By now, I have experience with both (Duet more than Bambu). My opinion is this: Bambu Labs have identified the key areas to innovate where an FDM 3D printer has to be really, really good to make an overall good product.

• motion system that is not overengineered (Raise) nor underengineered (Ultimaker), focus on lightness, with intelligently engineered, custom injection molded parts.
• very powerful extrusion system (ultra fast ceramic heater, short filament path, light weight)
• hype-worthy features: the print speed that results from the above, and multicolor printing that really works due to the AMS which is cheaply made but also rather well engineered from a functional PoV. The Lidar is innovative for sure, I find myself not using it too often.

aside from that, they just made some smart decisions/choices in terms of which slicer(s) to fork, which build plate system to use, etc. And they seem to have a lot of experience in UI/UX which shows itself in the touchscreen interface, unboxing/setting up experience, extensive documentation.

All in all I'd say the printers live up to the hype for a great part, as Frederick says. They definitely didn't do themselves a favor with the online/cloud first approach, which albeit handy when you want to remotely access your printer, is still a nuisance first for me as a commercial user (my IT has great trouble integrating the printer(s) into our network, obviously using the cloud servers is out of the question, and they don't have ethernet). They are expanding on the "LAN only" mode which should have been perfected first, so I think they are listening to the community.

For Duet to "perform on par" IMO it doesn't even take too much, the features are mostly there - it's just a task to perfectly tune them to a specific set of hardware, which would also include programming a lot of macros and integrating a lot of sensors. I'd go a step further and say that with the CAN ecosystem including closed loop drivers and such, Duet has the better foundation to build a bigger and more powerful, industry-ready Bambu competitor. The thing I see myself envying most in other systems is a sleek, polished and functional touch UI such as the Bambu's or (from the looks of it) KlipperScreen.

Just my 0,02$!

I've acutally written my master's thesis about designing and building a HT printer. In my case, HT refers to a build chamber temperature of about 160-200 °C and nozzle temperatures of 350-450 °C.

The main challenge was in fact to design a motion system that would either withstand the heat or be excluded from the heated and isolated build chamber. I chose igus drylin in a stainless version with HT capable gliding foils, as well as high pitch spindles with nuts from the same polymer (I work at igus and did my master's there, if someone wants to look at the design, do so here). In this case, the linear rails are kept in the build chamber while the spindles protrude through the isolation to the outside, where they are driven by the steppers.

Doing so allowed me to bypass the Stratasys patent which seemed to be the sensible thing at the time.
If I were to design one such printer again, I would change a few things over the last design (aside from general considerations like accessibility and manufacturability). Most notably I would consider changing to a belt-driven, maybe coreXY system that is isolated by bellows as suggested before. A design that incorporates this is shown here.

In contrast to some who commented before, I'm very much of the opinion that the higher the chamber temperature, the better. While you can certainly produce some nice parts at 70 °C (at which temperature most available belts start to go out) sneaking up to Tg of the polymer is ideal and will allow to freely print parts of any shape without problems. And while for most use cases, materials like PA and PC (natural or filled) will do the trick, if you want to process materials like Ultem or PEEK (that have not been highly altered to be suited for lesser temperatures), you need that 160-200 °C chamber temperature at least.

If it doesn't become clear from this, IMO it's not the main challenge to reach the required nozzle temps. A 60 W heater, maybe water cooling for the hotend and a berd-air system for part cooling (or pressurized air for both, which is available in most workshops) does the trick. In my setup I'm running an E3D setup with the standard heater cartridge. The standard temperature sensor cartridges are garbage in this application and have been replaced by a high quality, braided-line version.

Hi,

you're putting a lot of torque on the bearing blocks, which leads to a lot of binding (what you call "chattering"). This might work with stiff ball bearings, which still move under high load, but not with gliding bearings such as igus. The forces in the bearing surface become too high to allow a smooth gliding motion.

