#neptune4pro
#3d_print
#klipper
#firmware
#elegoo

Ok here is the issue, yesterday I updated the firmware on the printer and the screen.

Now it's locked in this error loop.

Does anyone have an idea how to correct it besides flattening it to factory stock.

Any help is good help.

I Gave Up My 3D Printer

Long-time readers of the blog might remember that a few years ago I bought a Neptune 4 Pro. This was back when we lived in London, I had a bit more spare time on my hands – as most of my job involved talking more than coding – and I was playing around with a few electronics projects, for which a 3D printer is a great companion.

Things have changed, I have less time to dedicate to these particular hobbies, my work became a lot more coding-heavy, and between the overall existential dread of the world, and the general race to throw expertise out in favour of LLMs is not a great situation to live in to have the energy to spend on extracurricula.

And in addition to that, turns out the Neptune 4 Pro, which was a good tool back in London in an overly dry apartment where humidity needed to be consistently added, didn’t quite have the same appeal in the East of England, where humidity particularly in spring and autumn is quite reasonable. And similarly, moving the printer to a room where I’m not spending all my time, and thus has often an overall lower temperature, turned out to complicate things.

While I did already buy a filament dryer back in London, as some filament arrives just horribly humid to begin with, figuring out a way to print directly out of that turned out to be a quest in and by itself. I spent days toying with different pivot points and pulleys to have a working filament guide straight out of the dryer into the printer, to no avail. And that was after I decided to take on the common advice of upgrading the springs to silicon spacers, and listened to Functional Print Friday’s advice about a different Neptune 4 variant (the Max) and have it warm up the bed and redo the calibration after every print.

Now, these are all weak points of the particular printer I had, in the situation I am in — none of those are a reason to say that 3D printing isn’t feasible, or useful, or fun. But they are part of the reason why I decided that I don’t need a 3D printer, and I’m unlikely going to get another one in the short to medium term, much as I had my eyes on the Bambulab H2C, or the Snapmaker U1. Things might change in the future, obviously.

The reason why I’m even writing about this at all, is that I have not seen before any write up of people who gave up on 3D printing. When you look at YouTube you see a lot of people including 3D printing in their processes, or that decide that one model is better than another, but you’d have to look explicitly to find a video of a creator going “I no longer use a 3D printer” — they’re creators, there’s little incentive to even say that!

And I think that it’s worth for people to know that there are people giving up. And indeed, 3D printing might just not be for everyone, despite some of the 3D printing enthusiasts that have been trying to convince everyone that the world is moving towards a direction in which 3D printers are so ubiquitous that you are more likely to print your own objects than buy them from AmazExpress.

Before deciding to get rid of the printer, I went and looked back on what I did print with it in the few years I have owned it. There’s obviously been a long list of calibration prints, which is a given for the type of printer I ended up buying. And there’s been the number of prototype for projects I’ve been working for, which were the original reason for me to buy it in the first place. But the vast majority of the material and runtime for the printer has been spent on Gridfinity boxes.

For those who are not into 3D printing that much, Gridfinity was the first large-mindshare standard for grid-based organization objects. Mostly, but not exclusively, containers. It might sound grander than it effectively is, but the idea is that it provides a blueprint around which you can design compatible interlocking bins, holders, and other “building blocks.”

It’s an interesting idea overall, and the grid layout can be extremely useful. I even designed and published my own bins for a few things I couldn’t find already designed, or for which none of the existing designer could help me with — because of course there’s a number of free, and not free, Gridfinity bin designers nowadays. Just like there are competitors to the original Gridfinity design to cover slightly different needs.

And this is where things get… curious. While I have found Gridfinity bins to be a great way to organize my worktop in may cases, a couple of years after starting I do regret a few things. In particular, because of the many different battery formats I ended up stocking for sensors and buttons, I had printed multiple Gridfinity bins to keep batteries organized: CR2032, CR2570, CR2, etc…

All of those require you to open up the packages and slot the batteries into the printed receptacles, with sufficient gap so that they shouldn’t form a circuit from each other. But as it turns out, most of these end up discharging significantly faster in those bins than in their original blister — which meant I ran through a lot more batteries than I would have liked. I’m not entirely sure how this comes to be, as I don’t think the chemistry or the electrical characteristics are meant to be affected by the blister, but I have compared batteries from the same lot, on our coffee scale — the opened ones lasted just over two months, while the ones straight out of the blister are still in use nearly four months later, which is in line with the expected yearly battery change routine.

This, together with the lack of purchasable Gridfinity-compatible boxes, disenchanted me quite a bit from keep printing bins for things. While I did print a couple of boxes that would fit the bins myself, they’ve been less than stellar, and I did hurt my thumb quite a bit when trying to open one of them after closing it up.

