How hard is the AWD upgrade? I thought AWD on a small printer was basically just for speedboat racing (because the small builds can already print absurdly fast). I assumed most of its value was stabilizing fast printing on a big machine like the 500mm. But admittedly I'm not that read-up on the topic. And yes, I feel like there's a good community behind RatRig. I am not familiar with any of the other DIY printer communities to compare, but I'm very happy with RR.
@@ObsessiveEngineeringnever done it so far but I think not difficult. will need to strip back to the motor blocks, and add the new front parts and I guesse new slightly longer belts, then rebuild gantry. Your right, aside of speedboat benchy, the 500 needs it more than the smaller ones. I'm on the stock alu gantry until I find the right solution, bit heavy but since its on its way to high temp capability and water cooling, CF or fancy alu ones will warp. Quad superpower ldo's and AWD would speed up the stock gantry nicely. Running 48v 5160's already on that machine also :)
As much as I hated my Ender 3 and everything associated with it, that modified dessert printer with the syringe looked brilliant. Great vid and congrats on the new printer!
Thanks for your video. I just ordered the 500 version. My door between living room and the passage to it is 81 cm wide. In the passage is a niche with about 1 by 1 m. So perfect to assemble the printer in the living room and than put it there. I will add thermal insulation to the niche, so I just need a front door. I might simply use a window as a door (german windows can be fully opend or tilted - tilting is nice than printing PLA). For the printhead I decided for a voron Revo hotend with Revo-HF-nozzle. With a printer this size I definitly will use bigger nozzles, so a quick nozzle change seems mandatory. Also I already have a bunch of Revo nozzles (including 0.4 and 0.6 HF and 0.4, 0.4 and 0.8 ObXidian) so for the start I have everything and might add the 60W heatervore and HF-Nozzles >= 0.8 later. For bigger spools: They are only available from more expensive brands. For PLA and Petg I mostly use Sunlu/Jayo and I am quite happy with them. With about 8.5€/lg extremly good, but only available in 1/1.1 kg spools. However, I see 2 possible ways to solve the problem: a) add an ERCF to automaticly load next spool if filament runs out. b) build a spoolrewinder and spool multiple 1kg spools onto one big spool. I just did this manually, welding the remaining filament of 5 used spools onto one and it worked quite well...
Great printer! I considered the Ratrig, but I wanted to finally use my Teknic Clearpath servos. And since there was no one to stop me, I went a bit overboard on the size at 595mm x 595mm x 600+mm. And I have a Qidi Tech X-Max 3 coming in to replace my old bed slingers, and the Qidi is "small enough" to fit on the HevORT build plate. :)
Very nice video series wish you would have done a configuration video along the series I bought E3D motors and I heard they were a pain to setup like your comments on this..
It is possible, but not so much after it's built (at least not without significantly rebuilding the frame). RatRig labs has two different variants for dual-extruder. However this printer is my workhorse, and I am not motivated enough to take it offline long enough to try that upgrade. If you're starting from scratch, it's very doable, though the documentation might be lacking in some areas. However I see that V-core-4 was just announced, and it looks like they have a native dual-extruder option. I'm looking forward to seeing more details about the V-core-4 over the next few months.
The actual building of it looks fun a easy from a bolt to bolt idea, the bit that puts me off is the software firmware stuff and WiFi stuff, do you need to have WiFi or can you run it as a stand alone machine and put your files on a USB stick and run from that, at home my WiFi is intermittent and at work it's none existent, also this would be my first printer so on that point would I be better with a elegoo or 3s1 type, I don't want to mod if there is a pre configured off the shelf with the main upgrades that community's already spotted, I'm not lazy I'm interested in it as a tool and not a tinkering toy.
Yeah, I'm with you. I wanted the experience to build the machine because I thought it would be fun and educational (it was!), but I was more interested in ending up with a functional printer to accomplish other things, rather than some endless meta tinkering and mods. I got my machine to a "stable" state and mostly stopped tinkering, but it took a while. I wouldn't recommend this as a first printer unless you have experience with the mechanics and electronics concepts. And of course you need to be ready to put in a ton of time to get it running. As for the software -- there's nothing stopping you from plugging in mouse, keyboard and display, and using it locally. But you'll still be using the hosted web service that is used to access it remotely, you'll just open your browser and go to localhost from the pi, instead of from a remote system. These kinds of things can be searched and discussed in the RatRig discord community, on the #ratos channel, so you could start there to get specifics.
