RE: belt pitch. Based on comments, my explanation appears to be incomplete and include some potential misunderstandings. Here's my best attempt at an explanation: It's the finer belt pitch in combination with a smaller pulley that makes the difference. With a finer pitch belt, the pulleys will have a smaller diameter for an equivalent number of teeth. Smaller diameter means a shorter linear movement for one full revolution of the motor. This increases your positional resolution, thereby reducing stepping artifacts that appear on your prints (VFAs). This has a similar effect as switching from 1.8 degree steppers to 0.9 degree steppers. This is Prusa's approach on the MK4. Qidi achieves this with the belts. The drawback of smaller pulleys is that the motors will need to turn more to move the same distance. This will limit the top print speed that is achievable. Ironically, and unbeknownst to me at the time of making this video, Bambu ALREADY uses 1.5 mm pitch belts on the A1 and A1 mini. If you need more convincing about the correlation between belt pitch and positional resolution, play around with this calculator: blog.prusa3d.com/calculator_3416/. EDIT: The Plus 4 pulleys appear to have the same diameter as the Q1 Pro I compared it to. So now I'm thinking the difference is in the belt width (9mm v.s. 6mm) or the fact that a finer pitch belt will have more teeth in contact for an equivalent pulley diameter, resulting in less backlash.
Im not sure if a smaller diameter pulley translates into smaller VFAs. I have a Voron Zero with tiny pulleys which has very pronounced VFAs. My other machine, a qidi q1 pro has barely visible artifacts while having the same belt pitch and bigger pulleys.
you could literally! use a pulley with a V-Belt as long as its slack free and tight you get the precision your motors and your gear/belt/pulley gear ratio will give you lol ... whats so hard to understand about this ?
@@ygk3d your explanation is plain wrong. If you want to say that smaller pulleys increase accuracy or resolution then you're right. But you did not say that. The belt pitch is absolutely unrelated to this, and the bs about an equivalent number of teeth does not safe this. I hope you are aware that there are pulleys with different amounts of teeth, for all kinds of belt pitches and types.
@@robertj8674Mhh… yeah, you’ve got a point. And the pulleys appear to be the same diameter as on the Q1 Pro, so obviously that’s not it. I’m just trying to reconcile why I’m seeing less VFAs and I thought it was because of the belts. Here’s another possible explanation: For an equivalent diameter pulley, a finer pitch belt will have more teeth engaged so perhaps there’s less backlash. The belts are also wider, at 9mm, so that could be the bigger contributing factor (less stretch). Since you seem to be quite knowledge about this, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.
Finer pitch on belts does not improve the position accuracy in this application. And the move distance/ motor step is based on the driving pulley diameter.
Yup, I was gonna say the same thing. The only way to increase positional accuracy is reduce the pulley size or increase the microstepping, both of which lower the maximum travel speed.
@@Zach929Uincreasing the micro stepping does only limit travel speed if the board can't handle the required step count. It also does not significantly change positional accuracy beyond a certain point. What would work is to use 0.9 deg stepper motors.
I disagree, for the same diameter driving pulley the finer pitched belt will allow you to have more teeth on the driving pulley. The more teeth on the driving pulley will decrease the polygonal action of the system. This will smooth out the motion by increasing the occurrence of impacts between the belt teeth an driving pulley teeth.
Nice review! Whatever combo Qidi has going in the motion system, it definitely works. While there have been printers with issues, a lot of the Plus4 prints I have seen are some of the cleanest stock printer results I've ever seen. That includes prints from my own Plus4. It's a very capable printer. The chamber heater power supply issue is regrettable. Qidi could have had a killer product to boost their reputation on hand. There is no problem on 230V and Qidi has revised the board and started sending units out to 120V users. Fingers crossed it's a proper solution. I think there's no doubt it's a great value for the money, but Qidi has to fix the problems. I really hope they let the Max4 cook longer, so it doesn't cook.
Are you sure that the belt pitch results in more precise movement? Smaller gears should give you more precision. I don't see how the belt would achieve this. 🤔
Gearing no matter what size or pitch is susceptible to backlash.( Or the space between each Gear tooth in the mesh.) I look for that, and the degree of tolerance the gears are spaced within the mesh.
@@AwestrikeFearofGods That's not actually true in modern 3d printers. The kinds of belts and pulleys used are shaped for the belt and pulley curve to take practically all of the backlash. It's not a generic general purpose motion system. Just try it yourself, pull on the belts on your printer. You can feel the slack but there is no backlash in the motion system. If there was that much backlash the vibration compensation would be so much more complicated. You couldn't possibly see a single or just 3 peaks in the resonance frequency graph.
@@SquintyGears Even with a zero-backlash (i.e. preloaded) system, compliance allows for imprecise motion. Another example is the nonlinear variation of belt speed being greater for lower tooth-count gears of a given diameter.
@@AwestrikeFearofGods Yes yes that's what you need to consider in general in motion systems. The belt and pulley combos we're talking about aren't the pre-loaded kind of backlash removing. The teeth on the belt are there to prevent slipping and transfer more torque. That's further down the transfer of movement chain than the backlash that would happen at t=0. In fact practically all of the slop in 3D printer belt motion systems are due to the elasticity of the belts not the tooth profile and pulley engagement. That's the part we need to preload. Whe tension, later the belt ages and slacks and needs to be replaced. Good engineers designed parts for specific use cases. We could be using a bicycle's gear and chain to move the axis. But we don't, because it's not suitable. We're very far from the OG home printing days where every part of the printer was randomly picked from what was kinda available instead of what's actually good for the use case. These are all real precision robotics motion system parts. We're at a point where the limits are in the mechanical rigidity and the processing power of the brains of the systems to compensate for things in software. And those are problems that have straightforward cost relations. Not a 2¢ part swap. Software needs dev time. And you can build your printer as beefy as a mill if you want.