To eliminate the torque on the bearing block, either move the linear rail to the center of the bed's side (which would have been the sensible thing to do in the first place), or add another bearing block per rail that is spaced to the original one at least half of the distance between rail and the bed's center of gravity.

igus calls this the "2:1 rule", check out this document: https://www.igus.de/_wpck/pdf/global/2zu1Regel.pdf

HTH, Niklas

Good day,

IMO the duet 3 6HC is overkill if you're not planning on going super fast or high accelerations (to the like of Vez3D etc on youtube)

I've done the Voron 2.4 with a duet 3 mini + 2x expansion, as well as the 1LC toolboard which simplifies wiring the gantry a lot. I'm moving the print head around at up to 300 m/s comfortably (haven't tested for more).

Anyway, the 1LC toolboard is a recommendation no matter what main board you get

Hi,

I've used igus chainflex CF884.006 which packs the following cores into one cable of about 9 mm diameter:
3 pairs of 0,14 mm^2 twisted pair sensor wires (shielded)
4 wires of 0,14 mm^2 (for fans, LEDs)
4 wires of 0,22 mm^2 (for 1 stepper)
2 wires of 0,5 mm^2 (for 1 heater element)

there is another shield around the whole package. It's made for energy chains, so it allows for quite tight radii and is flexible enough so it won't break. I fit a print head with direct drive, heater, sensor, 2 fans and a bltouch (and even an optical endstop) with this cable, I can see if I can still find the according diagram later at home.

Best regards, Niklas

Hi all,

I've now equipped a few printers with Duet hardware, and lately with all the CAN expansions for tool boards and single (bigger) motor drivers, I've found that I'm using the actual main board connectors less and less.

Example: bigger FFF printer with NEMA 23 for motion all around, it might use a 3HC expansion for X,Y,Z and 1LC Toolboard, or even an IDEX with three 1HCL for XYU and a 3HC for 2-3 Z drives, as well as 2 1LC toolboards - there is very little else that needs to be connected to the main board, maybe some temp sensors and small mosfets for switching PSU relais or bed heater SSRs.

So wouldn't it be feasible to have a "hat" for the Pi that acts as the Duet Main board but only has 5V and CAN outputs, maybe a few other connections that might not be included with one of the expansions; this concept would make wiring much simpler in general, as mostly there only has to be CAN + Power. Think of otherwise selecting the matching cable for each heater/sensor/motor/... and the matching cable chain which is probably a must for machines of this size.

Benefits would include a cheaper main board without unused stepper drivers, SD slot etc., and it could even be mounted externally, for example within the "monitor and UI box" that can be seen on many bigger CNC machines or SLS printers. Writing all of this up I realize that this would mostly appeal to printer OEMs that have to look out for cost at scale, versus the hobbyist who can afford to spend some extra bucks on unused stepper drivers etc.

Thoughts?

best regards, Niklas

I've designed a mount that integrates the 1LC toolboard to the new Stealthburner print head. I can share it however it is based on the pre-release STL models, and it is possibly flawed in that it doesn't support the tooboard on all four mounting locations and might allow for some vibration which crucially can throw off the accelerometer for tuning input shaping. Aside from that it's tidy and works well.

@giblte535 did you watch some ThisOldTony during the last week?

Pressure Advance is a "mechanism" to better match the actual extrusion output to the output requested by the control, by means of anticipating the upcoming movements and changing the current extrusion speed before a change in flow is actually requested by the gcode (I hope I'm not totally mangling the actual mathematical model that is working under the hood to calculate PA).

in short, it's not so much a mechanism to keep extrusion constant, but to better match the actual output to the requested/calculated output.

If the extrusion output is varying, e.g. because of Arachne's variable line width, pressure advance should work just the same. I personally haven't had any unexpected results in the combination of both, however there might be edge cases where they might counteract.

also:
in my (personal) opinion, drylin is in fact a very good choice for a quiet machine. If done right as per my above recommendations, that is. The often advertised fact of its rust- and dust-proofness and lack of lubrication make it very easy to maintain, keep clean and in general enjoy.

