On today's episode I'm gonna take a look at this $99 easythreed x1 printer. $99 is it any
good? Well we'll find out. On today's Filament Friday Filament Friday is
brought to you by these patreon supporters. this is the $99 x1 3d printer
from ez threed. And I got this from banggood.com they sell it for $99 they
gave it to me to do a review and honestly it's got some features that I
like. I don't expect to get a lot from a $99 printer especially when it's made of
plastic and it just kind of looks cheap but it comes mostly assembled. the top
half and the bottom half with the electronics. so you snap this top section
in, tighten two screws and make one electrical connection. And then snap
together their spool holder and it goes on two screws in the back and it's
assembled. now there are full instructions on the SD card and also
they have their own slicer called easyware. it's actually just based on the
cura slicing engine but I like it. It's really easy to use. They do give you some
sample PLA although I ended up using my own spool. they give you a screwdriver to
tighten the two screws and also to help adjust the bed. The bed itself has a
removable magnetic plate and it does have belts at all corners including
the z-axis which makes that first layer kind of squish and it's harder to get a
consistent level bed. it's one drawback. but that's what you get with a $99 printer.
They do give you a single sheet of instructions which are very very limited
again the full instructions are on the SD card but this thing's really good for
leveling the bed. They also give you a power adapter this is what powers the
whole thing. it's a 12 volt two-and-a-half amp adapter and it plugs
into the box. now there's no on/off switch so plugging or unplugging the
power adapter is how you turn it on and off. there is a USB connection and they
give you a USB cable for that. I was able to connect to it through pronterface and
verified it is running Marlin although an old version 1.1.0
So it's pretty old. I think that goes back to 2015. There is a micro
SD card and there is a sample print on the SD card here.
There's no LCD or control knob on this so it's gonna print whatever the newest
file that's on the SD card. That's how it determines what to print
because there's only four controls. there's a home button that only homes
the Z . there's a plus and minus for loading and unloading of filament and
then there's a play button and it's multifunction. you use that button to
start a print, to pause the print, to stop a print and also you hold it for three
seconds and it'll raise the Z ten millimeters. So everything is done just
through these buttons. So it's really really basic. They do offer an x2 version
which has LCD and knob I think it's like thirty dollars more than this so it's
like hundred twenty nine dollars. Everything is based on the date code of
your file. I did take it apart and verify it's got the same setup as an Ender
three. It's got a 1284 for micro controller and it's got 4988 drivers.
There is some form of thermal runaway protection. I tested it and it will shut
off the hot end if it loses track of the temperature so there is some protection
built into the Marlin firmware. I did load up the sample file. it's a cat. it
printed pretty good I mean it didn't fail or nothing but at the end of it
look at the print quality. it's pretty bad. and it did print on a raft and I
know why because this bed it's really difficult to keep it leveled. so next I
decided to try out their slicer easyware and try out my CHEP Cube. so let's
take a look at that. I opened it up from the SD card the first thing you
need to do is select English, then you select your printer, then you select PLA
and it opens to this really cool looking window. It's very clean. You've got an
import, a save, a delete and a slice button. The slice button has two
modes. A button mode with fast standard and optimized in one click, or you
go custom where you get all the Cura settings, well not all of them, but a lot
of the most the important ones. So you can scroll through them here. So now
let's import my CHEP cube. so I click on the import button here, go find it, click
on it, and just select choose and it should land on the bed.
And there it is. Now once it's on the bed I can zoom in, zoom out.
I can scroll this thing around. there's controls down here where I can
look at the top I can look at the side I can look at the flank or I can reset it
back to where it was. If I click on it I can move it around, I can rotate it and I
can actually put a degrees in there, I can scale it and also with the uniform
scale just like Cura. But then it's got floor here and this is where you select
a side and that side will go to the base. That's something that was added to Cura
really late so this is a nice feature. You can set which side you want on
the bed. so now let's slice this and take a look
at it. so I'll click on custom and I'm gonna use just their standard settings
right here. But I did notice it defaults to 180 degrees C. That's something you're
gonna want to change because most filaments need higher temperature. So I
sliced it with their default settings here and it automatically goes to a preview
mode and you can scroll through the layers. This is something you have to
click separately in Cura. And it really does a good job of showing, I mean it's
not perfect, but it does a good job of showing the different layers and how it
looks. Once you got it sliced you're ready to save it to the SD card you have two
options you can just click on save SD card or you can save data which means
you can put it anywhere in your hard drive or you can go find your SD card
and save it to there. So two different ways very similar to what Cura has. so
now we got this, I actually resliced it with a skirt no raft and tried to print
it directly on the bed. Let's look at that. Here's a time-lapse of it printing
and if you watch closely you can see it warped. It lifted right off the bed and
warped. it's not a heated bed so this thing worked terrible. it's really a
worst print than the cat. and if you notice the CHEP is backwards. it's a
mirror image. it's because the y-axis motor is reversed. it's actually moving
in the wrong direction. so then I was ready to just shove this
aside and say it's a piece of crap. I don't recommend it. But then I realized
it's direct drive and when I saw the internal workings it actually traps the
filament similar to way the EZR extruder does a my Ender three. So I
wondered, could it print that really flexible stuff? like ninjaflex?
so I tried it. so I took the same CHEP cube file, printed it without a raft, and
it stuck to the bed really well because that's what this filament does. and it
actually came out a little bit smoother because this filament doesn't give you
those crisp edges. And look at it, its flexible. I can squeeze it. Next I tried
printing the rubber foot for my Ender three. I put this on all my Enders makes
it a little quieter this thing is squishy it printed really well. The base
of it we're a touches the bed is a little bit rough but the rest of it looks
really good. I'm really impressed with how well this thing prints ninjaflex.
This is very handy and there's no stringing in between these feet. On my
Ender three with the EZR I get a little bit string in between the feet.
There's no stringing here. None at all. So I've printed a few more flexible
prints and they're all coming out good. I've never had a single one fail. And
this thing just, I don't know, it just prints flexible so well, and PLA so
average. That to me, it's a great flexible printer. That's what it's good for. And if
you want to use this with kids it makes more sense to have them print flexible
materials because if they printed blocks and then they start throwing blocks at
each other, the PLA is gonna hurt. If you hit yourself with one of these soft ones
it's gonna hurt a lot less. And there's so many other things you could do with
this. Now when I was a kid there were machines to make what they called creepy
crawlies. They're creepy crawly machines are really just a molding machine where
you could print flexible little snakes and lizards. This is like a modern-day
creepy crawly machine. You put some flexible filament in it and you can
print pretty much any flexible you want. And as far as the bed level who cares.
This stuff sticks so well if your beds off a little bit so what. So I decided to
make a creepy crawly. I found this lizard on Thingiverse I printed it out and look
at this. It printed it beautifully. And this thing's totally flexible.
So from that point of view I think this is a fantastic 99 dollar investment. Just
print a ninja flex with it and then a kid could have a ton of fun with this.
And as far as settings, I didn't do any different settings than the PLA. The same
settings to print the PLA as the ninja flex and it worked beautifully. So I
don't have to do anything special. To hold the larger spool, I did make a new
bracket design. Designed this in Tinkercad, printed it on my CR 10, it's too big for
this machine, but it just slides right on locks in place and holds the larger
spool. So I'm sure they'll be better designs in the future as people get
these machines but this is really incredible what this thing can do with
flexibles. So this to me is a modern-day creepy-crawly machine. It's perfect for
kids to make rubberized or flexible toys. If you like what I'm doing here please
subscribe. There's other videos that should be popping up but most of all
stay safe through this tough time we are going through and I'll see you next time
right here at Filament Friday