The ceramic heatbreak nozzle has fixed like 99% of heat creep clogging in the community's experience. Anyone with the stainless heatbreak version can ask for a free replacement. Also just a quick note that for absolute maximum quality on this and many core XY machines you should orient long straight parts 35-45 degrees rotated so it prints diagonal across the bed. :)
Woa.. never knew about that 45 diagonal thing. Why is that? Curious why that would be any better only because the bed is not a slinger so how does that help the print? Heck I would think the core x/y head having to move +1 in each direction for a straight line instead of just a seamless splurge of straight line output would be slower to print and potential for issues. Like when I print a large "drawer" (or enclosure to hold it).. I would have thought having it oriented along x or y would provide a stronger print overall.. so how does the angled alignment make it better?
@@b3owu1f So I am not a complete expert on this, but my basic understanding is that the least vibrations are generally produced moving diagonally. This will vary by printer design and even individual printer tuning, but I believe it is a fairly standard result. Look up "Polar Angle Energy Profile" in the Klippain-ShakteTune documentation and it will explain how to generate a chart and read it. Cartesian printers like bed slingers tend to do best at 90 degree angles while core XY tend to do best at 45 and 135 instead.
Thanks for the solid look at the printer. Its so tempting to pick one up, but I just bought a P1S and AMS for the reliability because I have a tinkering problem lol.
I don't wanna give too much praise to qidi given they released the bad relay boards in the first place, but by the same token if they treat this like they did with the x-max 3 where they just straight up accepted all returns and send out significantly better models after the fact then they at least can have that as a plus to them. I am waiting for bambu's next announcement purely because I'm more in the market for an idex machine or toolchanger and if reports are accurate their next one isn't to be just a bigger version of the current line.
I think that Qidi has hand picked/tuned their samples and not just taken random ones off the factory line, my bed level was 0.9 out of the box, with adjustment I got it down to about 0.35 but certainly can't get it any better than that.
Bought it on the day of release. Have only done one print with it, but it was nine hours PA-GF, turned out very nice but with horrible layer adhesion on the first layers. Don’t know if it is due to the filament (Bambu), or some errors trying to copy the Bambu defaults to qidi-slicer. Anyway, I doubt I’ll use this as a daily driver. The heat bed is just to slow getting up to temperature, adding a lot of time to small prints.
FWIW I generally think the max speed and acceleration advertised for any printer is supposed to be max before a mechanical issue of some type. Stepper drivers overheating, motors overheating, motors skipping steps, belts slipping, bearings binding, stuff like that. You will never get good quality out of using the max advertised specs for a printer.
There seems to be some misunderstanding on the role of belt pitch. Belt pitch width and depth affects transmission power, it does not play a roll in precision of motion. Precision in stepper motor systems comes from the step angle of the motors. If you consider a 2mm pitch width belt on a 20 tooth pulley its 40mm of belt motion per rotation of the pulley. If you increase the number of teeth on the belt, and the teeth on the pulley it will still be 40mm of belt motion if the pulley is the same diameter as the 20 tooth pulley. The smallest unit of belt motion you can achieve comes down to how small a rotation angle unit you can command or resolve. Larger pulleys produce more belt motion and smaller ones produce less for each rotation. This is why in printer config files you won't see any reference to belt pitch and instead see rotation distance, step angle and micro steps. 1.5mm pitch belts would seem to just make it harder to find replacement parts instead of the very common 2mm pitch standard. I also wonder, but don't know for sure, if the smaller pitch could mean they are more prone to skipping.
Probably no problem with actual skipping. We're not at the limits of accelerations that such a pulley+belt can do. Missed steps are motor control system faults not mechanical, and that's what you'll probably see first when the head is too heavy for the acceleration (tork) asked from the system.
I'm not crazy about new nozzle. It was already difficult finding different types of nozzles until Trianglelabs made a v6 adapter. Being able to use all sorts of nozzle materials or even just hardened tips, coated nozzles, and high flow cht-type interiors are great options to have. Iirc, it was about half a year before a cht-type Qidi 0.4 nozzle was available, and then several more months before other diameters were available. How long will that take for the Plus 4? I guess that, the normal and safety revisions, and the release of their AMS, is another reason to wait to buy a Plus 4.
This printer was #1 on my list until I started hearing more about the overheating issues on that circuit board. I don’t want to risk burning my house down.
i was very tempted until the two issues with the chamber heater were found... i'll wait awhile and see when they fix these issues, or if bambu comes out with a larger printer. 325x325 would be nicer :) but who knows what they are going to do.
I really appreciate your video and the time and effort you put into making it. I’ve already decided to purchase the Plus 4 with my tax return. Hopefully, by then Qidi will have addressed most, if not all, of the issues you have pointed out in your video.
I found mine was running at 640x480 but QIDI has instructions on their support site for changing it. Not sure if they have changed that in the lastest builds or not.
So I am torn on how I feel about having a heater issue (in the US) with this printer. On the one hand.. for $800 it gives you more value than many $2K+ engineering printers do, even beating the X1C at 25% or more cheaper. On the other hand.. though I know QIDI will soon fix the heating issue for US market (and frankly even the 220v world though its not nearly as pronounced).. I suspect (correct me if I am wrong) that MOST 3d printer owners not only are tinkerers of some sort, but often 3d print upgrades/changes to their printers.. and thankfully we have a LOT of smart folks that not only are engineers and know how to dissect and improve upon printers.. but then design and offer the STLs/etc for the rest of us to benefit from. My heater is bad.. so QIDI sent me a new one and got it in 2 days. I also requested the ceramic heat break option.. which I am not sure if that is the same thing you were talking about with regards to the clogging issue and they resolved? At any rate I got that too.. haven't put it in yet. But I ordered the parts (Omron relay, heat sink, etc) to fix the heater issue myself and honestly I am OK with this. Sure I would have preferred not to do that.. BUT.. on the flip side apparently the Omron is a MUCH better quality part than what they offer out of China (or at least more likely than what QIDI will fix the issue with). So.. I am not bothered by the "upgrade" if it solves the problem and ensures my heater is "better" than what future QIDI Plus 4 owners will get. I will say I wasn't aware of the 3d print to upgrade the air flow on the extruder.. that's good to know so I'll have to print that once my printer is working again and look to upgrade that. I did buy the upgraded nozzle (made from adamantium ;) and a 2nd PEI sheet. Was hoping BIQU would offer their new cold/blue ones in this size, but not yet.
