Orbiter - Super light weight direct drive extruder on Seckit SK-GO 

Very nice tutorial again. You make everything look so easy and simple.

A few comments - great job with the assembly and installation process. However - your conversions from mm/min to mm/s are off by a factor of 10 (360mm/min)/(60s/min)=6mm/s not the 60 shown. In addition, it's likely that you are volumetrically limited by the copperhead, not by the linear feedrate of the extruder gear itself. 6mm/s*((1.75mm/2)^2)*pi =14.42mm^3/s, which is in the neighborhood of tested max flow. If testing just the extruder itself, use A) large nozzles and b) high flow hotends for a true comparison of capabilities. 3) instead of using wires to flip the pairs, just reverse it in firmware. Much easier.

Got mine last week. Glad to see you do a video on this

Your videos are fabulous! I find this one particularly helpful, as I am piecing together a possible boot build to start

FINALLY someone did it!!! Thanks Michael!!

I got a Seckit Sk-Go thanks to your videos and it has been the printer of my dreams! =D

Running the orbiter on 3 deltas of mine - awesome extruder really

I ordered this a few days before this was uploaded, and had hoped you would do a review! What luck!

Excellent extruder, very nice engineering. An Orbiter with a planetary gearbox, brilliant ;) And it really is open source, not pretend ..STEP files!

as usual the best product review on youtube

Michael's smile is so vampire friendly ❤️❤️❤️

Great video as always!! Interesting extruder Thanks for sharing :-)

Thanks a bunch for the deep dive! I'm a bit bummed that there was so much re-work involved; I'd been eyeing this for my Seckit SK-GO (which sadly has been sitting unassembled for a few months now)... Will keep my fingers crossed that v2 works out better; or that a better FlexDrive kit comes available (as I don't have a resin printer to make those parts myself).

Thanks for the appreciations! During the design phase I used the upside-down heat break as something metal I had lying around :) and fitting to the purpose of a metal filament exit guide. I grinded down the top in an angle as you did. As things came along they picked up my first quick and dirty solution and forget about the grinding . There will be very soon an upcoming V1.5 with properly molded plastic parts including the filament guide :). The V2 will be smaller with all parts custom made to reduce weight and increase performance.

Excellent review, many thanks.

Hi Michael. At 5:32 the easy way to put that bolt in is to put the bolt in before the geared cover in placed in position, so that you can make sure the bolt is straight as you wind it in. It greatly reduces the chance of stripping the thread that way. The bolt on the other side, as you showed, is relatively easy to do. Anyway I loved the review, I ordered one last night and am currently designing a mount for it for my Coccon printer. Thanks!

Hi Michael, great video, I liked seeing the Seckit again! But I'd highly recommend you get a crimping tool (I use a Engineer PA-09, but not for long) so you can make some proper wiring. Cheers and thanks.

definitely interesting, let us know how it holds up after a couple of months. looking forward to buy this for my cr-10s when V2 gets released

Wow, TT must have been looking at what I am googling. Because I was just looking at obiter extruder this morning

Hang on now...let's go back to those diagonal artifacts mentioned just before the 2 minute mark: I've seen similar artifacts on prints from both my Ender 3 (with the Micro-Swiss DD kit) and my Sidewinder X1, that only went away when I basically disassembled and reassembled everything on the printer. I never could properly nail it down, but knowing that it's related to misalignment in the extruder and hot end is quite a relief. Anyway, this extruder looks pretty magnificent. Great video!

Thanks I just started to look into that one

I got mine working quite well on my ender 3 pros. I personally prefer the micro fan duct for the v6 style hotends like the Dragon as it's low profile and doesn't take much to assemble it. For the motor heat issue I've elected to use small heat sinks made for pcb boards like the raspi and no skipped steps from it as a result

Love that hotend heatsink

I've been researching this extruder so much recently! Thanks for the vid

Nice tutorial video!👍🏻😎

Option 3 looks like a recipe for clogs in printers where ptfe tube is pushed against the nozzle, since it does not allow to apply pressure to ptfe from the top. And I believe most common printers have that kind of hotend out of the box