Once RatOS is running on the Pi, you can get to it from any device on your network with a web browser. That includes the Pi itself if you plug in display, mouse and keyboard.
16:57 I haven't looked looks at the panel files, but I imagine anyone could knock out several 1/8 - 1/4 acrylic panels in a few minutes on a laser engraver at a maker space.
That would be ideal compared to the CNC router, but the FabLab I go to doesn't allow cutting plastics in their laser cutter (even though it is ventilated), and even if they could it's limited to like 18"x24" which isn't big enough anyway.
@@ObsessiveEngineering You're right; I should have mentioned that not all maker spaces permit acrylic laser cutting. However, one of the two spaces near me allows you to cut acrylic up to 48 x 36". They also sell acrylic sheets, and you can bring your own.
@@bernardtarver It sounds like you'll have an easier time with it than I did. CNC routing certainly worked, but it was a lot of work to setup each workpiece and it's not particularly fast (and it's super loud!). Here's a direct link if you want to look at them yourself: github.com/Rat-Rig/V-core-3/tree/main/cad/panels
I will build one too, in i hope not 2000€ more like 500-600 with parts that i own and doing the metal parts myself mostly. Also i will use 4 Heated beds and a friend of mine will write a programm that checks what bed needs heating and what bed does not need it so the energy use is reduced
I went into detail at the beginning of my mechanical assembly video of RatRig vs Voron and why I picked RatRig. - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-rW1INp5_i1M.html Overall I think I would've been happy with any of the options, but I liked RatRig for my first DIY printer because the kit was sold by the same company that designed the printer, so I felt confident it was going to be a better experience.
I'm yet to build my CoreXY, and am leaning towards a Voron 2.4 because I really like the stationary bed design with the quad flying gantry. Structurally and kinematically, it just seems more logical to me to have the low center of gravity. That said, does RatRig have a model with a stationary bed and flying gantry?
Hey I'm trying to add my vcore 400 to cura but I don't know what to setup in the printer and extruder menu. Would you have a snapshot of your config menu plz? Would be appreciated thank you!
Remote viewing data suggests something similar to this is used to produce saucer type extraterrestrial vehicles. Well, they might be billions of years in advance of us...
It is a fork of Mainsail, yes. I've actually never used vanilla Klipper/Mainsail, so I'm not sure what the specific differences are. But I really like RatOS whatever they are
On most printers, the PSU supplies 24V for everything, including the heated bed (that's why my Ender3 has a 350W PSU and my other printer has 450W). In the case of the V-Core-3, the heated bed actually runs directly off of 120VAC from the wall (or 220V in Europe), making it *effectively* a different plug from the 24V power supply. Thus the PSU only needs to power the electronics, the motors, and the nozzle heater, which is why you only need a 200W PSU. Which is actually a more-complete picture of how close you're cutting it with the 500mm V-Core-3 in the US: the heated bed alone uses 1,500W, and the 200W PSU is pulling more power for everything else. Therefore, if you're heating the bed and hotend and moving the printhead all at the same time, you'll be close to 1,700W draw. However, you can limit that max current for the bed, like 75% power to give yourself more room. Obviously, the bed will heat slower, but it's worth it to avoid tripping a breaker (but at least it would trip during pre-heating before the print has actually started, so it's not likely to happen in the middle of a print. It takes a lot less energy to hold the target temp than to get it up there in the first place.)
I'm not sure what model you are referring to. But you can find a full Fusion360 model of the V-Core-3 in the RatRig docs. There's a model for every size, with and without an enclosure. From the online Fusion UI you can export any part of the model, or download it to be loaded onto Fusion360. Good luck
I don't know about squeaking, but there was definitely a loose screw in my printhead assembly somewhere that I eventually fixed. Also, the general loudness has reduced over time, I can only assume it's the result of breaking in the printer, ball-bearings smoothing out a bit, etc. I don't know for sure. But I have seen lots of people complain about the noise when they first build it, but not many people complaining later, myself included. Big :shrug:
Hi, 1. when we order the custom one on the ratrig shop, do we get the metal bed surface and the balls thingy? 2. are the bed very flat? 3. I want to print PLA, PETG, ABS, ASA, TPU, (one day, Im want to do Nylon, PC, and other hotter filament), does the printed part can handle the heat? (considering I might be want to add chamber heater inside) 4. Does the cooling fan deform when printing without cooling fan? 5. If I choose duet board do I still need raspberry pie?