Pretty reasonable take I think a lot of people, including me, mostly align with. At $800 even without a chamber heater it is a good value. So once the issue is properly fixed, it's a great proposition. It's just unacceptable a safety issue was let out the door like that. Hopefully they make it right for everyone. My Plus4 has been nearly perfect, but I'm still getting a replacement board and may move to an off the shelf SSR unit later.
@@802Garage Is QIDI sending you a replacement SSR? I wasn't offered that.. even though I did just speak to them 3 days ago about my heater not working. In my case if I turn on the heater it immediately spikes the sensor in seconds to 140+ c and shuts things down. So I can't run the heater at all.
@@b3owu1f Contact them and their after-sales support will send you the parts you need. US users will get the latest SSR for free and extend the warranty for one year.
Carbon filters don't do anything about the ABS fumes, just the smells, so in some ways it's worse than not having the filter, as you're still inhaling the toxic fumes, even though you don't get the warning of the bad smell.
Printers will continue having vfa until manufacturer start to use teethed idlers for the teethed side of the belt again. My v0 has its drivers tuned for the motors and used current while my trident hasn't. Both use moons motors, so pretty low vfa from the start. Guess what, the trident has much better surface quality than the v0. There is one important difference, the v0 uses bearing stacks everywhere, the trident uses toothed idlers too. See prusa mk4, even its 0,9 degree steppers didn't solve the vfa situation, only improved it. Also uses smooth idlers. The problem with smooth idlers becomes even more pronounced if we were to use the belt tension specified by gates/the manufacturer which is in general higher than the user manuals of the printers suggest
@@TechVirtue the main things I did are: disabled slow down for overhangs (the acceleration / deceleration was causing issues), and calibrated pressure advance. Besides that, I was just using the default profiles.
If you want super clean prints I'd also recommend turning on "Don't slow down for outer walls" in the filament cooling settings and using inner/outer/inner wall order. Also turn on small area flow compensation. Tuning your extrusion rate and PA values first is always most important IMO. If you want to go even deeper you should get the Shake&Tune download and dive into input shaping and vibration profiles to find the best speeds for your printer.
@ygk3d Ah fair enough that's quite a low temperature for high speed printing. Sunlu filaments come with temperature ranges for various printer speeds now. 50-100 100-200 and 200-300 mms I'm achieving those flow rates with the default speed profiles but 0.25mm layer height and 0.6 extrusion width for the inner walls and infills. I'm printing PETG-cf at 20mm³s, ASA-CF at 24mm³s and TPU 95a at 15 mm³s I think I could push a little bit higher but I think for TPU there's just too much Bowden tube and so too much friction to go much higher.
I think if you're going to express the big difference in print quality and how great it is you shouldn't show a part with tons of ringing. There's tons of vertical lines present in the example at the beginning. As the light catches the part they are very visible.
I was going to buy this printer after seeing the first few reviews. I now know that the chance that one of these printers will become a calibration and repair nightmare.
In your opinion, it is better to buy, for example, creality K1 max? There are a lot of problems with the K1 max, but the K1 max (the whole line of K1 printers) also has a large support community. I need something with a table around 300x300 and can't find anything interesting.
@@ygk3d I think it's more likely that printer manufacturers pre select the units they ship to influencers like yourself. That's why the more serious channels purchase the hardware themselves to rule that out.
1:24 why do people see this as such a big upgrade? Plastic is lighter and as far as I know more shatter resistant. Are there significant advantages to glass that outweighs these disadvantages, other than "it looks nicer"?
Looks really promising but the quality issues is a recurring theme. Based on reviews of their previous printers that I've watched they seem like they rely on using RUclips reviewers as their QA department. I'm also not a big fan of every manufacturer making their own nozzle standard. I don't want to have to make international orders just for a nozzle. And their EU warehouse currently has no nozzles in stock for this machine.
Yeah, RUclipsrs are used as a QC department WAY too often. Don’t they realize it’s bad press to have your product beta tested in public? And I definitely agree on the nozzle. Would be much better if it just used an open source standard.
The misunderstanding of Shaper graphs drives me up the wall. Alright, so a basic explanation, a Shaper Test tells you how fast the printer can go while being able to account and counteract the vibrations that cause quality issues with Input Shaper turned off. The accelerations and speeds on most stock profiles on printers are lower because for the most part, the biggest problem with high speed printing is that you cannot cool the plastic fast enough (hence why we do crazy mods like CPAP), but having the ability and motion to do the super high accelerations is nice, which from what I've noticed the Plus 4 does effortlessly (and it better do considering the specs)
@@SquintyGears There are several things that drive me up the wall, not only with this channel but with several channel that either don't know what they are talking about (which would be forgivable if they just came into like a popular Discord server for example like Armchair or Annex to ask questions) or ones that just go along with the buzz words and random guesses that makes my life miserable when I gotta counteract videos to recommend people printers. At the very least the Plus 4 is a great printer that is easy to recommend...after they fix the SSR issue
Where you aware at the time when you started filming that the electronics that govern the chamber heater (w/ 120vac models) is highly susceptible to catching fire? Qidi has been working on a fix & as of today, sending affected customers replacement boards. I have the knowledge to replace these boards but i do not recommend customers who arent confident working on Mains AC circuitry attempt this. New customers who receive 110-120vac models should absolutely know this up front! I filed a complaint with the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission regarding this issue. At that time, Qidi was working on a solution and i agreed to accept the replacement. We'll see if Qidi issues a recall.
To be clear, there has not been a single instance of a fire yet. There is a component on the board highly susceptible to overheating and damaging the components on the board. I am not saying there is zero risk of fire, but when people drastically overstate the case it makes it sound like there have been fires already. He does cover this topic in the video.
SORT OF......having less pitch on belt does not directly result in the belt moving less with each motor step, the minimum belt movement per step is a function of the smallest step (or 1.2 step) the motor can move *combined* with the radius of the pulley. Still a finer pitch may result in a smoother print...or not depending on speeds/resonance. I think proper tooth profiles of timing belts were designed to provide smooth linear movement at the tooth engagement geometery. Chains have similar considerations there were "Hyvo " chains to address the geometry for similar reasons.
the biggest vfa improvement for me was 0.9 steppers and linear rail mod on my k1 max. the dual x rod design is a failure. not even a bedslinger with linear rails will have such bad vfa
@@IrishZorg the quality is still good at 10,000 is just that the sharpness of details is somewhat lost. The details get smoothed. Without converting my X1C to the X1 Plus community firmware I have no idea what the input shaping results for that would be.
