5th Gen - Review and Head to Head with Rep 2

[American 3D Printing]

Below is an image of the front of the X carriage. You can see the squirrel cage fan, and you can also see that all connections are now using an actual flex cable rather than the traditional wire bundle that all the manufacturers seem to use, including Makerbot on their previous machines. I have had to replace wires in all but one of our printers (including Rep 2) from the constant flexing, and have wondered why these guys didn't have a clue. When I was designing high speed pen plotters back in the 1980s (almost identical robotic motions as printers except much faster), we used flex circuits rather than wires. It's good for a couple orders of magnitude more flex cycles than stranded wire is.

[American 3D Printing]

The famous camera. Chatting in the store after the 5th Gens were introduced at CES last February, some 3D buddies and I were wondering if the addition of the camera was what made the 5th gen "worth" so much more money, since the specs didn't seem to make any appreciable improvement. In fact, there some items we can't build on the new one that we can on the old one due to the change in shape of the bed. And we still keep bumping into that darn 150mm Z height limit!

[American 3D Printing]

As I mentioned above, the bed looked crooked, so I figured I should check on that first. But before that I decided to load some filament into the extruder. It took a good 10-15 minutes of fiddling to get the extruder connected to the X carriage. From the front panel, I selected Load Filament and waited for it to heat. It takes about twice as long to heat the filament as the Rep 2. Loading it is essentially the same procedure as the Rep 2. The front panel user interface takes some getting used to, as there are two buttons on each right corner of the display, in addition to the scrollwheel, and the scrollwheel button. At first it is not intuitive that the scrollwheel even has a button, but some of the commands are invoked by pressing the scrollwheel button, and others with the buttons on the right corners of the display. The Rep 2 has far more intuitive UI.

My normal procedure for leveling the bed on the Rep 2 (and all the rest of our different printers) is to make sure the extruder is hot so any ooze is soft and doesn't affect the slide-the-paper-under-the-extruder friction. But the 5th gen wanted me to unload the filament (!?!) before leveling the bed. So I had to unload the filament. When it finished that, it cooled the extruder and allowed me to proceed with the leveling procedure.