1. Yes, it comes with everything I showed except for the little accelerometer on the printhead for input shaping. I bought that separately for a couple dollars on Amazon (adxl345). 2. Yes, the bed is very flat. When I look at the bed mesh in RatOS it's got a max deviation about 0.3mm from center to corner. 3. Print the parts in ABS or ASA if you can. These have very high temperature tolerance and low creep, especially in a heated build chamber. PETG is typically used too (if you buy the printed parts from rat rig, they give them to you in PETG), but they will be less reliable in high heat. But I also haven't heard of anyone complaining :shrug: 4. I regularly do multi-hour prints at 110c bed temp with no fan (ABS/ASA), and my fan ducts show no signs of deformation 5. I don't know for sure. Though. I think if you want clipper and rat OS you're going to need a raspberry pi in a mix
Even if you plug keyboard, mouse and display directly into the Raspberry Pi, you will still be accessing through the browser. Klipper is just running a hosted web service on your network. If you are on the Pi you'd just go to "localhost" instead of "" from another device
@@anon_y_mousse I'm not sure exactly what a DE is, desktop environment? I've never dug too deeply into this, but I know it's a common software pattern to develop software/UI as a web service, and if you want to run it locally, you just run the service and access it through the browser at localhost
@@ObsessiveEngineering Yeah, desktop environment. I guess this means you don't use Linux? I'll probably just download an image and plug in the old Pi3 to play with it.
@@anon_y_mousse I used to use Linux exclusively, though I have been mostly in front of windows recently for 3d modeling and video editing. My point is that it's not a traditional program you just run and it shows a GUI on your desktop. It is strictly a background process that runs on your system (obv available for Pi, I'm sure if you wanted to run it on an arbitrary linux box, you could). This background process IS the printer management software, and binds to a port on the system running it to serve the web UI. If you want to access it from the same computer on which it is running (via display, keyboard, mouse) you simply open the browser and connect to it via localhost. Otherwise, you open the browser on another device and access by the IP address of the system running it, . As far as I know, there is no other way to run it, nor would I expect them to maintain both a GUI interface and a web interface. I was just saying this is a common pattern for running this type of software, especially because most users would dedicate the pi or a laptop to the printer, but prefer to access it from elsewhere on the network. But you're also not blocked from using it on the same computer (even though it otherwise seems roundabout to run a web server on the same system and accessing it through a browser). Hope that makes sense!
The kits are sold on RatRig's website: ratrig.com/3d-printers/rat-rig-kits.html RatRig also has CNC router kits which appear to be built like tanks, as well. I seriously considered that for my next project. I might wait for their CNC Mill--supposedly coming soon!
Based on what I've seen of the V-Core-4 -- absolutely. It looks like it's an improvement all around. Build complexity, kit completeness (incl electronics), a lot more metal components, beacon probe, and has the IDEX (dual-extruders) as a primary build option. I decided if I ever get another printer, it has to be IDEX. I would love to build a V-Core-4 myself, but recently added a CNC router and laser cutter/engraver to our mess here. Wife approval is unlikely unless I promise to get rid of 2 other machines...
@@ObsessiveEngineering Thanks, I'm on the list. I was considering a tool changer rather than IDEX on the off-chance I'd need two materials plus support. What do you think? Do you use an inductive probe (Beacon)? If so, how does it work? I've heard inductive probes have repeatability issues at temp.
@@leroycasterline1122 Re: IDEX vs tool-changer -- Toolchangers come with a whole class of extra complexities. I'm going to guess that's why we don't see many printers using it. IDEX isn't trivial either, but at least for the RR, it appears to be a first-class feature now. I also doubt I would personally use 2 materials + support, but that's just me. If you think you might you could consider ROME, which is a side project in the RR community by Helge Keck, for using two filaments per extruder with an extra motor and Y-shaped feed port. I don't know how mature it is, but it's an option. Re Probe: I switched from SuperPINDA to the Euclid dockable probe, because I try a lot of different build surfaces and I needed something that measures the physical top, not the metallic substrate some mm below it. I've had some issues with it but it generally works. I feel like I had some minor issues with the SuperPINDA at temp, but it's been so long I can't say for sure. Beacon is a different beast though, I'm not sure if you can extrapolate to that. Obvs I'm not the person to ask though :)
@@ObsessiveEngineering Thank you for your expertise! I've filled out the rez form for a V-Core 4 500. I ordered an Octopus Max EZ, I hope I shouldn't have asked you first!