@ yup, but any printer can have little VFA’s if well built and with good quality belts and bearings, and extruder of course. My Voron Trident has slightly less VFA’s than my A1 mini, but since the minis belt pitch is smaller it also makes it less noticeable
you could literally! use a pulley with a V-Belt as long as its slack free and tight you get the precision your motors and your gear/belt/pulley gear ratio will give you lol ... as you contact inner teeth in a radius seeing the belt outside pulley inside you reduce the tenency to slack to basically zero in comparison to a pulley that has to drive a straight belt so even that argument is not really worth the discussion
Why QIDI uses only 2 Z motors, you need 3 (or more) for full bed leveling. And oh, belt patternsdo not cause vertical artefacts. Those patters would be horizontal...
Yeah, they don't have full bed tramming. 3 points is needed to define a plane. But 2 points of adjustment at least lets you eliminate any left/right tilt. Forward/backward tilt is still possible but the bed is constrained in that dimension by the bushing and linear rods, so It should be relatively level. And to your second point, belts do cause VFAs... check the comment below by 802Garage.
I have the Qidi plus 4 and i print with PLA+ and since last week, i cannot print anymore. The hotend become always clogged. I clean the nozzle perfectly. Try again and it became clog again. QIDI is sendi g me a new hotend
As he covered in the video, the early version nozzles were prone to heat creep clogging. Best thing you can do is print slightly colder usually and with the top off and door open. Once you get the ceramic heatbreak nozzle, your issue should be solved.
Although 3d printers are becoming really good compared to the early boom of reprap kit around 2016-2020 but in general 3d printers from China still suffer from issues that shouldn't exist in the first place. It seems like the 'engineers' that designed these printers don't really have enthusiasm nor have much experience of using a 3d printer in the first place, and what makes matters worse are most of them don't really know what to test for before committing to productions and tends to treat the customers as their internal alpha testers....
I don't get the Z offset / leveling. Why, if it already is able to detect/set z offset with nozzle probing, why they added a magnetic sensor to do bed leveling. It doesn't make sense, no? Added weight, and probably less precision than if they would use nozzle probing like the rest newest printers that have flawless first layers.. Weird.
Looks nice, feels nice, doesn't scratch. They had gotten a lot of complaints about scratching and were trying to please the customer base. Reviews were constantly talking about all the plastic, so partially blame reviewers. FWIW the printer is pretty well insulated as is, even with gaps.
Prusa mk4 should have no vfas as it has no vfas motors so there is definitely something wrong with your printer and you should contact their support. I think they even advertise that feature.
They use 0.8 degree steppers on the MK4 which I believe is why the make the claims of no VFAs. They also claim a perfect first layer which I’ve found to be untrue in practice on my XL. The MK4 prints are good but if you look close on a shiny part I can see artifacts I would describe as VFAs.
@@ygk3dyes I had the same problem with the "perfect first layer". I don't remember though anything about the vfas. Excuse me but, shouldn't you contact them and tell them to help you fix these issues you are having? If you already did, what was their response?
@@AngelVenomous I just added a z offset override in the slicer and moved on. That fixed the issue. Couldn’t be bothered to deal with support when I already have a solution that works for me.
Belt pitch has nothing to do with VFAs. 9mm belts is what help to mitigate that, though my trident is still running 6mm belts and has no VFAs. 1.5mm belt pitch is not going to get copied, it's not standard, hard to source, doesn't evenly fit into any steps/mm math. Please actually research the physics behind the cause of VFAs -- throwing out the "killer feature" as the 1.5mm belt pitch is kinda silly considering the killer filler feature is the fact this machine's chamber heater SSR will set your house on fire.
Have you ever printed a shiny PETG part? Almost all printers show artifacts like depicted. Some are worse than others. From my testing, the Q1 Pro was really bad.
RE: belt pitch. Based on comments, my explanation appears to be incomplete and include some potential misunderstandings. Here's my best attempt at an explanation: It's the finer belt pitch in combination with a smaller pulley that makes the difference. With a finer pitch belt, the pulleys will have a smaller diameter for an equivalent number of teeth. Smaller diameter means a shorter linear movement for one full revolution of the motor. This increases your positional resolution, thereby reducing stepping artifacts that appear on your prints (VFAs). This has a similar effect as switching from 1.8 degree steppers to 0.9 degree steppers. This is Prusa's approach on the MK4. Qidi achieves this with the belts. The drawback of smaller pulleys is that the motors will need to turn more to move the same distance. This will limit the top print speed that is achievable. Ironically, and unbeknownst to me at the time of making this video, Bambu ALREADY uses 1.5 mm pitch belts on the A1 and A1 mini. If you need more convincing about the correlation between belt pitch and positional resolution, play around with this calculator: blog.prusa3d.com/calculator_3416/.
EDIT: The Plus 4 pulleys appear to have the same diameter as the Q1 Pro I compared it to. So now I'm thinking the difference is in the belt width (9mm v.s. 6mm) or the fact that a finer pitch belt will have more teeth in contact for an equivalent pulley diameter, resulting in less backlash.
More teeth on the pulley mean less slack in the system?
Im not sure if a smaller diameter pulley translates into smaller VFAs. I have a Voron Zero with tiny pulleys which has very pronounced VFAs. My other machine, a qidi q1 pro has barely visible artifacts while having the same belt pitch and bigger pulleys.
you could literally! use a pulley with a V-Belt as long as its slack free and tight you get the precision your motors and your gear/belt/pulley gear ratio will give you lol ... whats so hard to understand about this ?
@@ygk3d your explanation is plain wrong. If you want to say that smaller pulleys increase accuracy or resolution then you're right.
But you did not say that.