Hi @cosmowave,

two things to check:
(both points are based on my memory, default behaviour might have changed but the solutions should still apply)

• Cura is not very smart when it comes to multitool printing, it has "default extruders" for many features such as support, adhesion etc., and there might be some shady rules on which it selects the extruder - e.g. using the material with the "lowest adhesion tendency" as support, which is not even a setting that you can influence in Cura itself but rather in the material's .xml file. It's an Ultimaker thing but it makes life harder for the rest of us. Long story short, enter "extruder" in the settings' search bar and check that all extruders are set to the right tool. Often times I have the wrong extruder selected for "adhesion", so for the skirt of the print it selects another tool first before moving to the correct one.
• Cura also inserts some default Gcode aside from the "Start G-Code" into the beginning of the G-Code file, and there might be a "T0" in there just because. I have a "T{initial_extruder_nr}" as the last item of my Toolchanger's Start G-Code that can be set in the printer's settings panel. No custom G-Code for each of the tools.

hope this helps,

best regards, Niklas

@DocTrucker if you haven't started to migrate to Cura, I suggest you don't. IMO they're moving forward implementing useless and Ultimaker-centered features (which is their right of course) such as the multi-material-blending stuff, while neglecting the very real usability and feature weaknesses such as slow and laggy interface or the inability to place seams in any way that is logical and/or aesthetic.

OrcaSlicer was mentioned as the open source project that tries to find the best in Prusaslicer and Bambu Studio (which in turn is derived from Prusaslicer and incorporates some Cura features, such as an alternative slicing engine). It's more aimed towards open source printers and tinkerers such as ourselves, and it seems to be the spititual successor to Superslicer which also seems to have been all but abandoned. I've had very good results with little tweaking from OrcaSlicer.

best, Niklas

By now, I have experience with both (Duet more than Bambu). My opinion is this: Bambu Labs have identified the key areas to innovate where an FDM 3D printer has to be really, really good to make an overall good product.

• motion system that is not overengineered (Raise) nor underengineered (Ultimaker), focus on lightness, with intelligently engineered, custom injection molded parts.
• very powerful extrusion system (ultra fast ceramic heater, short filament path, light weight)
• hype-worthy features: the print speed that results from the above, and multicolor printing that really works due to the AMS which is cheaply made but also rather well engineered from a functional PoV. The Lidar is innovative for sure, I find myself not using it too often.

aside from that, they just made some smart decisions/choices in terms of which slicer(s) to fork, which build plate system to use, etc. And they seem to have a lot of experience in UI/UX which shows itself in the touchscreen interface, unboxing/setting up experience, extensive documentation.

All in all I'd say the printers live up to the hype for a great part, as Frederick says. They definitely didn't do themselves a favor with the online/cloud first approach, which albeit handy when you want to remotely access your printer, is still a nuisance first for me as a commercial user (my IT has great trouble integrating the printer(s) into our network, obviously using the cloud servers is out of the question, and they don't have ethernet). They are expanding on the "LAN only" mode which should have been perfected first, so I think they are listening to the community.

For Duet to "perform on par" IMO it doesn't even take too much, the features are mostly there - it's just a task to perfectly tune them to a specific set of hardware, which would also include programming a lot of macros and integrating a lot of sensors. I'd go a step further and say that with the CAN ecosystem including closed loop drivers and such, Duet has the better foundation to build a bigger and more powerful, industry-ready Bambu competitor. The thing I see myself envying most in other systems is a sleek, polished and functional touch UI such as the Bambu's or (from the looks of it) KlipperScreen.

Just my 0,02$!

I'm just going to leave this here, stumbled upon it a few days ago. Magnets!

Thank both of you;

@droftarts good call about the iap4e.bin, this fixed my problem.
It seems a bit counterintuitive that to upgrade to 3.0, the iap.bin from 2.05.1 is needed, and the same goes for the update from 3.0 to 3.3 - this might be worth mentioning in the firmware update section in the docs where the different jumps in firmware version are described. It does mention to not just rename a file () but it says that each version comes with the matching file, which seems a bit twisted.

best regards, Niklas

Hi all,

I'm trying to update my E3D Toolchanger's firmware after all, it hasn't been touched since the printer was assembled - never touch a running system - but since I was changing some hardware components around and am also missing some newer firmware features I'd tought I'd give it a go.
I'm already familiar with RRF3.x from other machines and aware of the necessary config changes.