The second largest group of printed items, have been another usual story for 3D printers: tat. A lot of it, for Christmas, for Halloween, just for the sake of it… I have not bothered with fidget toys, or articulated prints, or silk and multi-colour prints, but it’s not like those are not already flooding the stalls of local fairs and arts and craft events — which honestly saddens me, because I have yet to see a 3D printing booth at one of those peddling their own designs, most of them are the same set of toys you can find on Printables or Thingiverse, with the only value proposition of not requiring you to own a 3D printer in the first place.

Now that does not mean that there has been no utility out of owning a 3D printer, for me — a few of the designs I published I’m still using — including the replacement plug for the IKEA coat rack, which I ended up finding (obviously) a couple of days after printing my own replacement. But even those are mostly excuses. The most interesting design work I did was the inserts for Everyone Else Thinks This Game Is Awesome, but even that feels like a contrived reason to own a 3D printer, and honestly it probably could or should have been done with a laser cutter and some LDF.

Some of my designs were also silly and pointless, thankfully not in particularly dangerous ways, but let me just say I had to learn a lesson about storing whiteboard markers horizontally — and throw out the pointless vertical holder for my desk whiteboard. Whiteboard that I have not used in the new house ever since we moved in either!

In terms of useful prints, I guess the ones I’m still using quite a bit are my blister-busters, which I use to take my metformin pills (diabetes treatment) out of the blisters that they’re sold in, in Europe — I store those in bottles for use at home, because they’re handier, but I understand perfectly well why these are distributed as blisters instead. But that might be a topic for another time.

I have already mentioned above Functional Print Friday – who I used to watch before he gaslit his audience with “I want to spend more time with the family… that’s why I’m doing as many video as before, but half of them will be Patreon-only” – for a while I have considered it to be a possible inspiration to make better use of the 3D printer I had, but it turned out to be a dead end. Most of the functional prints in the last year have been fairly niche (while it was interesting to see how the radon extraction fan worked, and slightly more scary to see how it ended up being re-used for fabrication fumes extraction, it is not something particularly relatable in England), and more and more of those became the realm of a full blown workshop, rather than something useful for an individual.

The last sort-of-interesting project I saw that I could relate to was the tool holder print-in-place, and even that requires a 3D printer capable of dual-material (not just dual-colour, since it requires printing TPU with PLA supports), and the H2D Combo starts at a whopping £1449 at the time of writing definitely not the realm of personal hobbyist printer at that point.

This reminds me I need, one of these days, to write up about a trend that I noticed already: many of the widely viewed YouTubers are US-based for practicalities that go beyond the universality of the English language: there’s no way that you would be able to keep so much of a workshop around in a home in England, even owning it, so either you have the capital to rent a commercial unit, or you’ll always end up being in a cramped up space and have to move things in and out of storage units, like Techmoan appears to.

What I want to say with all this is that 3D printers are definitely cool — and if you are into designing or trying different things, or just happen to have the time and willingness to play around. They have clearly revolutionized the world of prototyping and made so many things possible that weren’t before.

But any of the suggestions that 3D printers will find themselves in every home, or at least in as many homes as document printers, are in my opinion far disconnected from the real world. Short of them becoming as reliable as Star Trek’s replicators, these are handy tools in the hands of a few, cool toys in the hands of the wealthy, and noise for the vast majority of people.

Last year, after gnashing my teeth a bit, I decided to buy a 3D printer to have at home. I had designed 3D printed enclosures for some of my electronics projects already, but I ordered those prints from different services that provide SLS on demand, which is the kind of 3D printing that you cannot really do at home. And even though I have had access to an FDM printer at the office, the reasonable requirement of being present while the printer is in use wasn’t really ever compatible with my style of work.

When asking around, a colleague suggested he had a very good track record with the Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro to print things with his kids, and since Elegoo was taking pre-orders for their new Neptune 4 Pro at the time, I decided to bite the bullet, and put an order through. I now realize that the positive experience of my colleague with the N3P didn’t really carry over to the N4P in any way, as the two machines are significantly different in nature. But I’m still glad I went for the newer model, if nothing else because I have not needed to put files on an SD card or USB stick ever — the series 4 has a networked firmware, so it literally just plugs into an Ethernet port and I can print directly from some of the slicers, or a from a browser. I’ll get to more details later.

The choice of FDM (i.e. filament-based) printer was forced by my living situation: while the idea of having a resin printer sounded cool, it’s not the kind of thing you want to do in a flat without a garage: the resin and curing chemicals are quite volatile and dangerous. Indeed, I would probably only ever consider getting one of those if I had access to a workshop with proper air extractions and safety features. So much as the results look good, that’s not going to be an option any time soon.

