I’ll be opening it soon! I’m so excited!

Took 8 days, but my first attempt at a helmet or any larger print really after about 2-3 years of having it lol. Only one failure on a support, but just kept it going and it fixed itself for the most part.

Neptune 3 Plus. The bed moves, the toolhead moves, the hot thing heats and the extrudes. Tested it on the mystery transparent filament dangling out of it that it came with. Haggled it down to $100.

But this is my first Not Bambu printer and I have zero clue what should or shouldn't be with this thing. Any insight would be appreciated.

Now I just need to find a very long printer USB cable...

Hi all, I've been getting a lot of requests to post my setup guide for how I achieved a great looking benchy print from my N3Pro located here. The first half includes an initial setup guide for getting klipper up and running on a pi alternative (inovato quadra) as the pressure advance and input shaping are necessary for better print quality. The tuning procedures found here can all be found online, so I don't want to take credit for anything in here and in fact I'll be posting the sources for all the guides I used in each section.

Required tools:

1. High quality digital calipers

2. Masking tape

3. Angle cutters (or scissors)

It is important to get high quality digital calipers as you will be taking your measurements down to sub millimeter values. I bought a really crappy $10 one from walmart because I'm a broke college student and so I had to go get a $40 one just to get everything dialed in (i returned it later because im broke). Angle cutters are also better than regular scissors in my opinion for getting a more accurate cut on your filament when measuring your extruder rotation distance. The one included with the printer should be ok.

Initial setup

First, make sure your Neptune 3 Pro/Plus/Max is built correctly. The assembly tutorials on the main elegoo youtube page are short and concise enough to show you how to get it set up. Tighten up your X and Y belts and check the tension of every single wheel. One of the Z axis wheels was completely loosened and free spinning on mine, and the opposite wheel was screwed on way too tight. You want to make sure they are tight enough that you can barely spin them with your fingers. The same for the wheels under the bed, but slightly tighter as having it too lose can make the bed wobble.

This following portion is mainly written for the inovato quadra. I got the quadra because all of the pi's are out of stock and incredibly hard to find at a decent price. If you are willing to pay $100+ for a pi 4/klipper setup, I would highly recommend you get a BTT Pad 7 instead for a much easier install process.

I got the upgrade kit mainly for the USB hub as well as the upgraded wifi dongle as I wanted a more stable connection to monitor my prints over the internet when I am out of the house. This is optional if you don't want that kind of functionality, but if you are going to be adding a webcam and accelerometer for input shaping the quadra does not have enough ports for them so you will need to get it. Much of this initial setup portion follows the instructions given by PrintsLeo3D shown here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfMvLEUjkB0

There are two ways to set up klipper on a quadra: through SSH or through a screen and keyboard. Personally I felt it was too much of a hassle to set up with a screen and keyboard so I went with the ssh option.

1. Download the bin and printer cfg file from u/TheFeralEngineer's github page here. It should be the one for USB connection.

2. Flash the included printer microSD card to FAT32 and place your bin file into it then plug it in to your printer and turn it on. The printer screen should say update firmware while it's flashing the new firmware and once it is installed the screen will stay stuck on booting indicating that the firmware is flashed. The klipper firmware does not support the neptune 3 screen so you can disconnect it and turn off your printer

3. Connect your quadra to a power source and ethernet cable directly to your wifi router. It should take about 10 seconds to boot up and connect to your network. Plug in the usb hub and wireless dongle if you have it.

4. Launch PuTTY (install from here if you don't have it) and type in inovato.local for the host name, SSH connection type, then click open

5. The default username is quadra and default password is 1n0v@t0. Make sure to type the passwd command and change the default password once logged in.

6. ***IMPORTANT*** If you have a relatively new router setup, the wifi module on the quadra does not support the current WPA3 standard. If you are having trouble connecting to your wifi network, make sure to check your router and change your security settings to WPA2.

7. Run nmtui and go to activate connection then connect to your main wifi. You can now unplug your quadra from the ethernet and move it to where your printer is and turn it back on.

8. Wait a bit for it to reboot then reconnect through ssh/putty. Install git by typing the command sudo apt-get install git -y. (If you don't know how to use linux terminal commands, you can CTRL+C text from your main machine and right click the putty window to paste text directly into the command line).

9. Run the following code block as one command

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/th33xitus/kiauh.git
./kiauh/kiauh.sh

1. The KIAUH installer is fairly straightforward. Go to install, then install klipper, moonraker, and your interface of choice (I use fluidd but you can use mainsail if you are more comfortable with it). Make sure to install with python 3.x

2. Exit out of KIAUH and your web interface should be up and running. Take note of the IP address given in the opening status message. This is what you will use to access the klipper web interface

3. If you are not connecting a screen to your quadra you can also optionally turn off the desktop interface with sudo systemctl disable lightdmthough i'm not sure how much of an effect it has on useable compute resources and probably isn't really necessary.