The belt pitch is absolutely unrelated to this, and the bs about an equivalent number of teeth does not safe this. I hope you are aware that there are pulleys with different amounts of teeth, for all kinds of belt pitches and types.
@@robertj8674Mhh… yeah, you’ve got a point. And the pulleys appear to be the same diameter as on the Q1 Pro, so obviously that’s not it. I’m just trying to reconcile why I’m seeing less VFAs and I thought it was because of the belts. Here’s another possible explanation: For an equivalent diameter pulley, a finer pitch belt will have more teeth engaged so perhaps there’s less backlash. The belts are also wider, at 9mm, so that could be the bigger contributing factor (less stretch). Since you seem to be quite knowledge about this, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts.
My qidi plus 4 has been going strong for a month now. Nothing but amazing quality prints.
Finer pitch on belts does not improve the position accuracy in this application. And the move distance/ motor step is based on the driving pulley diameter.
Yup, I was gonna say the same thing. The only way to increase positional accuracy is reduce the pulley size or increase the microstepping, both of which lower the maximum travel speed.
@@Zach929Uincreasing the micro stepping does only limit travel speed if the board can't handle the required step count. It also does not significantly change positional accuracy beyond a certain point. What would work is to use 0.9 deg stepper motors.
This. Quite a substantial error for someone who claims to be so rigorous in his testing.
Everyone is going to copy this!!!!!!!!
Your prints are FLAWED AF
I disagree, for the same diameter driving pulley the finer pitched belt will allow you to have more teeth on the driving pulley. The more teeth on the driving pulley will decrease the polygonal action of the system. This will smooth out the motion by increasing the occurrence of impacts between the belt teeth an driving pulley teeth.
Nice review! Whatever combo Qidi has going in the motion system, it definitely works. While there have been printers with issues, a lot of the Plus4 prints I have seen are some of the cleanest stock printer results I've ever seen. That includes prints from my own Plus4. It's a very capable printer. The chamber heater power supply issue is regrettable. Qidi could have had a killer product to boost their reputation on hand. There is no problem on 230V and Qidi has revised the board and started sending units out to 120V users. Fingers crossed it's a proper solution. I think there's no doubt it's a great value for the money, but Qidi has to fix the problems. I really hope they let the Max4 cook longer, so it doesn't cook.
Definitely waiting to see what Bambu comes out with.
Are you sure that the belt pitch results in more precise movement? Smaller gears should give you more precision. I don't see how the belt would achieve this. 🤔
Smaller pitch implies proportionally smaller gear-to-belt tooth backlash. Imagine an extreme case with very large teeth.
Gearing no matter what size or pitch is susceptible to backlash.( Or the space between each Gear tooth in the mesh.) I look for that, and the degree of tolerance the gears are spaced within the mesh.
@@AwestrikeFearofGods That's not actually true in modern 3d printers.
The kinds of belts and pulleys used are shaped for the belt and pulley curve to take practically all of the backlash. It's not a generic general purpose motion system.
Just try it yourself, pull on the belts on your printer. You can feel the slack but there is no backlash in the motion system.
If there was that much backlash the vibration compensation would be so much more complicated. You couldn't possibly see a single or just 3 peaks in the resonance frequency graph.
@@SquintyGears Even with a zero-backlash (i.e. preloaded) system, compliance allows for imprecise motion. Another example is the nonlinear variation of belt speed being greater for lower tooth-count gears of a given diameter.
@@AwestrikeFearofGods
Yes yes that's what you need to consider in general in motion systems.
The belt and pulley combos we're talking about aren't the pre-loaded kind of backlash removing. The teeth on the belt are there to prevent slipping and transfer more torque. That's further down the transfer of movement chain than the backlash that would happen at t=0.
In fact practically all of the slop in 3D printer belt motion systems are due to the elasticity of the belts not the tooth profile and pulley engagement. That's the part we need to preload. Whe tension, later the belt ages and slacks and needs to be replaced.
Good engineers designed parts for specific use cases. We could be using a bicycle's gear and chain to move the axis. But we don't, because it's not suitable. We're very far from the OG home printing days where every part of the printer was randomly picked from what was kinda available instead of what's actually good for the use case.
These are all real precision robotics motion system parts. We're at a point where the limits are in the mechanical rigidity and the processing power of the brains of the systems to compensate for things in software. And those are problems that have straightforward cost relations. Not a 2¢ part swap.
Software needs dev time. And you can build your printer as beefy as a mill if you want.
I was expecting the one killer feature to be "top mounted spool holder". :)
That's pretty nice too 😂
The ceramic heatbreak nozzle has fixed like 99% of heat creep clogging in the community's experience. Anyone with the stainless heatbreak version can ask for a free replacement. Also just a quick note that for absolute maximum quality on this and many core XY machines you should orient long straight parts 35-45 degrees rotated so it prints diagonal across the bed. :)
Woa.. never knew about that 45 diagonal thing. Why is that? Curious why that would be any better only because the bed is not a slinger so how does that help the print? Heck I would think the core x/y head having to move +1 in each direction for a straight line instead of just a seamless splurge of straight line output would be slower to print and potential for issues. Like when I print a large "drawer" (or enclosure to hold it).. I would have thought having it oriented along x or y would provide a stronger print overall.. so how does the angled alignment make it better?
@@b3owu1f So I am not a complete expert on this, but my basic understanding is that the least vibrations are generally produced moving diagonally. This will vary by printer design and even individual printer tuning, but I believe it is a fairly standard result. Look up "Polar Angle Energy Profile" in the Klippain-ShakteTune documentation and it will explain how to generate a chart and read it. Cartesian printers like bed slingers tend to do best at 90 degree angles while core XY tend to do best at 45 and 135 instead.
@@b3owu1fmy guess is because it's only using one motor at 45° so maybe less possibility for non synced movement?
Hey. Great review of the PLUS4. Can the hotend assembly be swapped to a Q1 Pro? I like the all in one nozzle assembly.
Thanks! Not sure but I think not.
Thanks for the solid look at the printer. Its so tempting to pick one up, but I just bought a P1S and AMS for the reliability because I have a tinkering problem lol.