I use this on my troodon 400, works fantastic

Bought mine about a month or so ago from blurolls and was really impressed. Got the standard one as seen here and made a custom bracket for my ender3 as i didn't notice the CR10 version. It works fine for petg and pla but as mentioned in the video, the filament path wasn't suitable for flexibles and it couldn't feed eSun eLastic (Shore 85A). It basically sucked the filament into the planetary gear housing. Anyway, long story short, I remixed it to integrate the ender 3 mount, use a microswiss style ptfe filament guide, close off the greasy gear housing and increase the clamping range of the drive gears as they were bottoming out on the flexible filament. Now it's perfect (for me)... but I'll still be looking out for the v2 :-)

Thanks. You said about trial and error with the stepper wires. You don't have to go this way, two of the wires are a pair and will be continuous when you check them with a voltmeter, the other two are the "other" pair. Now you know you have two pairs. One pair goes on one side of any given plug (or control board connector) and one pair on the other side, one way around the motor turns one direction, flip them around and it turns the other way, Do this with the machine powered down, pulling stepper motor wires with some drivers powered up can destroy them.

I got 2 to play with aswell, running one with heatsinks and a fan on it on my two trees sapphire plus

I have one and a couple of comments. First, I run at 0.25a not 0.5. At 0.5 it got unbelievably hot. Second, I really dislike the two screw mount. I want one more screw somewhere for stability. Otherwise, I'm liking it and it's printing well.

i would like to see the berd air fitted on this machine!

Ive never considered the prospect of saving weight on direct drive extruder (just didn't click) until this video, and my first thought was a flex shaft to mount the stepper on the frame. First thing you mention was the last extruder being exactly that. Always late to the party 😪

1:38 - Wow, these artifacts looks almost like a wood texture!

The Sherpa mini is also a great option. Similar weight and similar performance. I prefer it over the orbiter, because it's a much simpler and straight forward design.

The diagonal artefacts look a lot like wood grain, that's actually very cool!

"today I'm testing the orbital" lol I gotta watch this whole video now

I have been working on a remote direct-drive extruder using dual Bondtech gears for nearly a year now. I have some tweaking to do before I publish, but I think I will be able to beat the performance of the Orbiter in my final version. The Orbiter does make me wonder whether it's worth it to continue my effort since the improvement would only be slight...

I own the G5 from Flex3Drive. I use it on my Kossel Mini and I love it. I do really want to try his Nema 8 version but he has not had the parts for it in stock for a very long time. I think all I really need for it is the Gear Set to attach to the Nema 8 motor. I have already a spare Nema 8 Motor and the rest of the hardware looks to be the same so it should just be a matter of getting a worm gear attached to it and printing out the housing. At least from the looks of it. Hopefully one day he will restock the parts for it. I have not tried the Orbiter but I may just do that soon.

Would love you to take a look at the Ender 6!

Btw can you please post the refined version of the flex 3 drive extruder and some step files when you fix it? thx!

Super awesome! Just onde question... Could that thing last without a single drop of grease into the gearbox?

typical I ordered a different direct drive extruder just days ago , THEN I see this a batter one lol :)

I designed an adapter for the orbiter and the hydra fan duct! :) I really like it. I use it on my ender 3 pro. It works pretty well! :) Edit: i posted it on Thingiverse a few days ago. :)

should look at the OmniaDrop. it's not as small, but it includes the full hotend with cooling ducts and fans. When you add all those components I think you'll find it's darn near the same weight. about 1/2 a Hemera!

Reduce the hole size to the hotend so it is a press fit all the way down for a bowden tube to constrain XandY and use "thing:4655121" for the Z

Did you experience any change in the needed retraction length compared to the "conventional" direct drive extruder? Asking because I'm concerned about the (planetary) gear backlash.

