Creality Ender 5 - new purchase

After looking at the Ender 3 Pro, I ended up ordering a Creality Ender 5 - it had free shipping
Delivery is supposed to be about 3 weeks so time to catch up on the forum and brush up on my 3D printing knowledge.

I do have an Ord Hadron I've have for 6 years or so but a recent move to a new place has seen it languish in a cupboard. it needs a new ramps board and the hotend needs fixing/replacing. I do have a e3d hotend to do this - one day.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/24/2019 01:50AM by geoffs.

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Geoff
Geeveston, Tasmania

Well looks like I WONT be getting this printer.
After the order was placed and my credit card debited, I was advised that there was a $A60 remote delivery charge to be paid before shipping.
I understand the need for this fee in some cases (I'm in the statest capital city so not sure how that's remote) What I object to was the fact the money was taken from my card before I was advised of this fee.
No I'm going through the hassle of trying to get a refund.

Not Happy!

Pity because I'd heard good things about this printer and Creality in general.

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Geoff
Geeveston, Tasmania

Turns out that the site I tried to buy the printer through, was not the official site.
Ended up buying the Ender 5 from Creality's online store with no issues.

About 6 weeks worth of printing on it now and so far, I'm happy with the purchase.
The only mods I've done to date are to replace the plastic extrude with metal parts, replace the crappy bowden fittings and printing on 3mm glass.
Future mods include an MKS Gen L controller with TMC2208 drivers. Replacing the existing fans with much quieter units and perhaps incorporating the Rasberry Pi running Octoprint, into the electronics enclosure (bit of a squeeze).
To date, I've only printed PLA and PETG. I do have some TPU that I've tried but the extruder really isn't up to it.

It has got me reinterested in the old Ord Hadron again so it's getting a bit of refurbishment, not sure what I'll use it for .

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Geoff
Geeveston, Tasmania

I too recently purchased the Ender 5 although I specifically ordered it from the Chinese Creality site to make sure it was one of their machines and not a knockoff. To my surprise, it shipped from a warehouse in Kentucky. I did print a few additions for it for supporting the bed wiring, cover for the back side of the LCD, a boarder for the wiring hole in the case, and then I’ve added a BLTouch V3 to mine along with flashed the boot loader and updated it to Marlin 1.1.9, and also added some TL Smoothers to the drivers. It’s a lot quieter machine than my other ones that runs a Duet 0.8.5.

I’ve been extremely happy with it so far. I have plans to put a Titan Aero on it to make it direct drive, and if they ever stop revising the Duet boards I might put one on it to upgrade the Creality board. However, so far with the factory board it’s running like a champ printing from the SD card so there’s little reason to change it at the moment. As far as a Chinese kit, it’s been a very pleasant experience and for anyone wanting a low cost ($300) printer, it’s definitely worth it.

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PDBeal
I did print a few additions ... TL Smoothers to the drivers. It’s a lot quieter machine than my other ones that runs a Duet 0.8.5.

Tried the TL smoothers on the Duet 0.8.5. Effect was negligable on sound level. Perhaps the E3D hotend fan was just too noisey in comparison to the quietening! No effect on part quality for me. v0.6 and 0.8.5 are essentially the same board save the addition of an extra driver and hotend heater controller on the v0.8.5. It's the A4982 drivers with 16 microsteps which are noisey. That said there was another post on here abould a mod to the A4982 step sticks which significantly quietened them. I'm meaning to check the schematics to see if that is alread appied to the Duets.

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PDBeal
I’ve been extremely happy with it so far. I have plans to put a Titan Aero on it to make it direct drive, and if they ever stop revising the Duet boards I might put one on it to upgrade the Creality board.

Had significant problems with a genuine Titan extruder. It was out performed by the machines original reprap extruder. Perhaps due to being a very fussy build, perhaps the aero is better. Personally I'd check out Bondtech BMG extruders. I'm about to start working with a clone as cash is tight at the moment. Not got the build quality of the original bondtech but hoping it's easier to live with than the titan.

Why would you expect the Duet boards to stop revising? I would exepct any company working in open source products to evolve fast in order to stay ahead of the east asian cloners which most companies simply can't compete with on a pure coat basis. 0.6 and 0.8.5 are old hat now. Duet 2 (wifi or ethernet) have been around for a few years now and are very capable boards. The Maestro is a cut down version to get a cheaper offering and the incoming Duet 3 is a premium offering that is likely to bring in many new features and drive big steppers directly but realistically not aimed at taking a massive market share of more standard printers.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/24/2019 04:09AM by WesBrooks.

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WesBrooks
Tried the TL smoothers on the Duet 0.8.5. Effect was negligable on sound level. Perhaps the E3D hotend fan was just too noisey in comparison to the quietening! No effect on part quality for me. v0.6 and 0.8.5 are essentially the same board save the addition of an extra driver and hotend heater controller on the v0.8.5. It's the A4982 drivers with 16 microsteps which are noisey. That said there was another post on here abould a mod to the A4982 step sticks which significantly quietened them. I'm meaning to check the schematics to see if that is alread appied to the Duets.

