Transcript:
Several years ago, I started my 3d printing journey by pre-ordering and up, meaning that little machine was my first ever taste of desktop 3d printing and I absolutely flogged it over the many years that I used as my primary for 3d printer, I went through maybe 15 kilos of filament through it. And at one stage, It was even being used as a production machine at the 3d printing studios. Perth store because my boss was too cheap to buy any more machines, but anyway, step 4 to 2016 and tear time has released the update to them ever popular at mini. This is the up mini – and welcome to the our mini – review. Welcome back to make his muse. My name is Angus. And this is the up Mini – from Tier X. So it’s pretty clear. This is more than just a upgrade from the original machine. This is a complete redesign, but it does take some cues from the original. Let’s have a look at it. So the up mini – ditches, the black metal sheet chassis for a gloss, white plastic with black accents personally. I think it looks like something. From the game portal. Pretty cool. But maybe not really my thing. The up mini has always been a pretty small machine and the up mini. – is no different with the same print volume as its predecessor of only a hundred and twenty millimeters cubed, although you can do quite a lot in that small print Volume tear time has also improved the portability of the up mini – versus the original with an included metal handle, which has a very satisfying click. The acrylic window is now properly clear, which is very nice versus the original, our mini, which had a black tinted window, which made it very hard to see inside the machine. It is still difficult to see inside and film print on the up Mini -, but it is a lot easier with a clear window versus the original, a feature inherited by the up Mini – from its bigger brother. The up box is automatic and nozzle height calibration, using a touch plate at the back of the print bed. This works pretty well in my experience, but it does seem to err on the side of being a bit too close to the print surface for my liking, so you might want to use this as a guide and then still go back to the software to tweak it properly. There’s absolutely no ability to mechanically level. The bed, it’s a small print area, so they try to get away with software leveling. Which is a bit hacky in my opinion, but to be honest. I haven’t had to do leveling at all on this machine that I’ve been using. I’ve only had to do. The nozzle height calibration exposure of filament to dust and moisture is currently a big hot topic in the 3d printing community and the up mini to tries to solve this with an external filament caddies instead of just having an external filament holder that you put the roll on and pipe it into the machine, tear time has tried to go all the way in with an external caddy that protects the roll from moisture and dust to be completely honest, this is less useful. Bennett could be, and there’s a few reasons why. Firstly, filament rolls that tear time provides 500 grams. They’re quite narrow and they’re very unique for their products. That means that if you’re running monkey low rolls or even 750 or 700 gram rolls from other suppliers, they’re not going to fit in the caddy, and for me that makes it pretty much completely useless. Unfortunately, does have a really nice tool holder. If you’re not put your scraper and side cutters in there for safekeeping, so if your are in again in a school environment where you’re only running up brand plastics, then yeah, it might be quite handy, but for me, it’s not something. I’m going to be using, so let’s go through some of the things I really like about the up Mini -. Firstly, it prints. Abs like a boss. A combination of an enclosed chamber with a small heat bed means that your small. ABS prints are amazing quality of this machine, So I’ve been doing some prints for the NERF gun competition on the Facebook 3d printing group and these are printed at 150 microns. And honestly, you cannot see the layers with your eyes. You have to feel them with your fingernail, that’s. How good for layer accuracy is that’s. How detailed this machine can print if you make it print fine on 150 microns. I also try it. My torture test. And this is a pretty good result, so the slicer doesn’t recognize a point for a walk. That’s totally fine. The detail on the text is completely readable and very nice the only fault. I would say, is the cooling on the peak. So with ABS. Printing, you’re always struggling to print hot enough, so your plastic doesn’t warp and then cool enough, so you don’t get sagging and clearly at the peak here. The cooling wasn’t as good as it could have been, but for the rest of the print, it is not warped at all, which is awesome. One of my all-time favorite features of the original up mini was the ability to slide the print beds out from the printer and swap them on the fly, so the up. Manito is no exception and carries this feature forward into the second-generation machine. The ability to remove the bed is awesome. If you’re trying to flex prints off easily, and if you