8mo ago

Experience with Orbiter 2.0 extruder

I'm currently using an Orbiter 1.5 and it's pretty decent but I'm looking for an upgrade. I like the light style extruder sitting on the gantry over a Bowden system as it allows for flexible filament and has much better control over retraction.

Is the 2.0 a significant improvement over the 1.5? Should I get a new hotend as well with it?

Right now I'm using a MicroSwiss all metal hotend and am quite satisfied with it.

Print speed is okay I guess.

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16 comments

Why are you looking to upgrade? Are you chasing detail, speed, or something else?
- Detail. I'm looking to achieve tighter tolerances with 3D printing, going for dimensional accuracy.
  
  Dimensional accuracy doesn't necessarily mean detail. What are your expectations? You should be able to get fairly crisp and dimensionally accurate prints, but there's a ceiling. With FDM you're ultimately running what could be considered a CNC hot glue gun so absolute accuracy won't ever be as good as a resin or SLS printer.
  Do your parts look good, but their dimensions are off? If yes, you probably need to scale your parts to accomodate for shrinkage. That's what the Voron team did and their parts fit together really nicely with non-printed parts when printed on a decently tuned printer. Their threaded test prints are a pretty good indication of how well dialed in your printer is.
  Some of this also comes down to temp and material, so if you had the perfect interface and changed material you might need to iterate a few times. There are also the design quirks that you learn as you go, especially for things like small holes in parts often being smaller printed than designed. Print a hole gauge set, with a series of holes ranging in size, and use the one whose printed - not designed - dimensions are the one you want.
  
  Sounds good. I'll definitely give those a try to further calibrate it.
  I have the issue that the nozzle hits infill during travel motions and it probably has to do with minor overextrusion.
  
  Sounds like your infill is curling up? Solid or sparse infill? If solid, it's likely over extrusion as you said. If sparse, my suspicion is temperature and/or cooling related.
  
  Well. I'm not sure I fully understand it. The way I calibrated e steps was to tell it to extrude 100mm of filament and then measures how much filament was pushed through the nozzle. This resulted in a value of about 680 steps/mm.
  This always overextrudes and setting it down to 640 steps/mm made it much better.
  Setting flow rate in the slicer does not seem to have the same effect.
  Lowering e-steps gave the result I wanted but with a lower value than was calibrated for.
  
  Esteps and extrusion multiplier are related, but different, solutions to a similar problem. Changing one value by say 10% should be the same as changing the other by 10%.
  Esteps is "how far does the extruder motor have to turn to extrude some length of filament". This lets your slicer know how much plastic volume should be extruded per step of your extruder motor
  Flow rate is "crap, different filaments expand/contract at different rates and have different physical characteristics like viscosity".
  This is why the extrusion multiplier setting is associated to your filament profile in PrusaSlicer and all its derivatives. I use a much lower value for ASA (around 0.88 if going slower and cooler) than PETG (0.95 ish) than PLA (1.0) than TPU (1.15 if memory serves).
  I'll also tweak my extrusion multiplier depending on how I'm printing. For example, right now I have an ASA print going. The printer is laying down filament at 30 mm^3/s. To do this I'm printing a bit hotter than I normally would with this filament (245 vs 230). I'm also at 0.92 EM vs my usual 0.88.

16 comments