single screw bowden extruder
based printer with the usual aluminium extrusion and roller wheel configuration.
Functionally above the base, it follows the classic ender 3 design, with the exception
of a few features, the LED lighting which yes, of course you can change the colour of,
and the extruder is metal, which is definitely welcome, and the filament sensor which also
improves the filament path compared to an ender.
Of course you also have the new bed probe which is unlike anything we've seen before,
at least, if you believe the marketing.
Bed tensioners on x and y and a really good PEI surface make up the rest of the top half
of the printer, and also noting that the bed has adjustment wheels with blue springs, presumably
to match the colour scheme although blue springs are normally stiffer than yellow ones, not
that it should hugely matter with auto bed levelling.
That's enough of the top half of the printer, for now, we'll take it apart in a moment.
We need to look at the bottom half next, this is where the good stuff is.
The front of the printer has no less than two memory card slots, but neither of these
do what you probably expect them to.
One of them, fits the micro sd that comes with the printer, contains the linux OS that
runs klipper on the host, which we'll look at in a moment, the other is
Well I'm not entirely sure.
It isn't really fleshed out in the manual, I'm not sure what it's there for.
It's not referred to in the manual, and it's not referred to in the manual for the board
itself either.
I think it's used solely to flash firmware to the MCU itself or that's my best guess,
which is odd, because you could probably do that through the pins internally but we'll
skim over that and just call it the "broadly ignore slot", in fact biqu would have done
well to put these slots at the back or side to avoid confusion because the OS card should
not be removed while the printer is on, just as you wouldn't remove a raspberry pi's card
while it's on.
So while you can add gcode print files to the OS card, I wouldn't recommend it, the
easiest offline way to do that is presumably, because I don't, but as we look at the rear,
there's two USB ports, and according to the manual you can put a usb stick in there with
model files on and print from them.
The other port on the rear of note is the one marked SPI and this is for the adxl - if
that's too many acronyms for you I'll cover it shortly.
On the front of the printer we have the LCD which looks pretty normal, but of course is
controlled by the CB1 raspberry pi type chip on the board rather than what would be the
MCU on marlin printers.
The reason I say this is because this makes it not only configurable on the device if
you're hardcore enough but also I'm afraid to say, at times, laggy.
The menu contains a lot of the usual kinds of options but broadly you won't want to use
it, mainly because of how it occasionally decides to not respond.
It's convenient for some things like setting the z offset but for anything else it's mostly
just a display for print progress and so on.
What you really want to use, is the mainsail web interface.
The more klipper you know, the less you have to rely on the screen, and I'm very inexperienced
at klipper so I'm slowly learning too.
I will say I find the mainsail interface more frustrating on the hurakan than I did on the
flsun v400 because the flsun really had the macros nailed down.
On the v400 we had macros and menus defined for everything and the experience was super
smooth, but on the hurakan the configuration is more basic, so you have to fall back on
at least some klipper knowledge or googling to get the answer you need.
Mainly this struggle revolved around the z offset.
I still don't think I fully understand how the z offset works on this printer.
You can set it in the menu or you can set it and press save on mainsail.
Either there's some bugs around this or I don't fully understand it but I had a fair
bit of trouble getting the printer to retain the correct z offset, it was behaving so strangely
I couldn't really figure out what it was doing.
A teething issue I think.
Speaking of teething issues, the reason this review is so much later than it usually would
be for a new printer, because I've had it around for a while, I had a huge problem with
the machine when it first arrived.
It would stop mid print on around 1 in 5 prints, with what appeared to be a timing error.
Of course this was a huge concern, as you can imagine, but to cut a long story short
I did what I always did and worked with bigtreetech to solve it.
It was probably fixed within about 3 weeks I think, by an OS update, I didn't really
track the timeline, but it meant I had to do a LOT of print testing after that before
I could be sure the problem has gone away, because how can you be sure a problem that
happens maybe once every 3 days has gone, without trying to reproduce it for a couple
weeks at minimum.
So that was a story, anyway I guess it shows that biqu do fix problems, sure it was a pretty
big problem that I think all reviewers may have been having by the look of it, but they
did fix it, and I hope they might sort out the laggy screen in time too.
Anyway moving past that minor rant.
It's time to open this thing up I think, after all this surely contains things we've never
seen before.
including a board pinout diagram on the back of the metal case.
I'm impressed.
Biqu absolutely didn't need to do this, but they did it, and that is cool.
I would say an easter egg for those of us who go inside the printer, but I find it hard
to imagine you'd buy a printer like this and never open it up, I guess they know that.
inside we have the manta which is the ...I think maybe the successor to the octopus?
I'm not sure?
But it's the relatively new board from Bigtreetech that supports the pi compute module CM4 or
the CB1 which is their own version, as the manual points out in a hilariously blunt style...the
CM4 is perpetually out of stock.
