Transcript:
This is the silhouette Alta, a 3d printer aimed at creatives and crafters by a company with a ton of experience in producing easy-to-use cutting tools. Brace yourselves, friends. This one is a bit of a game-changer. They almost got it perfect. Almost let’s get started as going. Guising is here from. Magus Muse. Let’s kick things off with some info on the company behind this little. Delta 3d printer silhouette produce a range of CNC tools aimed at creatives from scrapbookers to graphic designers to all manners of crafters and hobbyists. They sell products that cut engrave mark a range of materials such as cardstock and vinyl with the usability and aesthetics of your more conventional desktop inkjet printer. Well, they certainly now the aesthetics here the. Alta looks gorgeous. This small Delta is completely injection molded and manufactured to a very high quality. In fact, I would go so far to say that’s probably the highest production quality of any 3d printer. I’ve ever come across so far and I would guess. A team of engineers and designers worked on this to get it right. So top marks from me. The print volume is 124 millimeters in diameter due to the deltal design and up to 130 millimeters high, pretty small but large enough for many craft projects. The machine is PLA, only using a custom, Bonin extruder and hotend assembly and no heated bed, just an acrylic plate with painter’s tape. Basically, it’s been a while since I’ve seen painters tape as a print surface and yes, it does work, but it’s incredibly fragile and easier to Ripley. Take prints off, and I’m not here to the acrylic plate comes bare, and you apply the the painter’s tape to it. And because it’s laser-cut, it actually has a slight angle to the edges to the laser cutter curve, so you need to make sure you position it with the larger edged up top. Otherwise, it kind of wants to pop out of the pins that mount it to in place. You wanna make sure you get it the right way around, so it sort of snugs down, not pops up other than that. This machine is no frills, no filament out detection, no power loss recovery and no face at all. Just the power switch. In fact, everything is controlled by a USB connection to the PC, using their very own software silhouette 3d The software is honestly stunning. A lot of work has clearly gone into it and it’s aimed at people with little to no experience in 3d printing, the loading and unloading sequence is clearly explained, And even though I’m not a big fan of side-mounted filament spools like this actually works quite nicely, providing you’re using their own spools and not aftermarket 1.75 but look, there’s no drm, which is really nice to see so you can use any one point Seven five millimeter filament as long as its PLA, But that she works pretty good bed. Leveling is clearly explained and accomplished by adjusting little limits which offset screws, But mine was pretty close from factory. So I didn’t have to tweak that too much. I can’t see you ever needing to change this again. Once it’s set up anyway, let’s chat about the printing experience as I mentioned. This machine is not aimed at 3d printing. Suzy Astiz. Such there’s no modding potential, no tweaks to do or tons of slicer settings to change its design, whereas a tool for crafters of all kinds and to encourage that still, they won’t have a huge online library of models you can purchase and print for all manner of projects, but and this is really neat. You can also design your own things right here. In the software, the 3d modeling interface is reminiscent of Tinkercad and then it’s primitive based and you adjust and combine shapes to create more complex results. I threw this keychain together in literally a minute using the text generator, a flat box and then punching a hole in the part, the top corner and combining it all together the Boolean operations that is the actual, combining and cutting of shapes can fail on occasion, But if they do, there’s a nice pop-up that recommends grouping, so the slicer can still figure out what’s meant to be one whole object. This is also required if you’re printing multiple objects at once because it forces the slicer to treat them as one and do a single skirt free extra around them versus around each single one, which it won’t do because there’s such a tiny print volume little complaints, so that’s also handy to know too. The software appears to be running here a slicer engine under the hood build 3.6 which is nice and fairly recent. The default settings are far. But if you wish you can go in and change quite a few things such as layer, height, perimeters, infill print temp and more, there’s even gyroid infill, which is pretty cool, but it’s not really intended to be used and changed by beginners. Instead, there’s a nice range of pre-made profiles with descriptive names such as tall and thin supported Draft etc. I tried printing these forming tools at 100% density Because