New Creality Ender 5 pro 3D printer

Ryan Mooney

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Well the boss needed^Wwants a bunch of spinning wheel bobbins, which are surprisingly pricy and kind of tricky to make the old fashioned way (especially as she wanted a bunch that flat pack for storage).

So it turned out to be cheaper to enter the 3D thunderdome than to buy the darn things. So this arrived today, a creality Ender 5 pro, was just around $360 after instant rebate on Amazon. Which for the specs and build area 220x220x300mm nominal.

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Assembly was super easy. Basically install the uprights between the preassembled top and bottom, bolt on the z axis, and level the bed.

First print without tuning anything or.. really knowing anything about what we're doing :rolleyes: looks pretty good except some Shmoo on some overhangs, but the transitions otherwise looks super crisp and look awesome - will certainly serve it's purpose as a strain relief for the bed heater.

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Note that the dangly bits had basically zero support so .. I'm not sure how they were supposed to work (hard to blame the printer there I think). Other than that the print is really crisp looking imho (especially since this was at low res).
 
His is pretty much the exact same size, but chatting with Ryan the other day I was looking at some of the larger Ender printers.

I really like that the table isn't getting slung back and forth on these printers. The less mass being thrown around should workto make a better print.
 
So what slicer software did you go with?

We're starting out with cura latest and seeing how it goes. The usage reports from most users say the modern cura versions are quite good. Our experience is one test print so far so I'm not claiming to have significant experience. The firmware is Marlin but perhaps a bit out of date so that's also on the short list to update.
 
Well this was hiding inside the screwed down plate underneath the thing.

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The switch is intuitively not visible inside the back
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But now it doesn't reboot when I heat the hot end and bed at the same time so that's nice. Really surprised it worked at all.

While I was in there added a bit of grounding to the frame (green wire with black stripe - paint is scraped off underneath the nut for frame contact also scraped the other side of the bolt so the upright had contact). Had to search through my "small nuts" and "really small bolts" containers to find the bolt and nut that fit. Then managed to find crimp connectors in the stash even :bliss:The wire is perhaps one size smaller than I'd like but sufficient and at least the hot bed and rails are grounded (proven by multimeter) now so that seemed like a good idea.

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Belt and suspenders on the grounding. I'd think that with it being screwed the the case, it's at least grounded there, lol.

That gets a bit more important when dealing with the k40 lasers, as some of those need to be grounded, but aren't, and with the way they step up the voltage for the tube, well, youch!
 
Yeah I was mostly thinking this might help keep transient noise in the steppers to a minimum. Not that a little extra grounding ever hurt anything anyway :D

The multimeter confirmed the the critical points had a decent path to ground at this point and they didn't before anyway so I reckon it did something lol.
 
Quick update on what we've been up to mostly focused on mods to the printer itself as I think most of these are things most people would want to do with this printer.

We hooked the printer up to an existing linux box that it was sharing the table with instead of buying an RaspberryPi specifically for it and installed https://octoprint.org/ on that. I think if your generally sitting/living in a different room from the printer, this is a nice-to-have thing. I'm not sure we'd have bothered with this right away but the computer was right there.. just add a USB cable add a few scripts to the computer and boom remote printing support. The alternative is either to have your slicer machine connected or to carry a little SD card back and forth. The SD card works pretty well and we used it for the first couple of prints, but direct printing is kind of nicer.

First was printing strain reliefs:

For the bed heater cables (picture taken from the thingaverse shot because ours is in black so photographs poorly). This seems like a basically required fix because of the voltage there and the general lack of support not having this is a fire hazard.


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Next up was hot end strain relief.. Which keeps the delicate little cables there from twisting back and forth and breaking prematurely. I'd also mostly put this into the required category. There are a bunch of ways to skin this cat but some sort of strain relief here seems pretty much required.

(picture also taken from thingaverse because .. ours is black and you can't see it).
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I also did a bunch of futzing with the cables trying to get them routed happily and we printed a handful of various cable management clips that .. generally seem to work ok. I'm still not super happy with the layout and will likely re-visit it all before to long but it's working for now.

Around this point was a long and tedious set of experimentation with much bed leveling, test prints with slightly different temperatures, retraction settings, etc.. etc.. to try to get PETG to work well. PETG is apparently quite a bit trickier than PLA to get to print well but we wanted it for the next project because it's also stiffer and won't sag as much if it gets warm.

Next was under bed supports.. These take about 9 hours.. each .. and the first ones we printed snapped under light pressure when installing them. Some adjustment of print head temperature and another round of destroyed benchies and we got it dialed in better and the next ones seem to hold up pretty well (also the second pass we used a remix linked below that added some more material to the fragile part so that likely helped). Brent's 5 Plus doesn't need these because he has 2 Z axis supports, but the 5 Pro is cantilevered off of one so the far end droops a bit with very much weight at all, so imho these are mostly required. These were, as noted above, printed with PETG (actually so was the hot end relief but the timing complicated).