The specs are also in the manual, this is by the way the manual for the manta board,
not the hurakan itself, I'll link this below but it's not hard to find, the MCU which is
the bit that does the actual stepper control and stuff is an STM32, this is physically
attached to the board, and the CM1 contains the ARM chip which is the more powerful half
that controls the klipper host and the mainsail stuff and essentially is a full linux environment
on that tiny thing there.
And yeah you could run other stuff on there if you wanted like home automation, I should
do that for a laugh at some point.
You can see that there are ferrules on the incoming mains wires but not on the bed heater
wires, these are sadly tinned.
I think if you get this printer you'd want to tin those.
I have had a few people ask why this is important, here's why, the infrared camera shows the
wires getting...well, let's not get too excited, warm - not hot - barely above body temperature
in fact in use.
But the problem with solder is its low melting point so it would be better if the wires were
bare copper, as I understand it the solder can kind of creep which leads to the possibility
of the screw terminals becoming loose which leads to the heat becoming significantly higher.
Here's more cool IR footage though.
In fact while we're doing the IR thing, let's look at the bed.
The bed has two heat zones which is not the first time this has been done, but it's relatively
unheard of.
The switch at the back of the bed turns the outer zone on and off, with both LEDs on you
can see the whole bed is on, well you can't see, but...with the IR camera, you can see.
This is with the whole bed on, and this, is with the center bit on.
The downside to this if I show you a few images with the range set correctly, you can see
the bed temperature is not terribly uniform.
I think it's workable, but for very large models you might suffer.
In real terms I didn't notice any problems here and this is because mainly the PEI bed
is very, very good at sticking, it's a different colour to usual which I think is just from
the base steel being black but it also performs way better than any other PEI sheet I've had
before.
We should also look inside the toolhead, seems weird calling it that, its just a hotend on
wheels after all, it's not too tricky to open and it is a pretty chunky looking heatsink
.... with a custom heat block there.
All looks quite fancy for a bowden.
Worth noting that it appears to be PTFE lined and the max temperature of 260 is...hmm...it
has the blue tubing but I wouldn't personally go over 240 with this one.
Dual cooling fans and a pretty neat heatsink fan make this quite a nice setup.
Notice the two surface mount LEDs too.
Moving on to print quality and print speed, they kind of go hand in hand.
I think first and foremost it is really hard to make determinations of print quality on
a printer like this, not least because it's running klipper, that didn't stop me with
the v400 after all, but mainly because so much of the tuning is left to the user.
Sure enough, you can assemble it and start printing, but at what speed?
With what profile?
At the time of review I had to use the cura profile for the BQ1 which isn't even the hurakan,
and while I'm sure some tuned profiles will follow, it felt like that was not fast enough
or taking advantage of the klipperness of the printer.
Biqu included in my review printer the ADXL add on, which I believe is an optional extra
for people who are buying the printer, this allows you to do that thing known as input
shaping which is also known as the more parseable "resonance compensation".
The manual goes into how to do this and it's pretty simple to follow along, you attach
it to the x axis and it wiggles the printer around a bit, you then attach it to the bed
and it wiggles around a bit.
You store both these values and it supposedly prints better.
Optionally, if you want to see some fancy graphs, you can refer to the klipper documentation
and run the commands they specify and it will generate two images that you have to use your
linux knowledge to get off the CB1 board by ssh file transfer.
I think these make sense?
Do they make sense?
The least wiggly line I think is a model of the input shaping algorithm it chose to use,
at least.
Either way it wouldn't be right not to have a before and after and of course I do.
I think this is pretty profound actually.
So it kind of is evident that you shouldn't really buy this machine without the optional
ADXL unless you already have one with the right plug on it.
This review has gone on long enough so I want to wrap it up I think, there is a LOT more
I could have covered but I'm not into long reviews, I guess they might end up in other
videos in the future.
So what do I think?
Pfff this is really hard to make a call on.
This is a machine for tinkerers for sure, in my opinion.
A totally new to 3d printing user might be able to deal with it just fine, if they have
linux knowledge and I think that's one of the strange things here, normally when recommending
a 3d printer you might say "if you've had x years of 3d printing knowledge" or some
such, but in this case, 10 years of operating marlin based printers is only going to get
you so far if you don't know basic linux commands.
This is a machine for the software developer regardless of 3d printing experience, or a
machine for someone who wants to get into klipper but doesn't want to have to actually
install it, it's a machine for someone who has been eyeing up the manta boards and thinking
"that would be cool but I don't want to have to mod my own printer".
I think it's priced well for this kind of user.
And of course it's designed to be upgraded and modded and that is also why it's aimed
at these kinds of users, if you don't like the bowden, and honestly who does like bowden,
then you can plan an upgrade to a direct drive like biqu's h2 thingy, which honestly is almost
a no brainer upgrade, I will probably do it myself at some point.
So there you go, what do you think, is the hurakan something you would consider?
Let me know in the comments.
And I will see you next time for something equally klippery.
Maybe.
Thank you for watching.