Lots of updates in this one, so here is a summary of what we will be covering:
- Printer Hardware Upgrades:
Drag chain
P+F Probe
Pulleys & Cages
Right to Repair upgrades - Safety and Compliance:
UL Testing
Minor Hardware Tweaks
Mornsun Sanctions - American Shipping Update:
Why the delay
Free upgrades to V1.2
Repair Centres - Firmware Update
Main firmware update to 3.5.1
Better settings for improved quality
Homing sequence changes - Official GitHub
- Orca Slicer
New upgrades for the printers by default! Officially now version 1.2
Did you know that today is our two year anniversary from the first time we showed out prototypes in the public. And since then we have made quite a few machines, talked to various industries and customers, and learned a lot about how our machines are being used and abused out in the wild. We have even learned a lot about ourselves, and ironed out loads of little complications in the production process, streamlining production considerably. When we started making machines, it used to take 6 full days to build, calibrate and validate every machine. Now the build time is just under 2 days, and plans in the works to reduce that to 1 day.
As we have been growing as a company, both in confidence and scale, we can use our new found experience to directly improve our printers. Construct 1 is being upgraded with a whole load of internal changes, some small, some a bit more noticeable.
Upgrade 1: Drag chains
You know what isn’t a drag; drag chains.
Let’s start with the most obvious change; drag chains. Now don’t get me wrong; cable looms are fantastic. They are quick to build, simple to repair, and accessible with any skill level. Just grab some tape and get wrapping.
However, we grew to hate our looms. From a production and logistics side, the looms were really good, but after extended and heavy testing, we were noticing some little annoyances and quite frankly became a sensory nightmare for me. You see, the looms have to be wrapped tightly in a special type of fabric tape for safety and to keep their shape. This was quite a considerable time cost in the factory every time a loom was to be wrapped. Made even worse by the fact that if a printer fails testing, to replace any part in the print head, the loom has to be unwrapped and rewrapped. Furthermore, after a few months, the special adhesive wets through the fabric slightly, making the entire loom slightly sticky once you unwrap the tape and over extreme use cases, the shape of the loom can start to look a bit, sad.
Cue, drag chains. Super simple to attach and each link having its own flap means that any need to access the cables for maintenance or modifications becomes trivially easy. The chains even reduce the height of the printer meaning anyone who is rack mounting the machines can now fit one more printer per rack. The drag chains look better, and from a user’s perspective, much nicer and easier to work with.
Upgrade 2: Pepperl+ Fuchs inductive probe
I think everyone is familiar with the blue tipped z probes found on a myriad of industrial CNC machines & 3D printers. They are exceedingly reliable, with no moving parts, massively available and very robust. Our blue tipped Z-probes are accurate down to 2 microns, and repeatable across thousands of homing cycles. The trick with getting accurate output from these probes is to not undersize them, the smaller the probe means it has to be closer to the bed, and one of the main issues with inductive sensors is they are affected by heat. A hot probe and a cold probe will measure different values.
This is mitigated by correctly sizing the probe for the application and accuracy required, and for us we use the medium/large formfactor of M12. However we found this wasn’t perfect, or at least not up to our rigorous standards.
Internally we have a process that when we print a part, we always watch the first layer go down just to make sure everything is set up correctly. This includes moving the bed up or down to get the perfect first layer using the baby-step feature. And we kinda took this for granted. We shouldn’t expect you to have to do this periodically, nor should this be a method that you should be required to learn.
New probe is higher quality, you can tell because its green which reflects that it costs more
The reason we have this process is because we change materials in our print farm regularly, one day we might be printing PLA, the next PolyCarbonate. Two materials with very different temperatures, that will heat soak the probe slightly differently. It’s a very subtle difference in the z-probe offset, and most won’t ever notice it. But it is there, and it’s something we can address.
We have massively upgraded the Z-probe quality. Industrial standard was not cutting it, so industrial gold quality it is.
After consulting with P+F directly, our new probe was selected due to it’s extended temperature range tolerancing, meaning the value of the probe is much much more consistent across a wider range of temperatures. While we cannot promise you won’t have to touch your baby-step button again, this does bring us that much closer to never needing to watch that first layer go down.
Upgrade 3: Pulleys and Cages
In a subset of cases, we have found our supplier for bolts has accidentally mixed some grade 10 steel, into our orders of grade 12. Now what does this mean?