I've not tried TL Smoothers on my Duet 0.8.5 boards. I've only put them on the Creality Metzi 1.1.4 board that was in the Ender 5. It did have that noticeable salmon skin affect before the TL smoothers, and after it was gone. But it was quite right from the start with or without the TL Smoothers.

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WesBrooks
Had significant problems with a genuine Titan extruder. It was out performed by the machines original reprap extruder. Perhaps due to being a very fussy build, perhaps the aero is better. Personally I'd check out Bondtech BMG extruders. I'm about to start working with a clone as cash is tight at the moment. Not got the build quality of the original bondtech but hoping it's easier to live with than the titan.

From the (4) CoreXY machines that I run, (3) of them have Genuine E3D Titan paired with a Genuine E3D V6 and I've not had any trouble out of any of them. The other one has the Flexion extruder on it for dealing with Ninjaflex. When I had a Genuine E3D Volcano on one it only needed a tweak in retraction distance, but I've not had any problems with any of the Titans that I've got. The original Titan I bought, the only modification I did to it was buying the thumb screw upgrade that was shipped with the later versions. And so far, the Titan paired with a Mirror Titan on top of the Genuine E3D Cyclops setup I have works very well also. I did take care when building and installing them to the point I used a 200 grit sandpaper on the pancake stepper motor shaft to make sure there were no rough edges that would dig into the idler wheel mechanism.

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WesBrooks
Why would you expect the Duet boards to stop revising? I would exepct any company working in open source products to evolve fast in order to stay ahead of the east asian cloners which most companies simply can't compete with on a pure coat basis. 0.6 and 0.8.5 are old hat now. Duet 2 (wifi or ethernet) have been around for a few years now and are very capable boards. The Maestro is a cut down version to get a cheaper offering and the incoming Duet 3 is a premium offering that is likely to bring in many new features and drive big steppers directly but realistically not aimed at taking a massive market share of more standard printers.

I'm not expecting them to stop development, but I am waiting for them to get to a stable point. There was a very short time between their Wifi 1.0 board and the 1.04 board. Similarly there were a few revisions in a short amount of time on the Duet Ethernet board, and even it appears to be a hacked version of a Duet Wifi to add Ethernet with that board sandwiched on top. For the price they're asking for the new Duet 2, I'm not interested in buying one just to get yet another minor revision board. That happened to me when I purchased the 4 PanelDue boards over a 3 month period which forced me to design yet another case for the 7" display. Don't get me wrong, developing new stuff is great but with the number of quick revisions gives the impression they went to market without proper testing and engineering.

With the PanelDue revision fiasco I went through, I probably wouldn't buy a Duet 2 until they've released the Duet 3. I definitely wouldn't buy the Wifi version, and I'm not fond of how the Duet 2 Ethernet looks hacked together with that sandwich board either. And although the Duet Maestro might appear to be "cutdown", it looks well designed and has some nice features to support some non-duet hardware. Increased stepper motor current doesn't matter to me based on how I'm using the Duet 0.8.5 boards. And some of the expansion capabilities aren't material enough for most printers yet. The only interesting feature that the expansion boards provide is the ability to have 3 Z motors for automatic bed leveling. The multicolor hotend provides more issues than benefits for most of my prints, so that wouldn't play a role in the decision to purchase one or not.

I'm not clued up on the PanelDue revisions but I've used both the seperate board processor/and the integral. Both of these have been equally capable.

As far as I'm aware none of the minor changes on the on the duet 2 have been show stoppers. Addition of fuses for example has been a wise step that merely reduces the need to use off board fuses and protects users who are less thorough with their wiring.

Rather than be a sogn of bad engoneering I think the small revisions are taking advantage of small batch size manufacturing rather than just running on with a known weakness.

Anyway, is four revisions since the first schematic for duet 2 in July 2016 really that bad? How many tweaks did RAMPS get in it's active period?

I've added stepper dampers and they did make quite a bit of difference to the noise. No evidence of steppers running hot (X axis does get to about 50C)
I've just received my TMC2208 drivers and the next step is to install those with an MKS Gen L and TFT32 LCD. Another mod is to add a 5V DC-DC converter to run the Raspberry Pi for Octoprint. I have a supercapacitor based UPS for the Pi that will shut it down correctly when I turn the printer off - or at least it will when the above mods are done.

Biggest complaint I've got about the Ender 5 is the noise of the power supply fan! The Landy power supply that Creality currently supply is no where near the quality of the Meanwell that used to be fitted to the Ender 5. The fan in the PS is not temperature controlled and runs all the time. I intend replacing the fan but it will mean stripping off the printed cover on the electronics enclosure to get at the PS mounting screws :-(

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Geoff
Geeveston, Tasmania