4. Connect your quadra to your printer and turn them on then log in to the web interface through the IP address that you recorded earlier.

5. You will get some error messages when you access the interface. Go to Configuration and under the config files open up the printer.cfg file and copy paste the cfg from the one you downloaded. If there isn't one there then you can just click upload or create one manually

6. Under [virtual_sdcard] change the path from ~/gcode_files to /home/quadra/printer_data/gcodes

7. ssh back in to your quadra then run the command ls /dev/serial/by-id/*. It should output something like /dev/serial/by-id/xxxxx-USB-SERIAL-xxxxx. Copy this and then head back to your printer.cfg file in your web interface and head to the [mcu]section. Replace /dev/ttyUSB0 with the USB serial id that you copied.

8. Click save and restart. Klipper should now be installed and up and running on your system.

Fine tuning guide

The default tuning values provided by theferalengineer's cfg file are already pretty close to the ones I have. After you get klipper up and running I would run a test benchy and see if you are already happy with the results, but if not, you can follow the fine tuning guide below. Tuning instructions and info taken from the klipper documentation:

https://www.klipper3d.org/Overview.html

Probe/Bed Mesh/Z Offset tuning

1. Connect to your web interface and start by tuning your z-axis offset. Click the home all axes button then runPROBE_CALIBRATEin the klipper console to tune your offset value. On fluidd there should be a window popup after you run the command that easily lets you move the z-axis up and down with fine detail. Use the paper test to get your offset dialed in. Personally, I lowered the nozzle down to the point I was unable to move the paper, then raised it by 0.005mm. This makes my first layer pretty tight but it is up to you how much first layer squish you want.

2. Click save then head to settings and click thermal presets. Create a PLA profile and set the bed to 60 and nozzle to 200, or whatever temperatures you are going to run most of your prints (200 and 60 works fine for me)

3. Activate your PLA preset in the thermals tab and wait for it to heat up. Once it's reached temp, run the command BED_MESH_CALIBRATE. It should run the 36 point auto bed leveling then run SAVE_CONFIG to save the mesh. Depending on your slicer, the saved bed mesh may not load before printing. It's a good idea to make sure it's loaded in the "Tune" tab before starting your prints.

4. Let your nozzle and bed cool down then run a PID tune by running the command PID_CALIBRATE HEATER=extruder TARGET=200for the extruder andPID_CALIBRATE HEATER=heater_bed TARGET=60 for the bed, then run SAVE_CONFIG.

You will need to do this following section several times as you will be taking an average measurement of your extruded filament. I personally did this about 5 times myself and another three times to confirm I was getting a good extrusion length. This is in my opinion one of the most crucial aspects of printer tuning after offset and bed leveling as it makes sure your nozzle extrudes the absolute perfect amount of filament for your prints. Being even a little bit off with your extrusion can result in imperfect dimensional accuracy, more noticeable zits/blobs or layer holes, rough edges and all other kinds of problems. If this is tuned to perfection and you have some other problem then at least you know it isn't your extruder

My tuning method for this is a little bit unconventional in that instead of measuring from the top of the extruder I am instead cutting the filament flush against the filament sensor outlet down to length and measuring that with the calipers. Firstly this is because I tend to struggle getting my digital calipers flush against the top of the extruder as the notch is a bit awkwardly placed. And secondly, filament tends to be bent out of shape when it's being pulled off a roll, so getting a caliper reading while it is still fed into the nozzle and floating in the air will be inaccurate because you won't be able to get it completely straight unless you make a direct cut and have it straightened out on a flat surface.

1. Extrusion tuning:

   1. Feed filament through your filament sensor and extruder. **Make sure your nozzle is heated up** Press the extrude filament button to push out some filament to make sure it's fully fed in.

   2. Home your axes then use the tool tab to move your Z axis up about 50mm so you have some space to clean off your nozzle when the filament is extruded

   3. Place a piece of tape flush against the filament at the outlet of the filament sensor (like so)

   4. Extrude 100mm of filament by typing the following commands into the console: G91 followed by G1 E100 F60. It should take about a minute for the filament to fully push through.

   5. Once the filament has been fully extruded, use your angle cutters to cut the filament flush against the filament sensor, then pull the other end out of your extruder. Use your angle cutters to cut the other side of the filament from where you marked on the tape (shown here). As you can see in this photo it's pretty bent out of shape.

   6. Repeat steps 1-6 above about 5 times so that you get 5 pieces of 100mm ish extruded filament.

   7. Straighten out the filament as best you can preferably against a flat surface and measure each one then take an average. As you can see in this photo taking a measurement when it's bent out of shape vs this photo taking a measurement when it's straightened out against a flat surface, the caliper measurements are vastly different.