@@ObsessiveEngineering Well, 3 materials isn't something I'd use often. I suppose if I bought the IDEX kit when it's available, I'd be able to repurpose the 2nd tool. I'm not interested in a toolchanger if I'd have to remove it for high quality prints! Perhaps if I find I *need* one, a Prusa XL would be in order?
So I see a lot of people complaining about how loud it is at first, but not a lot of veterans, myself included. I am speculating that it's going to be super loud at first, but once you break the machine in, the bearings will smooth out, lubrication will be better distributed etc. I thought my machine was insanely loud when I first finished the build, but don't think that anymore. However there is a motor configuration you can use called stealth mode. It's a feature of the TMC2209 motor drivers, that reduces the stepper motor noise, at the expense of speed (and they claim lower accuracy, though I haven't seen that). When I upgraded my Ender3 mainboard with these motor drivers and turned on stealth, it's so quiet now I can hardly hear it in the same room. But that also uses v-wheels and doesn't move very fast. Still impressive, and worth noting, but the linear rails will always make noise. At this time, I'm using stealth mode, and a 0.6mm nozzle on my RatRig which means I can use large layer height and line width and max out the flow rate of the nozzle. This means I generally have the speed set to a "low" value like 120-150mm/s, and I can only softly hear it printing from the other room. It's tough to describe sounds and loudness, but I hope that helps
Thank you for answering. I have my printer next to my work desk and my curren CR6SE is silent with mods. I recently tried the bambu p1s and it was too loud. I got my interest in Voron and RatRig. I didnt see any talk about if it is posible to work next to one while it is printing. I am interest in quality and low noise than speed. 120-150 is already 2x faster than my CR6. @@ObsessiveEngineering
Honestly, I don't know if you can get it THAT quiet for anything using linear rails. The only printer I'd be able to sit next to while printing is the modified Ender3 Pro since it uses delrin V-wheels on aluminum extrusion, and the stealth mode of the upgraded drivers is so effective. I don't usually try to run it more than 50mm/s, and I have to say it is astonishingly quiet and the print quality is solid, too. It surprises me. It has the Btt Skr e3 V3, and a Mellow NF Sunrise all in one hotend and extruder. With a big nozzle on it, the lack of speed isn't so bad, if your use cases can tolerate it. But I'd certainly like to hear from anyone else who has experience getting quiet printing
There is a semi-official IDEX mod for the V-Core-3, though I don't know how mature it is. I've only seen diagrams with updated belt paths and motor placement for IDEX. It's semi official because it's actually documented on the "RatRig Labs" page. lab.ratrig.com/vc31_idex/
If I was going to do a major mod it would probably be IDEX, but I'm enjoying having a rock solid, functional printer right now. I don't see the appeal of 48V and AWD for my printer. I already did a 7min benchy with my stock 400mm, and since I usually print with a bigger nozzle I'm not pressing mechanical speed limits of the machine 🤷♂️ (limited by hotend flow rate limits, not the speed of the printhead)
I think I'm done building 3d printers for now. But if I do another one it's gotta be 2+ extruders. As much as I love my existing printers I really need one that can do supports in a second material or do like PETG-TPU hybrid prints, etc
I have pondered the single-extruder-multi-material designs, and I think I've decided I just don't like the time and material wasted on filament changes. It certainly would be an easier upgrade, and probably easier to maintain, but I think it's worth it, even just to eliminate the purge blocks. 🤷♂️
The best automobiles are handmade, the best ovens are handmade, you should make your own bed. It’s better handmade, grow your own food. It’s better handmade, raise and slaughter, your own beef it’s better. I do enjoy my hand made 3-D printer.
I should've clarified: it will do *carbon fiber* nylon great. 55-60C enclosure temperature is great for that. Nylon-CF is what most people print, and sometimes use it interchangeably with "Nylon". That's because pure nylon, especially Nylon12 can be a nightmare to print, even at 60C chamber, so most people buy CF nylon which isn't quite as cool as plain nylon but way easier to control. I have spent a lot of time printing pure nylon (hopefully a video about it soon), and this printer is as good as it gets without proper high-temperature enclosure and components.