I don't wanna give too much praise to qidi given they released the bad relay boards in the first place, but by the same token if they treat this like they did with the x-max 3 where they just straight up accepted all returns and send out significantly better models after the fact then they at least can have that as a plus to them.
I am waiting for bambu's next announcement purely because I'm more in the market for an idex machine or toolchanger and if reports are accurate their next one isn't to be just a bigger version of the current line.
I think that Qidi has hand picked/tuned their samples and not just taken random ones off the factory line, my bed level was 0.9 out of the box, with adjustment I got it down to about 0.35 but certainly can't get it any better than that.
That’s quite possible
Bought it on the day of release. Have only done one print with it, but it was nine hours PA-GF, turned out very nice but with horrible layer adhesion on the first layers. Don’t know if it is due to the filament (Bambu), or some errors trying to copy the Bambu defaults to qidi-slicer. Anyway, I doubt I’ll use this as a daily driver. The heat bed is just to slow getting up to temperature, adding a lot of time to small prints.
FWIW I generally think the max speed and acceleration advertised for any printer is supposed to be max before a mechanical issue of some type. Stepper drivers overheating, motors overheating, motors skipping steps, belts slipping, bearings binding, stuff like that. You will never get good quality out of using the max advertised specs for a printer.
There seems to be some misunderstanding on the role of belt pitch. Belt pitch width and depth affects transmission power, it does not play a roll in precision of motion. Precision in stepper motor systems comes from the step angle of the motors.
If you consider a 2mm pitch width belt on a 20 tooth pulley its 40mm of belt motion per rotation of the pulley. If you increase the number of teeth on the belt, and the teeth on the pulley it will still be 40mm of belt motion if the pulley is the same diameter as the 20 tooth pulley.
The smallest unit of belt motion you can achieve comes down to how small a rotation angle unit you can command or resolve. Larger pulleys produce more belt motion and smaller ones produce less for each rotation.
This is why in printer config files you won't see any reference to belt pitch and instead see rotation distance, step angle and micro steps.
1.5mm pitch belts would seem to just make it harder to find replacement parts instead of the very common 2mm pitch standard. I also wonder, but don't know for sure, if the smaller pitch could mean they are more prone to skipping.
Probably no problem with actual skipping. We're not at the limits of accelerations that such a pulley+belt can do. Missed steps are motor control system faults not mechanical, and that's what you'll probably see first when the head is too heavy for the acceleration (tork) asked from the system.
I'm not crazy about new nozzle. It was already difficult finding different types of nozzles until Trianglelabs made a v6 adapter. Being able to use all sorts of nozzle materials or even just hardened tips, coated nozzles, and high flow cht-type interiors are great options to have. Iirc, it was about half a year before a cht-type Qidi 0.4 nozzle was available, and then several more months before other diameters were available. How long will that take for the Plus 4? I guess that, the normal and safety revisions, and the release of their AMS, is another reason to wait to buy a Plus 4.
Proprietary parts are definitely a pain. Usually a good idea to wait a few months before buying a new Qidi printer anyways.
This printer was #1 on my list until I started hearing more about the overheating issues on that circuit board. I don’t want to risk burning my house down.
I would really love to get one.
Hi there - is this max flowrate test print available somewhere? I would like to test my own configuration (Voron / Rapido 2 HF).
@@lam_xyz it’s built in to OrcaSlicer.
i was very tempted until the two issues with the chamber heater were found... i'll wait awhile and see when they fix these issues, or if bambu comes out with a larger printer. 325x325 would be nicer :) but who knows what they are going to do.
I really appreciate your video and the time and effort you put into making it. I’ve already decided to purchase the Plus 4 with my tax return. Hopefully, by then Qidi will have addressed most, if not all, of the issues you have pointed out in your video.
You had bed level diagrams. One was tilted another was within 0.25mm. Which one was out of the box and what did you do to make it 0.25?
@@IrishZorg 0.25 was after I ran BED_TILT_ADJUST. The other was from the Q1 Pro also after running bed tilt adjust.
Did you remove the plastic film on the camera lens? seems so cloudy
I found mine was running at 640x480 but QIDI has instructions on their support site for changing it. Not sure if they have changed that in the lastest builds or not.
So I am torn on how I feel about having a heater issue (in the US) with this printer. On the one hand.. for $800 it gives you more value than many $2K+ engineering printers do, even beating the X1C at 25% or more cheaper. On the other hand.. though I know QIDI will soon fix the heating issue for US market (and frankly even the 220v world though its not nearly as pronounced).. I suspect (correct me if I am wrong) that MOST 3d printer owners not only are tinkerers of some sort, but often 3d print upgrades/changes to their printers.. and thankfully we have a LOT of smart folks that not only are engineers and know how to dissect and improve upon printers.. but then design and offer the STLs/etc for the rest of us to benefit from. My heater is bad.. so QIDI sent me a new one and got it in 2 days. I also requested the ceramic heat break option.. which I am not sure if that is the same thing you were talking about with regards to the clogging issue and they resolved? At any rate I got that too.. haven't put it in yet. But I ordered the parts (Omron relay, heat sink, etc) to fix the heater issue myself and honestly I am OK with this. Sure I would have preferred not to do that.. BUT.. on the flip side apparently the Omron is a MUCH better quality part than what they offer out of China (or at least more likely than what QIDI will fix the issue with). So.. I am not bothered by the "upgrade" if it solves the problem and ensures my heater is "better" than what future QIDI Plus 4 owners will get.
I will say I wasn't aware of the 3d print to upgrade the air flow on the extruder.. that's good to know so I'll have to print that once my printer is working again and look to upgrade that. I did buy the upgraded nozzle (made from adamantium ;) and a 2nd PEI sheet. Was hoping BIQU would offer their new cold/blue ones in this size, but not yet.
Pretty reasonable take I think a lot of people, including me, mostly align with. At $800 even without a chamber heater it is a good value. So once the issue is properly fixed, it's a great proposition. It's just unacceptable a safety issue was let out the door like that. Hopefully they make it right for everyone. My Plus4 has been nearly perfect, but I'm still getting a replacement board and may move to an off the shelf SSR unit later.