have a print job, you need to keep printing again and again. Just take a print that out. Load the other one in and hit print again. I do need to mention, though, when you do initialize the up mini -. It will home itself on initialization and that’s it. It won’t try to home itself again every print. So if you take a print that out and force another one in without being careful, you may move the you may make the Stepper Motors skip some steps, which means your print will not be very good when you try to print it again. It won’t try to rehome before their next print, so if you’re unsure. I would say reinitialize between each print, but if you’re careful, you can really quickly. Hot-swap prints using these beds and it now has a touchscreen, so the upper nitu now has a color touch screen where you can load and unload filaments easily from the machine itself. This is long overdue and means you don’t have to use the software to talk to the printer and make it low, do load and unload sequences. You now do it straight from the screen, which is nice, You also control a light, turn it on and off you control a preheat, which is handy one thing to say about. The touch screen is that sadly, becomes completely inaccessible when you plug the printer into a computer with the USB cable. Unfortunately, as soon as you do that, it shows a little lock and say it’s USB connected. I would really like to be able to at least still unload and load and preheat from the screen even connected to a PC. So that is a little bit irritating. So often My workaround is to unplug the printer. Do a preheat and then plug it back in at the back to the USB cable, which is not ideal and really, it should be continued to be accessible in my opinion. So despite my love of the original up mini, there is one thing it could never do properly printing in PLA, So a lot of people have emailed me and messaged me over the years, saying the heaven up mini, and they can’t get it to print. Pla, that’s pretty much because you couldn’t. The original up. Mini just got too hot. It was fantastic for printing abs, but just way too hot for putting. PLA, it would strip at the gear and Jam up, So I’m happy to say that a lot of those problems are now fixed with the up Mini -. I’ve been doing some amazing. PLA prints with this is the lattice cube. I’ve been working on, I’ve been doing it. In fusion 360 This has a four millimeter diameter rod thickness. It’s printed with zero supports. Every rod is a 45-degree angle and the thing about PLA on up printers. It’s an all-metal hotend, so you will struggle to print with some PL As even though it does now work with most of them and just as a laugh, I tried printing some nylon, so nylon is traditionally exceedingly difficult to print. And this is one of my tests, So this is a ankle foot orthotic and I honestly didn’t think it would work. This is just a generic. Pa, so pulley. Um, polyamide nylon. And it is crazy tough. You could not break this at all. Honestly, if you’re trying to print nylon, this machine can do it and I’m really blown away that the fact it can print a nylon because it’s a very difficult material to print with. So that’s something worth knowing now onto some things I don’t like about the up Mini -, and it’s mostly down to the software you see. Several years ago up had the best software out there support generation was second to none and slicing speed was decent as were the USB transfer speeds. The thing is, this never really evolved past some creature comfort features like being able to have multiple machines hooked to the same PC and this year tear time has moved to they’re. All new software up studio. Up studio is pretty. It slices pretty fast and sends to the Machine fast as well, but it does lack some. In my opinion. Much-needed features that other slices now have for a start is G code preview. There is no ability to preview your files before printing. So you get issues like this? This fallout helmet took a good 14 hours to print in tear time. Pla, but you’ll notice the lack of support under some of the overhangs. I had no idea that this was gonna happen and there’s no way to tell without any sort of preview. So you don’t know if you’re gonna get a success or a fail while I could have increased my support generation angle to try to cover all my bases. There’s still some areas that the up slicer just doesn’t like to support generally under the edge of such sharp curves. And if you’re printing things that do need support material like this is a pull from a game. I haven’t designed it for printing. It has been pulled from a game and therefore needs support material. It’s very much hit and miss and saying that. I really would like to see, especially from a machine that so polished is this. The software really has to be up to scratch as well. Next is temperature settings. You see, the up software used to have two settings, ABS and PLA and their ABS setting was actually too high for most other brands it was designed for their own brand of ABS. Plastic, which is fine. But you couldn’t tweak anything now. UPS judo has finally included the ability to tweak