PLEASE :) Make a video about ender 3 dual z axis upgrade options:/...i really had issues with the single version z axis system

There was a remote Bowden dual gear drive extruder by the same guy on thingiverse

This was a vary interesting review. The "Orbiter" is a diamond in the ruff. This is a product has potential. I like the direction their heading in with Orbiter, though; It's not ready for the general public. I would buy one today just because "Teaching Tech" reviewed the product and revealed it's flaws. The most we can do at this point is fix the flaws and share the results with the manufacture, but; I really do like The Orbiter. I never cared for E-3D's direct drive extruder because of the weight, but; The Orbiter is light-weight.

damnit, these were just coming back in stock. If you talk about the sherpa mini before I get one im going to be so mad.

i thought it's like a hemera and the heatbreak goes into the extruder for a second and I almost lost my mind. oh well a bummer hope they release a heatsink having version. so you can have a shorter filament path

You should check input shaper btw, it made me print 10x faster!

I'm trying to find a lightweight upgrade/replacement for a stock ender 3 (stock extruder/hotend so far)... but I don't have a lot of money. The things I would like are ...1) direct drive extrusion ... 2) faster printing ...3) can print nylon ...4) lightweight ... and 5) as inexpensive as possible. I know that these requirements aren't too hard to find... but there are just so many options and so many pros and cons and so many different requirements and incompatibilities for so many of them and there are SO MANY mixed reviews on Everything. I'm really lost in all the options now and just can't remember which is which and everything I'll need for each option. For example, I was thinking about getting a Spider Pro, but I also need a direct drive extruder, a special heater (I think) and I'm not sure which extruder works and what I need to install the extruder. I thought a regular direct drive extruder would work, but in a video I was watching they said that the OEM direct drive extruder doesn't line up with the hotend. I also already have a Sprite direct drive extruder, but I don't have a hotend or the fans and all that for it. It was supposed to be the entire hotend assembly, but I ordered the wrong thing. I was thinking about just buying the hotend for it, but I'm not sure exactly what I need (all together) to get it to work... and it seemingly will still cost more money to just do that than it would be to just buy an entirely different setup. Hope you forgive the long comment and all the questions. I'm just kind of stuck on what to do and don't have the money to buy expensive hotends and parts... so any info/ideas/suggestions would be appreciated.

Nice

Nice shirt!!!

That looks like a really neat extruder. I would be a bit worried about the nylon on nylon planetary gears. Yes they are nylon but even that will wear.

If you are after reducing weight you might try to supply cooling air by tube from a pump? Get rid of two fans and a good bit of plastic structure to hold it.

Maybe you can make a cooling system with remote cooling fans in some sort of airbox combined with a PTFE tube and a bend copper pipe in the mounted near the nozzle

Can you do a video on how you go about creating fan ducts?

Ever try the zesty numble? for the most part i'm happy with mine but it has its quirks as well

Time for a Sherpa mini! Lighter + cheaper + still easy assembly.

no trial and error required for motor wires - just look up the correct pinout for your mainboard - the coils of the steppermotor are in the datasheet. worked 1st try in correct direction for me ...

Noticed you have mechanical endstops, I need to add those to my skgo. Kind of done with sensorless homing.

Looks good, though i might wait for their V2 release. i'm running a pancake stepper with a tevo titan and its adequate for now. I'm looking forward to seeing what mods you do for it!

Dammit, just ordered a flex3drive kit two days ago.

Could you explain the diagonal artefacts from the remote drive extruder you had on there originally? I'm getting similar problems with my flex drive extruder.

I've been having the same issues with the flex3drive on my ender 3 pro,. I'm wondering if combining the dual geared setup of the bondtech (which is also used in the orbiter) with a flex shaft be an improvement more for that design though.

People with flexdrive systems always pretend the flex cable itself doesn't exist. A flexdrive system with all its hardware, including the shaft, drags well more than the 150-200 grams a compact extruder does. The shaft itself is an extra annoying thing to account for too, as it will change the weight distribution of the system depending on where you are on every axis. Instead of having the same weight being dragged around everywhere, the amount of cable weight pushing on the hotend changes as you are printing. This makes resonance tuning and other methods of accounting for moving weight a freakin nightmare. Which I'm guessing is part of the new artefacts people discover using that type of system.