Normally this would mean nothing, as everything is designed with a huge safety factor well above anything like this causing an issue. However, our pulleys are of a cantilever design. Being bolted and locked at the bottom of a bolt, and then at the top rides the pulley. We effectively use the stiffness of the bolt to hold the pulley square to the frame. Even this is still fine for most printing cases. However, when you push the limits of the machine, or overtighten the belts, the pulleys can flex ever so slightly inwards. To find this, it took us months of searching for the root cause, but we did eventually.
Prototype metal capped cage block
To fix this permanently, we will be moving forward with a cage system for the pulleys. By having a hard top and bottom this effectively makes any flexure of the bolts impossible.
We have also found a much quicker fix that can be easily retrofitted into preexisting machines. Simply add 2 more nuts onto the tall pulleys, this effectively makes the threaded part of the bolt (which was the bit flexing) twice as thick, reducing the amount of flex to less than 0.1mm.
Upgrade 4: Right to repair improvements
It’s safe to say, we side with the right to repair movement. It’s scummy to design a product to be as hard as possible for self-repair. At the end of the day, we sell machinery, and machinery will need maintenance and repair at some point in it’s life.
So we thought about what we could do to improve the ease of repair, and our answer is Wago quick lever wire connectors. A few Universities have been having some fun adding custom components, and some community members will inevitably mod the printers’ internals. So to make that process easier, we have added Wago clips to all major wires. Easily disconnect the printer, the back panel or the heater bed in seconds with no tools required.
A bank of wago connectors on the live wires
Safety and Compliance
I am quite frankly scared with how unsafe most printers on the market are. As some of you already know, we have been exceedingly litigious with getting our printers independently validated for both safety and function, and the stories we hear constantly about how companies either skirt the law, or down right lie about the tests they have done is extraordinary. Safety should be one of those things that do not get compromised just to get to market faster.
To sell to the UK and EU, we have full CE and UKCA certifications. This includes many directives that we have to follow and meet to make sure our printers are safe. And thankfully we have passed every single one with flying colours.
But that is not all, we want to go one further.
1x UK and 1x US printer sitting in a testing facility
As we prepare to ship our first units to America. We sent two machines to one final 3rd party safety and compliance test house. Now let me be clear, we did not have to do this. Our current testing and safety checks is already more than enough, it has cost us tens of thousands to get this far, yet we are deciding to go even further.
We are going to be the first 3D printer that is UL certified
This will be the highest level of safety checks that we are aware of that any 3D printer has been subjected to. We have even sent individual components like our heater beds, or hot end components for specific lab testing, so that every individual part of our machine is UL-Recognised. This is a monumental achievement and it’s completion opens up being able to finally ship units to America, knowing our machines are built to the highest standard possible.
There have been some minor changes to the machines in order to make our printers fully compliant to the rigorous safety standards of UL, such as some cabling now has a double sheath to protect against accidental damage, and a new improved “don’t put your fingers in that” mesh has been added in some areas behind the back panel, but unless pointed out, you probably wouldn’t have noticed the difference.
Some people call this digital weave, and pay lots of money for it. Or you can just print it – who knew
Mornsun Sanctions
As a few may have seen, lots of companies have suddenly been in damage control because of the new US sanctions against Russia. These sanctions include some other non Russian companies and one of them is a global PSU company called Mornsun. Mornsun make very high quality power supplies…which we use inside our printers.
This is absolutely awful news. All of a sudden our suppliers have canceled all outstanding orders over night. We physically cannot sell printers with these PSUs inside to certain countries, and now we have a huge issue of finding a replacement – which by the way, has huge safety and compliance testing implications.
We thankfully have some things going for us. We are in full control of our company, extremely agile, and know how to play the game of logistics. Currently we have two shortlisted PSU replacements. One from Mean Well, and another from Delta. Both these units are tied in quality with our current Mornsun units.
This is good news, and with some fingers crossed, will mean absolutely zero impact in our logistical pipeline, and un-interrupted fulfilment of printers to customers.
American Shipping Update
As you have probably read above in the compliance update section, one of the major things we needed to tick off to ship to America is a higher level of safety certification.
To come to that conclusion has not been easy. The amount of misinformation we have been given is outstanding. Contacting anyone in shipping will say one thing. Contacting shops and resellers will say another. Contacting specialists in import and export will say conflicting information in the same sentence. It has been a mess, a nightmare and frankly it’s almost like no-one actually wants to import or export at all. We have been given mandatory sentences like “you must have X or your machines will be rejected at port” all the way to “just don’t put a label on it and it’ll slide through”.
So we had to do the hard decision of choosing our own path that will hopefully not get us arrested or fined. And one of these ways was to get full UL testing completed.
Now let me tell you a little secret, something to share the pain. We only just found out, we didn’t need UL to ship to America, which means we could have shipped the remaining US Kickstarter printers ALMOST HALF A YEAR AGO!