print settings without having to hack the software. But you have to log in to access the ability to make your own temperature profiles, which is fairly silly to me in in my opinion, because if you look at how most people use these machines pretty in their garages. I mean, they’ll have a laptop. A netbook, which is not going to be connected to the Internet, So if you fire up the software and have to log in every time to print a different temperature rather than the stock abs and then ABS class, which is a little bit lower in temperature and then PLA. It’s really gonna be frustrating very quickly. I don’t think the software should be so dependent on being linked to your login and going to their system because most of us have off system Pcs running these machines and that goes to the Wi-fi feature. So the up mini – does have Wi-Fi and I will be honest. I haven’t used it yet. Because their Wi-fi system that I use here at UNSW does not is not supported by the Wi-Fi that the up menu – wants to use. It wants more of a home system with a router and a a passcode you can you can log in like that, so I haven’t actually used it on the Wi-Fi, yet using on USB seems to work fine for me in case to the printer via the software. And then you’re good to go, but I will follow up once I take this to my parents or something where they have a Wi-Fi standard, the home router, and see how that look at see how that works, but I still believe that Wi-fi is a bit of a gimmick for most people, and it’s not something that I personally find very useful and my final pet peeve of the up Mini. – has to do with how smart it is, so it has a front door sensor that won’t leak, emit a print to the printer till it’s closed, which is fine, It’s actually a good safety feature, but if the filament runs out, the Machine doesn’t know which is ludicrous to me, especially considering it has an external filament caddy that has a very dark, black tinted cover. That means you don’t have any visual feedback as to your rolls slowly running out of filament now. The software does try to keep track by letting you enter a number of how heavy a role is once. You load it in like five hundred grams, and it tries to keep track every time you send a print to the printer, but if a print fails or you change color, it’s not able to keep track of that, so what? I’m going to do personally is. I’m going to hack the door sensor to a sensor on the extruder head, so it pauses when the filament runs out, hopefully. I’m gonna see how that goes. All it needs to be is a micro switch and that there’s no excuse for this machine not to have that built in. It would make it way easier to use, especially in a school environment. Where you’re running around, you might be in a different room. You have forgot to come back to check on. The filament and you’ve missed it for about 10 minutes for its being air printing. And your 14 hour dream job is ruined, so I feel it. At this point? There really should be a filament sensor. There’s no reason not to have it. The DaVinci’s have it. Apparently this should have it too. So what are my final thoughts on the up mini? -, is it a worthy successor to my beloved up mini that I bought all those years ago? Well, in a nutshell, yes, although there is clear software limitations. I can completely forgive them. Considering how awesome it prints in PLA and abs. So a few things worth looking out for in future is there is active development on AG code – up parser, so you could go from simplify to D or another slicing program into G code that the app can understand, but currently you are locked down to the up software, which works very, very well, but doesn’t have that. G code preview option, which means you can see if a print would fail very easily. Sort of you commit and go and most the time you’re okay, but sometimes you’re not, so I would really like to see that rolled out in future versions of the software personally. I do think it looks a little bit too. Plasticky for my liking. I did like the original sheet metal design, but to be honest. It works fine. It’s rigid, it’s quiet. The handle is a nice touch as is the touchscreen, which makes it easy to load and unload filament directly from the printer, and I must say the ability to print PLA as well as this is a very nice improvement. It’s something a lot of the original up mini owners will be happy to see if you came to given up mini – in Australia. You can find my affiliate code down below. I’ve teamed up with 3d printing systems here in Australia. We distribute the machines nationwide. And if you buy it using that affiliate code. I get a bit of a kickback but full disclosure. This machine sent to me directly from Ter time. Know, the money has changed hands. They sent to me for an unbiased review, which I hopefully have provided to you guys and by buying the machine locally here in Australia. You do support the channel, but it’s completely up to you. I just like to provide my unbiased opinion on this machine. So thanks for watching Guys. Hope you enjoy this video here on maker’s news. 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