I want to strength And sadly, the PLA did warp at this density, which does happen on an unheated bed, even in PLA, so I would stick with defaults with the default infill for optimum printing results. Or if you’re just getting started. The printing is pretty quick, partly due to it being a delta and partly due to the fact that print volume is so tiny and the quality. The smaller prints was okay, not amazing. The string is a little bit of an issue as it’s removing support material as required, but they do have a really good online tutorial series that does mention opening the door and letting. Erin, if you do have issues with stringing, I do want to mention. This door quickly has a key that actually could be pretty cool in an area environment with kids like a school or something where you just wanna keep kids or animals out from the hot end and the moving components, however, printing larger objects. Well, we’ll get to that because you see, there’s one big fat. Gotcha with all of this! This 3d printer does not catch the entire print job before starting, and you cannot attach storage media like with pretty much any other 3d printer on the market. Nope, you must print tethered. What is tethered? Well, it means you must have a. USB cable connected this machine at all times, back to your computer for the entire duration of the print. I’m not gonna sugarcoat it. This sucks, especially if the print job is going to take hours and in 2019 is almost unheard of. If your laptop goes to sleep or updates, which? Windows 10 does like three times a week. These days, then your print will be ruined. But sadly, it gets worse for testing. I was using my surface Pro 3 tablet, which I do use to run heaps of machines down the workshop. It’s pretty gutless sure, but we’re not doing anything to intensive here. I’ve run printers often before, so I threw the gay or Allison Cat print at it and let it go for so ours. So just in case you have forgotten what it it generally should look like this is the result from the flashforge adventure of three another machine. I’m currently evaluating that this print from the outer has tiny little dots of over extrusion all over it. At first, I thought it might have been caused by the larger than usual diameter PTFE tube, so I swapped to a Capricorn tubing, which has a better internal diameter and I got the same result. This is tragic because the machine’s mechanical design isn’t at fault here, but it’s the control method. Deltas have to do a lot more calculations than Cartesian 3d printers as a result. This machine is suffering stuttering as a g-code is streamed to the 3d printer on the computer. Combine this with a notoriously buggy. USB ports of portable devices and any high polygon model will suffer hugely. In fact, you can even see it on the 20 millimeter cube. I printed initially. I thought it was just the printer’s quality, but looking at it again. It’s the stuttering because of this. My clearance gauge only got down to zero point four millimeters and it’s barely there. You can clearly see the little blobs that are welding it all together, but in the interest of being thorough. I decided to tether the elta to my main editing rink via a USB 3 port, which is a very good computer, and the artifacts did visibly decrease, but they’re still present, which highlights to me and leads me to believe that the custom control board in here is 8-bit and struggling to keep up with the calculations as it prints so as a final test. I slowed the printing down by four times, which this already took like six hours and as expected, the artifacts do start to clear up. This issue is a huge blow, really. Is its. Honestly, the only thing. I wish was different on this 3d printer. Everything else, especially a $300 US. Price tag really does make for a fantastic little tool. Tons of R&D has gone into the design and creation of this 3d printer and it’s really being let down by this very archaic control method, which really shouldn’t have been considered in the first place. Remember, this is truly aimed at a novice who just wants a handy tool and smaller, low poly models do print just fine, but I really want to see this machine, updated ASAP, the faster control board and some form of onboard storage. So you can disconnect it. Once the printing commences, that’s all, it needs to be a fantastic tool for crafters to assist in testing. This 3d printer silhouette also sent across the curio, which is a machine that can cut and mark a wide range of materials, and I intend to have a crack at using both of these machines for a really fun Craft project to prove that 3d printing is a tool that everyone can use so be sure to subscribe. So you don’t miss that here on making smooth is my aim to empower your creativity through technology and full disclosure, silhouette did send me the outer and the curio free of charge for purpose of review and all opinions are my own. Thanks for watching guys bye.