Geeetech Prusa i3 X review

Hey guys, I have probed around and been looking for a descent priced printer for about 6 months now. I am a Controls Engineer/Maintenance by trade and have worked with my hands for quite sometime now. I was pondering on a couple different makes and models but settled on this one. I can say I read all the reviews and they were about 50/50 but I'm really really glad I chose this one so far. I received it about 3 weeks ago right befor Christmas. I'll make this short and sweet and you guys feel free to ask me anything that's on your mind. I can tell you this..............It took me about 18 hours to build. I bought the one made out of Acrylic. If you have never worked with Acrylic, it's not forgiving at the least. You have to be extra careful when tightening everything. I had absolutely no problems building this machine. The directions were a little off here and there, but if you have common sense, you will succeed. Only one small issue I had was exactly what other reviewers were saying about the shafts not being totally straight and my were maybe a little out but not enough to hurt anything. I did have to turn up the amperage a small bit on my Z axis stepper motors. Other than that, I am totally happy with the prints I have been getting so far. I can say I have had great luck printing right from the get go.



Now having been using it for the past couple weeks, the "what ifs" are coming into play. The machine comes with a 12v power supply at so many amps, I'm not exactly sure because I'm wrinting this at work right now, lol, but the only trouble I'm having, and it's not really trouble, is waiting on the heatbed to heat up to 100c or so for ABS. PLA works like a dream keeping the heatbed at around 65 to 70 but I find that with the 12v power supply powering everything, it's very hard for it to heat up to around 100c. So right now I'm in the process of trying to find a SSR or a Mosfet that I can hook a 24v supply to just for the heatbed. Again this is just a short review on my opinion of the Prusa i3 x and I'm totally happy with it I will post some pics and I'm in the process of starting to make some videos for Youtube. Thanks guys and like I said let me know if you have any questionsAttachment 8284Attachment 8285Attachment 8286Attachment 8287Attachment 8288

I know this is old but I suspected this problem on my stuff so I did something about it. From the above post we have a stated symptom of a long time for the bed to heat up and a suspected fault in the power supplies output. If the 3d printer were using more amps or current than the power supply is capable of creating we can see this manifest itself as the supply voltage being pulled down below 12v. So I got these tiny digital volt gauges from ebay and made this little housing for it and mounted one on each printer. The first one I mounted front and center where all can see..

http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...toWiz/44_4.jpg

After seeing it never change its value and realizing that I only need or want to look at it when I suspect a problem, I mounted the one on my geeetech i3 to the inside of the frame. It is still easy to see if I want to look at it, but not in plain sight..

http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/11_25.jpg

After seeing a constant 12.3v on the geeetech i3's 200x200 bed during heating and stable 12.0v on my custom machine heating a 300x200 bed I realized that I am not having a voltage problem. So I loaded up the software I use to interface with my printers, Repetier. I connected to the printer and sent a m303 e-1 c8 s65 command. When the printer is done running it's tests it will give you a set of kp ki and kd numbers that you can enter into marlin's configuration.h tab to fine tune your heater. then after that is done, you can rerun the m303 command at the higher temp and maybe even a few more cycles just to make sure you are as accurate as can be. so maybe the next command should be m303 e-1 c10 s100. Let it run its test, and update the kp ki and kd tables in your marlin. Then if you want you can run a command m303 e-0 c10 s230 and wait for good values to go enter in your kp ki and kd section for your extruder. It might still take a bit to warm up, but at least you know your calibrations are correct.