@@802Garage Is QIDI sending you a replacement SSR? I wasn't offered that.. even though I did just speak to them 3 days ago about my heater not working. In my case if I turn on the heater it immediately spikes the sensor in seconds to 140+ c and shuts things down. So I can't run the heater at all.
@@b3owu1f Contact them and their after-sales support will send you the parts you need. US users will get the latest SSR for free and extend the warranty for one year.
Carbon filters don't do anything about the ABS fumes, just the smells, so in some ways it's worse than not having the filter, as you're still inhaling the toxic fumes, even though you don't get the warning of the bad smell.
Mhhh, interesting. If that’s the case, it’s definitely problematic.
Printers will continue having vfa until manufacturer start to use teethed idlers for the teethed side of the belt again. My v0 has its drivers tuned for the motors and used current while my trident hasn't. Both use moons motors, so pretty low vfa from the start. Guess what, the trident has much better surface quality than the v0. There is one important difference, the v0 uses bearing stacks everywhere, the trident uses toothed idlers too. See prusa mk4, even its 0,9 degree steppers didn't solve the vfa situation, only improved it. Also uses smooth idlers. The problem with smooth idlers becomes even more pronounced if we were to use the belt tension specified by gates/the manufacturer which is in general higher than the user manuals of the printers suggest
Would you be able to provide a list of settings for the best quality prints? Speed is not an issue as I prefer quality over speed. Thank you.
@@TechVirtue the main things I did are: disabled slow down for overhangs (the acceleration / deceleration was causing issues), and calibrated pressure advance. Besides that, I was just using the default profiles.
If you want super clean prints I'd also recommend turning on "Don't slow down for outer walls" in the filament cooling settings and using inner/outer/inner wall order. Also turn on small area flow compensation. Tuning your extrusion rate and PA values first is always most important IMO. If you want to go even deeper you should get the Shake&Tune download and dive into input shaping and vibration profiles to find the best speeds for your printer.
What temperature and filament did you get that flow rate?
I've been printing daily at 25mm³s with sunlu pla+ at 225c
@@freedomofmotion eSun PLA+ at 210 I believe.
@ygk3d Ah fair enough that's quite a low temperature for high speed printing.
Sunlu filaments come with temperature ranges for various printer speeds now.
50-100 100-200 and 200-300 mms
I'm achieving those flow rates with the default speed profiles but 0.25mm layer height and 0.6 extrusion width for the inner walls and infills.
I'm printing PETG-cf at 20mm³s, ASA-CF at 24mm³s and TPU 95a at 15 mm³s I think I could push a little bit higher but I think for TPU there's just too much Bowden tube and so too much friction to go much higher.
I think if you're going to express the big difference in print quality and how great it is you shouldn't show a part with tons of ringing. There's tons of vertical lines present in the example at the beginning. As the light catches the part they are very visible.
I was going to buy this printer after seeing the first few reviews. I now know that the chance that one of these printers will become a calibration and repair nightmare.
It seems to be hit and miss. Some people have had a really rough time. I guess I got lucky.
In your opinion, it is better to buy, for example, creality K1 max? There are a lot of problems with the K1 max, but the K1 max (the whole line of K1 printers) also has a large support community. I need something with a table around 300x300 and can't find anything interesting.
@@bsw6583 I don’t have the K1 Max but based on my experience with the K1 and other Creality products I’d sooner recommend the Plus 4.
@@bsw6583 Personally, I would not get a K1 Max and even with the potential issues I would recommend a Plus4.
@@ygk3d I think it's more likely that printer manufacturers pre select the units they ship to influencers like yourself. That's why the more serious channels purchase the hardware themselves to rule that out.
1:24 why do people see this as such a big upgrade? Plastic is lighter and as far as I know more shatter resistant. Are there significant advantages to glass that outweighs these disadvantages, other than "it looks nicer"?
Looks really promising but the quality issues is a recurring theme. Based on reviews of their previous printers that I've watched they seem like they rely on using RUclips reviewers as their QA department. I'm also not a big fan of every manufacturer making their own nozzle standard. I don't want to have to make international orders just for a nozzle. And their EU warehouse currently has no nozzles in stock for this machine.
Yeah, RUclipsrs are used as a QC department WAY too often. Don’t they realize it’s bad press to have your product beta tested in public? And I definitely agree on the nozzle. Would be much better if it just used an open source standard.
Great review thanks
The misunderstanding of Shaper graphs drives me up the wall. Alright, so a basic explanation, a Shaper Test tells you how fast the printer can go while being able to account and counteract the vibrations that cause quality issues with Input Shaper turned off. The accelerations and speeds on most stock profiles on printers are lower because for the most part, the biggest problem with high speed printing is that you cannot cool the plastic fast enough (hence why we do crazy mods like CPAP), but having the ability and motion to do the super high accelerations is nice, which from what I've noticed the Plus 4 does effortlessly (and it better do considering the specs)
Just the shaper bothers you? The conviction that it's due to the belt pitch change is wild to me 😂.
@@SquintyGears There are several things that drive me up the wall, not only with this channel but with several channel that either don't know what they are talking about (which would be forgivable if they just came into like a popular Discord server for example like Armchair or Annex to ask questions) or ones that just go along with the buzz words and random guesses that makes my life miserable when I gotta counteract videos to recommend people printers. At the very least the Plus 4 is a great printer that is easy to recommend...after they fix the SSR issue
Where you aware at the time when you started filming that the electronics that govern the chamber heater (w/ 120vac models) is highly susceptible to catching fire?
Qidi has been working on a fix & as of today, sending affected customers replacement boards.
I have the knowledge to replace these boards but i do not recommend customers who arent confident working on Mains AC circuitry attempt this.
New customers who receive 110-120vac models should absolutely know this up front!
I filed a complaint with the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission regarding this issue.
At that time, Qidi was working on a solution and i agreed to accept the replacement.
We'll see if Qidi issues a recall.
To be clear, there has not been a single instance of a fire yet. There is a component on the board highly susceptible to overheating and damaging the components on the board. I am not saying there is zero risk of fire, but when people drastically overstate the case it makes it sound like there have been fires already. He does cover this topic in the video.
