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

[American 3D Printing]

Had numerous issues with 5th Gen for a year. Needless to say, currently with 3.6 and the latest print head (3weeks old), I am getting some excellent prints on .2mm and .1mm. If you have an older head, they have issues. Smooth extrusion and no under extrusion, brittle prints or clicking. Also, I picked up some Build Tak sheets to print on and all my non-raft prints grab like crazy to the build plate. No peeling or curling.

We're still having issues with the extruder finding proper Z home consistently (this is the 3rd smart extruder, November 2014 vintage), but yeah, firmware 1.6 has some tangible improvements, both in build quality, and in that silly homing business it does at the start of each build. Now, instead of taking about 13 minutes, it's closer to 4-5 minutes and most of that is heating it up rather than that "sneaking up" on Z home. We still get false filament jams a lot, and homing errors, but not nearly as often as before. It looks like they really are trying to fix the technical issues.

[Roberto]

Hi there,
new Firmware 1.7 is what you should install & use together with 3.6 Desktop.
Homing and others are much faster now.

It's been there for a while - I'm surprised you didn't get it by now.

[American 3D Printing]

Hi there,
new Firmware 1.7 is what you should install & use together with 3.6 Desktop.
Homing and others are much faster now.

It's been there for a while - I'm surprised you didn't get it by now.

We installed 1.7.0.274 on 4/3/15. We are using Makerbot for Desktop 3.6.0.76, installed that same day. I wrote about the faster homing in post #115 above