At the same time, the little experience I had up to that point with designing for 3D printing was different both in terms of the actual printing process (SLS and FDM have different practical considerations, such as the resolution of details, or whether geometry needs to be kept open — and SLS does not need to worry about supports!) as well as what you can actually get done. You cannot get to print a singleton or prototype, when you’re sending stuff out for printing to JLCPCB in China — you need to print a minimum number of identical copies, and they will take a few weeks to make it back to you. This means you can’t fix a tolerance issue if you get wrong, and any mistake might be quite expensive to fix, as I learnt with my acrylic lamp bases (thankfully, my thermostats’ enclosures worked almost perfectly the first time around!)

The journey into the world of home 3D printing started well before I received the printer, though, because this is a field that, like many in modern times, to my dislike, spread information only in the form of tribal knowledge, with Reddit and Discord being the primary sources of information. Both of which couldn’t be farther from my preferred modes of interactions. Instead, I decided to try my luck with Facebook (not for reason related to my employment!), where Elegoo themselves appear to have created the ELEGOO Neptune Series 3D Printer Owners group.

I have refrained from making any posts, or commenting on anything in the group, until I received my printer — as obviously I would have been talking out of my head with no practical experience. But quite quickly I did start noticing some strange “memes” (in the original sense of the term) in posts and responses. Besides the obvious bias in people posting having negative experiences (if you have no problems with your machine, why would you be posting?), there has been a number of people who posted about buying one machine… just to immediately go and “upgrade” it by replacing a number of parts. I guess this is part and parcel of a field that was started by enthusiasts looking more for a project than a tool.

Another common theme I noticed in the posts has been the amount of “buzzword bingo” — one of the few posts I commented on was one in which someone kept insisting that the MAC address, that the N4P displays under “IP Address” any time there is no IPv4 assigned, was instead an IPv6 address — despite being shown examples of real IPv6 addresses, and noting the length didn’t match. Similarly, for weeks I kept seeing the same similar posts insisting that if you don’t re-format the microSD you buy in the store it would be formatted in NTFS, despite the fact that microSDXC mandate exFAT instead — the end result is indeed the same, but instead of saying the less-restrictive “it’s in the wrong filesystem”, there were people insisting that it was specifically NTFS.

The possibly more annoying (to me) and dangerous (to everyone) memes are those that appear to suggest using 3D printed components in critical applications: in the months I’ve been around the group, I saw a handful of people looking at printing casts for broken limbs, functional parts for cars, motorbikes, and bicycles, and at least a couple of times tattooing devices. This scares me a lot — while I see the advantages of being able to tailor components to one’s very specific need, I don’t believe I would ever want for my, or anyone else’s life, to depend on a home-printed component of any kind.

On the other hand, it is interesting to see how many cosplayers seem to have integrated 3D printing techniques in their process. I have heard Adam Savage talking about it at length, but it wasn’t until I noticed how many of the completed builds on the Facebook group were cosplay pieces that I actually realized how big that community ends up being!

Some of the memes, to be honest, are the fault of the manufacturer. Elegoo’s documentation, that comes with the machine, instructs you to handle the bed leveling by using “a piece of A4 paper.” In their instructions video they more explicitly use the piece of paper that comes with the machine — which ironically is A5-sized. The problem is, A4, being part of ISO 216, only defines the surface dimension of paper, not its thickness, which is what the bed leveling would depend on. I don’t believe most people think about it too hard, and possibly didn’t even notice this inconsistency unless they have experience with — I do because of the print shop I used to work for as a sysadmin, so I know that you commonly measure paper thickness in microns, but you abstract that to paper weight in gsm or g/m² (grams per square meter.) Common printer paper is often around 80 g/m², but my coffee roaster prints their invoice in much thicker paper — the paper Elegoo uses in their video feels like a midway between the two, and with a bit of dial caliper action I would say it’s somewhere below the 100 microns mark. I wish they actually provided a bit more specific information about this.

Relatedly, the tinkerer nature of early 3D printing adopters (possibly with the bimodal distribution between enthusiasts playing with it at home versus professionals keeping their trade secrets), does not lead itself much to having a centralized resource providing every bit of relevant information. Particularly so, as various people end up turning into fanboys for whatever manufacturer they happen to have bought. Personally, I just find that my machine is working fine, and I have nothing really bad to say about the level of support I received from Elegoo so far, but that doesn’t mean I need to “score one” by dissing one of the other manufacturers.

The end result is that a lot of information is only available as word of mouth, and often is repeated even after it becomes outdated (particularly as the technology keeps improving year after year.) Is it safe to use PETG FDM prints around a hydroponics kit? Is printing TPU without an enclosure going to cause you significant health issue? How do you convert the important parameters from one slicer to another?