I was following the guide on docs.duet3d.com but the firmware update is stuck pretty soon in the process.
With my first try, having uploaded all bin files from the 3.0 release to the /sys folder, it was giving me the obvious "iap4e.bin missing" error. I renamed the file accordingly and uploaded it separately. Then the update process would start when (re-)uploading firmware files, but never finish - the board will quickly issue a reset and start up again to no avail. Starting the update process manually with M997 S0:2 also results in the same.

I've noticed that the M122 status says "watchdog" as the cause for reset during the update, and I've not been able to find anything on this on the forum. Can anyone give me some pointers?

M122
=== Diagnostics ===
RepRapFirmware for Duet 2 WiFi/Ethernet version 2.05.1 running on Duet Ethernet 1.02 or later + DueX5
Board ID: 0JD0M-9P6M2-NWNS0-7JKD2-3SS6K-TB1ZJ
Used output buffers: 3 of 24 (15 max)
=== RTOS ===
Static ram: 25712
Dynamic ram: 94372 of which 0 recycled
Exception stack ram used: 600
Never used ram: 10388
Tasks: NETWORK(ready,676) HEAT(blocked,1232) DUEX(suspended,160) MAIN(running,3736) IDLE(ready,160)
Owned mutexes:
=== Platform ===
Last reset 00:00:27 ago, cause: watchdog
Last software reset at 2023-07-05 15:57, reason: User, spinning module GCodes, available RAM 10468 bytes (slot 2)
Software reset code 0x0003 HFSR 0x00000000 CFSR 0x00000000 ICSR 0x0441f000 BFAR 0xe000ed38 SP 0xffffffff Task 0x4e49414d
Error status: 0
Free file entries: 10
SD card 0 detected, interface speed: 20.0MBytes/sec
SD card longest block write time: 0.0ms, max retries 0
MCU temperature: min 39.3, current 40.5, max 40.7
Supply voltage: min 24.3, current 24.4, max 24.5, under voltage events: 0, over voltage events: 0, power good: yes
Driver 0: standstill, SG min/max 0/1023
Driver 1: standstill, SG min/max 0/1023
Driver 2: standstill, SG min/max 0/241
Driver 3: standstill, SG min/max not available
Driver 4: standstill, SG min/max not available
Driver 5: standstill, SG min/max not available
Driver 6: standstill, SG min/max not available
Driver 7: standstill, SG min/max 33/443
Driver 8: standstill, SG min/max 19/1023
Driver 9: standstill, SG min/max 11/1023
Date/time: 2023-07-05 15:58:19
Cache data hit count 44605894
Slowest loop: 1.48ms; fastest: 0.07ms
I2C nak errors 0, send timeouts 0, receive timeouts 0, finishTimeouts 0, resets 0
=== Move ===
Hiccups: 0, FreeDm: 160, MinFreeDm: 156, MaxWait: 502ms
Bed compensation in use: none, comp offset 0.000
=== DDARing ===
Scheduled moves: 23, completed moves: 23, StepErrors: 0, LaErrors: 0, Underruns: 0, 0
=== Heat ===
Bed heaters = 0 -1 -1 -1, chamberHeaters = -1 -1
=== GCodes ===
Segments left: 0
Stack records: 4 allocated, 0 in use
Movement lock held by null
http is idle in state(s) 0
telnet is idle in state(s) 0
file is idle in state(s) 0
serial is idle in state(s) 0
aux is idle in state(s) 0
daemon is idle in state(s) 0
queue is idle in state(s) 0
autopause is idle in state(s) 0
Code queue is empty.
=== Network ===
Slowest loop: 51.57ms; fastest: 0.02ms
Responder states: HTTP(0) HTTP(0) HTTP(0) HTTP(0) FTP(0) Telnet(0) Telnet(0)
HTTP sessions: 1 of 8
Interface state 5, link 100Mbps full duplex

Thanks, best regards
Niklas

@dc42 thank you, those are some good pointers. I guess I'll leave it at that (right now I have it set at separate moves for each axis).