Attempt one: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3661405
Attempt two (succes): https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4128533

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We also replaced some of the sleeve fans with ball bearing fans, this proved to not be necessary and could have been avoided if I'd experimented more. That required a bit of soldering but pretty simple. There was an annoying high pitched fan whine that persisted across fan upgrade. Some further experimentation showed that this was due to the airflow of the fan across the fan shroud on the hot end. Interestingly Brents setup with the 5 Plus doesn't have this noise and his setup appears the same from the pictures. I definitively isolated it to the fan being close to the shroud, so to fix it I just snipped the fan guard out of the way and voila noise gone. I'm not recommending anyone remove safety devices of course :D Current plan is to add a wire mesh fan cover over the front for now (digs through parts box..) eventually I suspect we'll follow Brent in upgrading the whole hot end.. but that'll likely be a bit out.

We've also printed a few tool holders, and a cover for the back of the control panel which had a bunch of electronics sort of hanging out in the breeze.

The boss also found a few sheets of plexi for $5 at the local rebuild it so I'm looking at an enclosure. I think that'll help some with the more fussy material like PETG and the fussier PLA stuff as it'll make the temperature swings around the model a lot less. We've noticed a bit of corner lifting in a few cases which this will likely solve. That will, of course, require re-thinking some of the spool setup and .. some other things.

At this point I'm still pretty convinced that 3D printers are good devices for spending your time leveling 3D printers so you can print more parts for the 3D printers.
 
Even though these upgrades are a bit annoying sometimes, the cost of doing them still, by far, out weighs the cost of an expensive printer.

At this point I'm mildly dubious and the value of the 5 pro vs the regular 5 though. Basically the pro gets you a few upgrades that you'd want to do anyway at a reasonable discount over buying them from creality after the fact. One of the big ones is a slightly upgraded board with "silent" stepper drivers. They are a lot quieter and smoother than the stock drivers, but it's still an 8 bit board and you can get a 32 bit third party for just a bit more which would enable you to put a firmware with more capability in it easier (i.e you wouldn't have to strip out some features to enable others).

OTOH the pro let's you hit the ground running a wee bit easier and more pleasantly when you're a complete newbie so that does add some value. So I think it depends a bit on where you are starting from and how much low level tweaking you want to do. Everything we've done so far has been real easy, and mostly used precanned plans and pieces. Replacing more fundamental parts requires a bit more knowledge about both what you're doing and what your expectations should be than I suspect a lot of beginners have (myself included).

There's also the problem that as tinkerers done of us tend to keep poking at the thing when more reasonable people would freely admit that "you know it works pretty darn good right now' and just get to making the stuff they made it for.

I'm currently working with loml to overcomplicate the design of the spinning wheel bobbins she got the thing to make originally. The problem there is, of course, high expectations and standards so we're adding a few features like press in bushings to make them work smoother than it looks like we can get with pla or even petg (nylon might be another story.. but that's slightly stymied by the addition of some wood and brass pla plus to also make them pretty... Which of course necessitates another printer upgrade.. microswiss hard coated extruder nozzle on its way).
 
At this point I'm mildly dubious and the value of the 5 pro vs the regular 5 though. Basically the pro gets you a few upgrades that you'd want to do anyway at a reasonable discount over buying them from creality after the fact. One of the big ones is a slightly upgraded board with "silent" stepper drivers. They are a lot quieter and smoother than the stock drivers, but it's still an 8 bit board and you can get a 32 bit third party for just a bit more which would enable you to put a firmware with more capability in it easier (i.e you wouldn't have to strip out some features to enable others).

OTOH the pro let's you hit the ground running a wee bit easier and more pleasantly when you're a complete newbie so that does add some value. So I think it depends a bit on where you are starting from and how much low level tweaking you want to do. Everything we've done so far has been real easy, and mostly used precanned plans and pieces. Replacing more fundamental parts requires a bit more knowledge about both what you're doing and what your expectations should be than I suspect a lot of beginners have (myself included).

There's also the problem that as tinkerers done of us tend to keep poking at the thing when more reasonable people would freely admit that "you know it works pretty darn good right now' and just get to making the stuff they made it for.

I'm currently working with loml to overcomplicate the design of the spinning wheel bobbins she got the thing to make originally. The problem there is, of course, high expectations and standards so we're adding a few features like press in bushings to make them work smoother than it looks like we can get with pla or even petg (nylon might be another story.. but that's slightly stymied by the addition of some wood and brass pla plus to also make them pretty... Which of course necessitates another printer upgrade.. microswiss hard coated extruder nozzle on its way).

Well, I was more referring to cost of a Lutzbot TAZ or similar, which are in the $2200 US range. ;) I've intentionally stayed ignorantly dumb to what advantages those have over what I have. I am watching both your and Brents upgrades. I'm leaning towards a pro version when I upgrade, which will mostly be for a larger print bed, but the option to enclose the printer is appealing.
 
The 5+ is the one with the larger bed. The pro is about the same size as what you've currently got.

I'm really happy with the 5+ and really haven't done much in upgrades to it really. I will be replacing the hotend fans with

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