A lot of these questions should have objective answers, rather than the very subjective or appalling dogmatic ones that you’ll find on Facebook, Reddit or (I assume, since I can’t find the energy to go and check by myself) DIscord. The answers may become outdated at some point, needing to be changed, but it would make sense to have a reference documentation that is kept up to date, rather than having just an oral history of knowledge. The possible worst example I have seen more recently was when someone asked “where can I find Neptune 4 Max profiles for PrusaSlicer?” and someone kept repeating “Go to the Discord and ask around” rather than point at anything relevant at all!

Back when Linux hardware support was painful, a lot of us (me included — my homepage still has some remnants of it) ended up maintaining websites that effectively just contained “works for me” solutions — but at least it was possible to go and look for them. Unfortunately I also can see that trying to solve this is going to be nigh impossible, what with the horrible reality of LLM-generated spam we live in — I keep finding random “3D printing bible” style websites, that appear to have mined a bunch of opinions of the various forums, and restated them as facts.

Even with all of these problems, having a 3D printer at hand to be able to prototype and experiment, or even build very specifically-tailored components, is something I’m very pleased with. Being able to throw some ideas onto Fusion 360 (don’t judge) to figure out whether they would fit together, and then print a test fit is quite useful when coming up with custom components and quality of life improvements. I have had quite a lot of fun with printing stencils too — both to give myself proper spacing to write postcards as well as to cut EVA foam to fit into specific nooks.

On the other hand, I found myself printing existing design extremely sparingly. While statuettes and models of skyscrapers are fun to have around, they are not really useful, and honestly speaking, they are usually cheaper to buy on Amazon or AliExpress. I learnt to ignore the suggestion from some of the enthusiasts that printing decorations (or even replacement parts) is free — despite the fact that most slicers will show the cost in terms of material and time (sometimes including the price in currency of the material if you configure it.) Admittedly, sometimes is good to do this just for the sake of it, or to finish your roll of cheap-and-bad-quality filament you ended up with (any reference to some of my early mistakes in procurement is intentional here), but it’s also important to consider whether it would make more sense to just buy the thing rather than trying to print it.

Case in point, I was looking at printing an electric toothbrush stand, since I saw a number of people pointing at one — but when tallying up the material just of the one print (assuming no issues with the print, material, or printer, thus a completely right print at first try), the time and electricity required, I got a number that was somewhere north of £10. A similar stand from Amazon (likely straight from AliBaba) costed £4.

This is somewhat similar when thinking of tools and solutions: I was thinking of how to build some self-alignment for the stencil to cut out the EVA foam (to fit my camera’s card-carrier, and replace the SD-shaped cutouts with CFExpress-shaped cutouts), until I remembered that engineers’ squares are a thing, and I could just buy a metal one that would double as a way to hold the foam mat in place while cutting.

It’s also interesting to see how some of the tools end up being particularly overpriced when looking at 3D printing keyword specifically. I was looking for a filament dust filter – something that is commonly printed in place, but I find the print in place a bit too brittle to stay in place for more than a couple of months – and I found some repurposed ferrite toroids clip-on holders with a piece of sponge sold for over £7! Turns out that buying the actual ferrite toroits and taking them out is much cheaper, being £9 for five pieces shipping included. Plus you get to keep the toroids.

(Huge thanks to imax here for pointing me at This Old Tony, since despite the channel’s focus being machining and CNC, a lot of the technique and basics apply similarly when doing 3D printing!)

I will come back with more impressions about 3D printing software (slicers, CADs) in future posts, since unsurprisingly I have opinions. And I will probably do my best to share what I learn, both in terms of process, and in terms of useful related tools (software and hardware) that are handy to keep around. But let’s be clear here, that I’m a newbie when it comes to all of this, I just happen to be a newbie with enough stubbornness as to expect to be able to do things in particular ways.

https://flameeyes.blog/2024/06/23/first-impressions-of-a-3d-printer/

#3DPrinting #Elegoo #Neptune4Pro

In case you have an #Elegoo #neptune4pro /#neptune4 and are copying your files still via USB stick or over the web GUI to your printer, I was searching for a way to automatically copy my .gcode files to my printer, and found one.

I'm using now #rsync to copy the files over via #ssh

If you are interested in details, here is a blog post how to set it up. The post is in German, but should be easy to follow:

https://sebastian-muthwill.de/gcode-ateien-automatisch-auf-elegoo-neptune-4-pro-und-andere-3d-drucker-hochladen.html

Is someone using an #elegoo #neptune4pro with #ocoprint?

Is it really so strait forward that you hook up the printer via USB?

#3dprinting