Really like this extruder design, Will you be able to help us 10S Pro users with install kits? Dennis in Virginia

Now we need to solve the problem of a lightweight extruder for a Delta. (Smile)

Will the flex drive work with the derict drive you used towards the end of the video?

I'd like to see this one on Ender 3!

I looked at getting an orbiter, but I feel that did not meet one of my requirements, where all the hotend components added too much volume to the assembly. Will look into this at a later stage with the Flex3drive to miniaturise the hot end side. As there is a version of Flex3drive which supports dual drive

Could you make a video about configuring Marlin 2.1 for the Orbiter extruder 1.5? On the productpage of the Orbiter 1.5 is a section "Recommended firmware configuration:" with the settings for the Orbiter v1.5. Most of the settings i can not find in Marlin so i don't know where to edit the configuration files. So a good video that shows how to configure Marlin would be very welcome.

Have you seen the Hevort 3D printer? It would be cool if you built one and showed it.

Love the video. Wondering why weight is such a big factor in the direct drive part? I'm looking to upgrade my hot end and go direct drive at the same time on my Ender 3Pro.

Might be ok for PLA but mine melted when running ABS. Unit wouldn't run at the suggested current so I increased it to a point where it would run but it got too hot and melted into a mess in the gear reduction

Can you review the bond tech ddx and lgx when it releases?

Hi Michael, How about a test of the Sherpa Mini Extruder 109gram? Head to head with the orbiter?

Do you think this would be viable for a cantilever design, like the Prusa Mini ?

Is tere a posebilety to make a hybrid drive conecting the gear whit a cable like the dremmel extension cable so most of the mass is somewhere else an stil most of the good things of direct drive it's not as light as indirect but it will save a few grams Or have sqeare axels run along the bars transmitting the power that way Gears an stuf tere will be backlash but maby tere is a way

You should try the OmniaDrop it's even lighter and it has an integrated hot end. Also it comes with cooling fans for both parts and hot end.

instead of mounting both cooling fans on the hot end/extruder block would mounting one or both to the frame and blowing the air down a silicone tube to the hot end/extruder block have any advantages, i'm thinking a smaller unit in total as the reducing ducting would be at the fixed fans end on the main framework, you could also use larger/quieter fans with greater airflow without the weight disadvantage to the hot end/extruder block.

Do the PTFE solutions limit the practical temperature this can run at(because the tube melts?)

I keep having issues with mine paired with a microswiss and esteps and current messed with a million times

anyone played around with hydromotors and hydraulic transfer yet? ... seems like 2 gear pumps linked hydraulically might work for that. other alternative that might be a good step up is a brushless Dc w encoder (more efficient probably, also better power-weight)

It looks like a good lightweight option, but I always get nervous about buying anything on aliexpress more expensive than Arduino clones. I'd also like to see you do a follow-up video in the future about how well the planetary gearset held up (given it's SLS nylon).

have you ever used a voron 3d printer? i think you should do a video on them

What about backlash in planetary gearbox? Any backlash will affect Linear Advance K-factor, retraction length/speed, extruder acceleration and jerk, and lifetime of the reducer.

Mike, would it be possible to get a mount for the hero me? Sorry to ask this but my experience is limited to tinkercad. Thank you.

Have you looked into annex engineering and their Sherpa mini extruder ?

What is that stuff you wrapped around your wires? Thabks!

You should run an orbiter with a flex drive

Can you post your STLs for the SKGo to Thingiverse? Maybe even the F3D/STEP files as well! Many thanks!

Interesting. Should work on an Ender 3?

Wonder how this printer would stack up vs a Voron 2.4 or switch wire?

honestly, Aliexpress, I've never had an issue. Bangood on the other hand, my one time, I regret. Do like the planetary gear-set idea!

Hi Micheal thanks so much for your channel I have found it a great earning tool as I'm a newbie to 3D Printing So simple question can use this extruder with nylon ect at temp up to 350C ? Is there any direct drive extruder that can be used at those temps on an Ender 3 V2 with ease? Thanks, Micheal 😉🦘

use tritan, pc or other high glass transition filament for printer parts