You guys have been excessively patient with us, a delay of this long is a very long time so this is how we are going to make it up to you;
by scrapping all the US printers we have already built, and upgrading everyone’s to V1.2 .
Yup, we are going to put all those fresh USA printers, into our own print farm, and instead build you all brand new machines. All the latest improvements to the design, and the best build quality we can offer thanks to the testing and improvements made inside our factory. Additionally, we have changed how we ship our printers, I won’t go into too much detail but the new method is 1000% more reliable. It does cost us a LOT more, but notice how I said us, not you. What you have already paid for shipping is it, any changes and upgrades we made on our side is so we can better serve you, not an additional charge you have to pay. It’s the least we could do for how patient you have been.
Another thing we have been working on, is US based repair centres. Whilst our printers are exceedingly robust, it is inevitable that a machine may become damaged over time, either it being from shipping halfway across the world, or just bad luck after 6 months. To aid we have been looking at places in the US itself (instead of requiring you to ship the printer back to the UK) that can take care of the repair in the event that it’s not a job suitable for home, or you don’t feel confident or have enough time to do it yourself.
Firmware Update
The great people at Duet3D have been working on a huge list of improvements and updates to the firmware of the printers. The list of updates is frankly massive so if you want to have a gander that’s up to you. For now I would simply click the following link, download the .zip, and update your printer’s firmware. It’s a simple drop in update.
There are instructions in the manual for how to send the .zip to the printer. The process is simple: go to the “machine specific” tab, and click install update. Select the zip file and wait for the update to process.
https://github.com/Duet3D/RepRapFirmware/releases/download/3.5.1/Duet2and3Firmware-3.5.1.zip <- Update link here
Improved settings for better printing
Thanks to the data we have collected when building the printers over the last 2 years in addition to the new firmware, we have some new commands we can add to the printers to make them perform even better. To gain access to these improvements you are going to have to manually put them into your printer’s config files.
Inside Config.g, the following commands have been modified/added/improved:
Input shaping has a new value
M593 P”EI2″ F55 L0.1; input shaping
The new value is L0.1 Add this to the end of your M593 (input shaping) command. This massively improves the performance of the input shaper on small sections
A new setting “material feedforward” has been optimised.
M309 S0.022 P0 ;material feedforward
Axis limits for the C1 & XL printer has changed.
Replace the M208 command with the following
C1
M208 X227 Y260 Z180 S0
XL
M208 X327 Y370 Z400 S0
This adds a safety margin to the edges of the print volume. in certain scenarios the print head may collide with the linear rod clamps, this setting removes that possibility.
Homing sequence changes
To improve the quality of the homing sequence, the Homex.g Homey.g Homez.g have been updated. This update isn’t required, but recommended as it fixes a few edge case scenarios that may wear certain parts over time faster than expected.
The macro “Quick home” previously named “filament change home” has been updated as well.
To get these updates, you will have to download them from our github: Construct3D-AM/Construct-1: 3D printer CAD files, Printer Profiles, Printable Parts, etc. (github.com)
Official GitHub account
Did you know we had an official GitHub repo for our printers? If not, now you do.
The repo is where we put all our updates, printable files, CAD and so forth. If you want to check for firmware updates, or need to print a replacement part, I highly recommend going to our GitHub first as it probably has what you need inside.
Official Orca Slicer support
We are officially listed inside Orca Slicer now. It has been a journey to get here, but it’s well worth it. Seeing our printers listed in an official bit of software is a dream come true.
Our printers already have presets for 2 and a half materials (Pla, PetG, and PetG high flow), and 4 different slicer presets (Quality, Standard, Industrial, Draft).
Our printers in Orca ♥
Orca has quickly become our favourite slicer as it has every feature we could hope for, but is also user friendly so complete beginners don’t feel overwhelmed.
It is also with this announcement that we will be halting progress on getting official support for Ultimaker Cura, and Prusa slicer. We are a very small team and spending time to make optimised profiles to suit the quirks of individual slicers is unfortunately too much of a time cost that could be spent in improving our printers instead.
Our printers will still work flawlessly on Cura and Prusa slicer, but to get to a stage where you can see our printers listed in their official printer lists, just to simplify the setup slightly, is a bit too inefficient when Orca Slicer does everything (in our opinion) better and is more accessible.
That is pretty much that for this update. This update log was huge, and lots has had to be cut down or removed otherwise it’ll just be a book of text instead of a wall of text.
Jacob signing off.
P.S The fact we make the safest printer on the market is actually insane.