9mm@@802Garage
SORT OF......having less pitch on belt does not directly result in the belt moving less with each motor step, the minimum belt movement per step is a function of the smallest step (or 1.2 step) the motor can move *combined* with the radius of the pulley. Still a finer pitch may result in a smoother print...or not depending on speeds/resonance. I think proper tooth profiles of timing belts were designed to provide smooth linear movement at the tooth engagement geometery. Chains have similar considerations there were "Hyvo " chains to address the geometry for similar reasons.
the biggest vfa improvement for me was 0.9 steppers and linear rail mod on my k1 max. the dual x rod design is a failure. not even a bedslinger with linear rails will have such bad vfa
How does actual 6200 mm/s2 compare to X1C and other?
@@IrishZorg the quality is still good at 10,000 is just that the sharpness of details is somewhat lost. The details get smoothed. Without converting my X1C to the X1 Plus community firmware I have no idea what the input shaping results for that would be.
@ygk3d thanks!
The A1/mini also uses belts with 1.5mm pitch
Interesting. That along with the great single gear extruder design may help explain why they have so little VFA.
@ yup, but any printer can have little VFA’s if well built and with good quality belts and bearings, and extruder of course.
My Voron Trident has slightly less VFA’s than my A1 mini, but since the minis belt pitch is smaller it also makes it less noticeable
Interesting. Thanks for pointing this out!
you could literally! use a pulley with a V-Belt as long as its slack free and tight you get the precision your motors and your gear/belt/pulley gear ratio will give you lol ... as you contact inner teeth in a radius seeing the belt outside pulley inside you reduce the tenency to slack to basically zero in comparison to a pulley that has to drive a straight belt so even that argument is not really worth the discussion
Why QIDI uses only 2 Z motors, you need 3 (or more) for full bed leveling. And oh, belt patternsdo not cause vertical artefacts. Those patters would be horizontal...
A horizontal pattern distributed vertically is literally what FVA are.
Yeah, they don't have full bed tramming. 3 points is needed to define a plane. But 2 points of adjustment at least lets you eliminate any left/right tilt. Forward/backward tilt is still possible but the bed is constrained in that dimension by the bushing and linear rods, so It should be relatively level. And to your second point, belts do cause VFAs... check the comment below by 802Garage.
I have the Qidi plus 4 and i print with PLA+ and since last week, i cannot print anymore. The hotend become always clogged. I clean the nozzle perfectly. Try again and it became clog again. QIDI is sendi g me a new hotend
As he covered in the video, the early version nozzles were prone to heat creep clogging. Best thing you can do is print slightly colder usually and with the top off and door open. Once you get the ceramic heatbreak nozzle, your issue should be solved.
@802Garage i change the hotend fan for a more powerfull and it work for 40min than.. clog. I will wait for my new hotend.
I am looking forword to a vertion of this printer that has the filament holder inside of the heated chamber to avoide moister absorbtion.
@@CasGRos that would be nice!
Although 3d printers are becoming really good compared to the early boom of reprap kit around 2016-2020 but in general 3d printers from China still suffer from issues that shouldn't exist in the first place. It seems like the 'engineers' that designed these printers don't really have enthusiasm nor have much experience of using a 3d printer in the first place, and what makes matters worse are most of them don't really know what to test for before committing to productions and tends to treat the customers as their internal alpha testers....
I don't get the Z offset / leveling. Why, if it already is able to detect/set z offset with nozzle probing, why they added a magnetic sensor to do bed leveling. It doesn't make sense, no? Added weight, and probably less precision than if they would use nozzle probing like the rest newest printers that have flawless first layers.. Weird.
Yeah, I don't get it either.
It boggles my mind why they choose glass over PC panels. PC has better heat insulation and doesn't break.
Looks nice, feels nice, doesn't scratch. They had gotten a lot of complaints about scratching and were trying to please the customer base. Reviews were constantly talking about all the plastic, so partially blame reviewers. FWIW the printer is pretty well insulated as is, even with gaps.
Prusa mk4 should have no vfas as it has no vfas motors so there is definitely something wrong with your printer and you should contact their support. I think they even advertise that feature.
They use 0.8 degree steppers on the MK4 which I believe is why the make the claims of no VFAs. They also claim a perfect first layer which I’ve found to be untrue in practice on my XL. The MK4 prints are good but if you look close on a shiny part I can see artifacts I would describe as VFAs.
@@ygk3d0.9
@@ygk3dyes I had the same problem with the "perfect first layer". I don't remember though anything about the vfas. Excuse me but, shouldn't you contact them and tell them to help you fix these issues you are having? If you already did, what was their response?
@@AngelVenomous I just added a z offset override in the slicer and moved on. That fixed the issue. Couldn’t be bothered to deal with support when I already have a solution that works for me.
@@ygk3dwell yeah that's an easy fix. I was mainly talking about the vfas.
How to fix vfa with this crazy simple trick...
Just raise speed by 10%
so all the drawbacks of a bambu printer with none of the benefits, such a shame
it makes no difference betwen a 2mm or a 1,5 mm belt. My Prusa MK4 and my ZeroG are printing as fine as this printer, or better...
Belt pitch has nothing to do with VFAs. 9mm belts is what help to mitigate that, though my trident is still running 6mm belts and has no VFAs. 1.5mm belt pitch is not going to get copied, it's not standard, hard to source, doesn't evenly fit into any steps/mm math. Please actually research the physics behind the cause of VFAs -- throwing out the "killer feature" as the 1.5mm belt pitch is kinda silly considering the killer filler feature is the fact this machine's chamber heater SSR will set your house on fire.
Belt pattern ringing is a thing, the finer pitch makes it less noticeable.
The belt pitch and size are contributors to VFA issues, even if he overstated the case. The lack of VFA from Plus4 prints is very noticeable.
lately you tube is full of killers
Travel accelerate can go beyond 6200
True, good point.
Qidi Fire Hazard
0:38
Only your prints look this bad.
Have you ever printed a shiny PETG part? Almost all printers show artifacts like depicted. Some are worse than others. From my testing, the Q1 Pro was really bad.
first
Print Quality? All those prints at the start riddled with VFAs/ringing/artifacts. Simply horrible.
One of the prints he showed was from another printer. That was the point.