@dc42 I realise I'm reviving quite an old thread, but my question is closely related so I'd like to add it here:
On my setup (IDEX in dual markforged configuration, e.g. all gantry motors have to move for most all X/Y/U moves, separate endstops for each axis), when comissioning a

G1 H1 X-1000 Y-1000 U1000

homing move, all movement halts when the first endstop is reached, meaning that the other axes don't finish their moves. Is this normal with this kinematic setup or has something changed since the above remarks about homing all axes at once? My setup is a 5+ mini and 3HC with FW 3.5b2.
Thank you for your time.

best, Niklas

@droftarts Hi Ian, thanks for your remarks and for updating the documentation.

I was trying to make a point that I was in no way referring to the BL-Touch (clone) that Creality sells, but rather to "their own" product that is the CR-Touch. As far as I can tell, they have been consistent (however nonsensical) within the range of this specific product in terms of the wiring, e.g. my at least one year old, broken one that seems to have been version "AL T01" had the same wiring supplied as the one I bought last week, e.g. "AL T04". But yeah, it seems the safest way to ensure the order of the pinout is in fact to measure the both GND locations.

best, Niklas

Hi all,

I wanted to share my experience in connecting and configuring the Creality CR-Touch Z-Probe. There is some information here and there in various threads and the docs, but I felt a complete and comprehensive guide was missing (existing threads are help posts by users because they couldn't make it work, and then they just post "oh yeah I made it work" when someone asks and don't say how). I also want to provide some guidance since I destroyed my first CR-Touch due to switched wires which can be avoided. I thought it worth the effort to write up this little guide as the CR-Touch seems to be a more sturdy and precise alternative to the original BL-Touch probe.

(Disclaimer: this only applies to the CR-Touch Probe by Creality and their supplied cable connectors etc., I won't be responsible for any damage that might occur. My working setup is with the "Model AL T04" version of the CR-Touch, as printed on the probe)

There are some pointers in the docs as to the pinout. Notably there seem to have been different versions of the BL-Touch Z-Probe in a Creality version with varying pinout, but there is no explicit mention of the CR-Touch by Creality themselves. Maybe this can be added after this @T3P3Tony

I've started out by measuring which cables would be the ground connection, since there seem to be two (one for the servo output, one for the sensor input). On the CR-Touch cable, the White and Red wire are the GND connections and can be combined into one crimp when pinning the connector (contrary to a user's statement in one of the aforementioned threads). As mentioned in the docs, Black is 5V+, Yellow is the servo control input, and Blue is the sensor output.

Important: don't mix the red and blue (GND and sensor output), since it will probably short out and destroy the measuring circuit for the optical sensor. In my case, this happened while the probe was still operable with M401/M402, but didn't put out any reading anymore. It also made the toolboard reset itself but luckily didn't damage it. I measured for continuity between the white and red cable to make sure these hold the same GND potential.

I wired the probe to the IO0 port of the 1LC Toolboard, I presume it must work the same if wired to the mainboard directly. I took the liberty to modify the 1LC wiring diagram to make it extra clear:

my shortened and pinned-for-duet connector cable:

as installed on my print head:

As per the configuration, I did it like described in the docs:
from config.g

M950 S0 C"121.io0.out"   ; 121 is my toolboard CAN ID
M558 P9 C"121.io0.in" H5 F120 T6000
G31 P500 X0 Y31 Z1.18   ; since the pin protrudes past the nozzle, the trigger height is positive

plus the deployprobe.g and retractprobe.g macros in the /sys folder.
from here on out, the deployment of the probe is like described for the BL-Touch in the docs.

hope this will help one or two people that might find themselves in the position I was in two days ago.

best, Niklas