Weirdness:
The default g-code for the machine does silly things like park the nozzle over the build plate letting it ooze, instead of over the nozzle wiper/waste container.
The filament change routine is strange, requiring you to remove the bowden tube to cut the filament every time. This is easily fixed by printing a filament cutter and using that to cut the filament.
The bowden tube rubs against the top plexiglass lid for the machine, requiring you to print a riser for the lid to avoid it getting all scratched up.
The door for the machine is an odd shape design with no handle making it a little annoying to get a grip to open it.
The filament holder they include is a very bad design, flexes heavily with a full roll of filament and I have had spools fall off several times while printing.
The touch screen menu isn’t very intuitive and it can be very laggy at times.
Good features for the price point:
Fully enclosed with built in chamber heater.
Pretty decent auto leveling system.
Timelapse camera.
Runs klipper/mainsail and input shaping is pretty cool.
I have around 500 hours on mine and I haven’t had any prints fail that were the fault of the machine so I’m pretty impressed by that. And I find the features and capabilities to be pretty great for the price point. They just could use to do some polishing of the design
I bought one based on this thread, but only set it up a few days ago.
Two days ago, my five-year-old requested that I print them a cat. I downloaded two cat models, one that was print-in-place bendy and one that was meant to test your calibration. I tried to print both, but both of them caused the printer to hang after displaying "stop processing, please wait … "
I spent several hours testing and troubleshooting this, only to find an old thread saying that the printer firmware can’t handle filenames between 6-9 characters (not including the extension), meaning the filenames could be 5 characters or fewer; or 10 or more. I had named my files calicat.gcode and flexicat.gcode. After adjusting them to be longer filenames, everything started working beautifully.
I’m very happy with the printer now that I know that, but it seems such a random error that it was very frustrating to try to fix. I thought my printer arrived broken. Hopefully if someone else encounters the same problem, they find this post and it fixes their problems!
I have never actually tried printing off the device itself, the touch screen is very confusing. I always submit print jobs over the network via OrcaSlicer. But yes, that is exactly the kind of thing I meant when I said it has some odd quirks.
I printed a few things by sending directly from the Qidi slicer that came with it, but it pretty consistently is crashing at 40-80% when connecting through the network. I’ve been using the web interface directly and that’s going pretty well.
Weirdness: The default g-code for the machine does silly things like park the nozzle over the build plate letting it ooze, instead of over the nozzle wiper/waste container.
The filament change routine is strange, requiring you to remove the bowden tube to cut the filament every time. This is easily fixed by printing a filament cutter and using that to cut the filament.
The bowden tube rubs against the top plexiglass lid for the machine, requiring you to print a riser for the lid to avoid it getting all scratched up.
The door for the machine is an odd shape design with no handle making it a little annoying to get a grip to open it.
The filament holder they include is a very bad design, flexes heavily with a full roll of filament and I have had spools fall off several times while printing.
The touch screen menu isn’t very intuitive and it can be very laggy at times.
Good features for the price point: Fully enclosed with built in chamber heater.
Pretty decent auto leveling system.
Timelapse camera.
Runs klipper/mainsail and input shaping is pretty cool.
I have around 500 hours on mine and I haven’t had any prints fail that were the fault of the machine so I’m pretty impressed by that. And I find the features and capabilities to be pretty great for the price point. They just could use to do some polishing of the design
I bought one based on this thread, but only set it up a few days ago.
Two days ago, my five-year-old requested that I print them a cat. I downloaded two cat models, one that was print-in-place bendy and one that was meant to test your calibration. I tried to print both, but both of them caused the printer to hang after displaying "stop processing, please wait … "
I spent several hours testing and troubleshooting this, only to find an old thread saying that the printer firmware can’t handle filenames between 6-9 characters (not including the extension), meaning the filenames could be 5 characters or fewer; or 10 or more. I had named my files
calicat.gcodeandflexicat.gcode. After adjusting them to be longer filenames, everything started working beautifully.I’m very happy with the printer now that I know that, but it seems such a random error that it was very frustrating to try to fix. I thought my printer arrived broken. Hopefully if someone else encounters the same problem, they find this post and it fixes their problems!
I have never actually tried printing off the device itself, the touch screen is very confusing. I always submit print jobs over the network via OrcaSlicer. But yes, that is exactly the kind of thing I meant when I said it has some odd quirks.
I think my first print was with the touch screen.
I printed a few things by sending directly from the Qidi slicer that came with it, but it pretty consistently is crashing at 40-80% when connecting through the network. I’ve been using the web interface directly and that’s going pretty well.