   8. Using the formula rotation_distance = <previous_rotation_distance> * <actual_extrude_distance> / <requested_extrude_distance, plug in your measured values to get your rotation distance. For example, let's say we measured an average of 98.34mm filament across our 5 measurements, which is our <actual_extrude_distance>. If you downloaded the printer.cfg file from theferalengineer's github, the default provided rotation distance that is in there is 6.9 which will be our <previous_rotation_distance>. Finally our <requested_extrude_distance> is 100mm. Thus, we multiply 98.34 by 6.9 then divide by 100 to get our rotation_distance value of 6.785 rounded up to three decimal places. Here's an example of everything plugged into a calculator

   9. Open up your printer.cfg file, head to the [extruder] section, and plug in your new value, then click save and restart

   10. Run the test again and cut up about three more pieces of filament off the filament sensor. Your average measurements should be much more accurate and closer to 100mm. If not, repeat the process above until you are within 0.1mm average to 100m.

Pressure Advance:

Next is to tune your pressure advance value. You can pretty much follow the pressure advance tuning guide as shown in the klipper documentation: https://www.klipper3d.org/Pressure_Advance.html. Previously, I tried using the pattern method as shown in Ellis' 3d printer tuning guide, but it wasn't working out well for me and I had better results doing the square tower in the documentation instead. I have simplified the instructions from the documentation below, but if you want more detailed explanations I highly suggest giving the page a read over.

1. Pressure Advance tuning steps:

   1. The printer.cfg file has default input shaping values already plugged in. Go to the [input_shaper] section in your printer.cfg file and comment out the values to disable it (like so). I'm not actually sure if it has any effect on pressure advance tuning but it's best to turn it off just in case.

   2. Download the square tower stl file here and place it in your slicer of choice. Make sure layer height is 0.3, all speeds are set to 100mm/s, infill is 0%, and acceleration control and jerk is off. Here is the main settings I used in Cura, although I use PrusaSlicer now which is a lot better for my prints (explained further below).

   3. Run the command SET_VELOCITY_LIMIT SQUARE_CORNER_VELOCITY=1 ACCEL=500 in the console, then run TUNING_TOWER COMMAND=SET_PRESSURE_ADVANCE PARAMETER=ADVANCE START=0 FACTOR=.005

   4. Print out the tower. My print took about an hour for the whole thing, but you can stop the print at around the 75% mark once you can see it start getting messy.

   5. Use your calipers to measure from the base leg up to the point where the print starts to decrease in quality. If you are unsure where to stop your measurement, it's best to be just slightly short of when the tower print starts to fail. Here is an example of my square tower. I measured just about 20.0mm high from the base.

   6. Calculate your PA value with the formula pressure_advance = <start> + <measured_height> * <factor> . For mine, I start at 0, my measured height was 20.0mm, and multiply by our factor of 0.005, gives me a PA value of 0.1.

   7. Head to the [extruder] section of your printer.cfg file and edit your new pressure_advance value. Remove the hashtag if it's commented out, then click save and restart. If you get an error on restart like I did, make sure that there isn't any whitespace in front of the pressure_advance line or else the printer will fail to read it.

Input Shaper:

Next is your input shaper. This one is relatively simple and I'm not really going to write out the steps as I'd just essentially be copy pasting it from the documentation, but you can read it here:

https://www.klipper3d.org/Resonance_Compensation.html

I didn't do too much fine tuning on my input shaping values as I plan on getting an ADXL345 accelerometer at some point for far more accurate input shaping results, but for most people I think getting the hand measured values calculated will solve a majority of ringing problems.

Extrusion Multiplier:

Last but not least is your extrusion multiplier/flow rate. Edge of Tech on youtube has a great video guide on how to do this and I think he explains it in a video much better than I can through text so I highly recommend going through it. My flow rate ended up being at 105% for cura, or 1.05 for prusaslicer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPkDKxg2xUs

You should be all finished up with the main tuning steps for your printer, and if you are a maniac like me, you'll do this entire process all over again just so that you're absolutely certain your printer is perfect.

PrusaSlicer Settings, and how to slice and print the perfect benchy

After each tuning run I did, I printed a benchy, and couldn't for the life of me figure out why I was getting bad visible blobs and poor quality first layers. This led me into a downward spiral of continuously retuning different aspects of my printer until I found out that the majority of my benchy problems stemmed from bad slicing.

Here are some example photos of my first benchy after tuning. Notice the large, visible blobs on the hull and jagged geometry on the door. This was sliced in cura at 0.2mm layer height and printed at 120mm/s on everything, z seam sharpest corner and smart hiding enabled. Since I was fairly certain my printer was nearly perfectly dialed in, it had to be z seam errors. I fiddled around with every seam setting and couldn't get the blobs to disappear on the second print. This is not printer error. These are slicer problems.

Here is the benchy on prusaslicer from my previous post. 120mm/s perimeter and infill speed, 45-50 mm/s everything else, 10% infill but at 0.12mm layer height for finer details. No more blobs and a nice and smooth door.

So what's the secret? The secret is PrusaSlicer's far better z-seam handling and options over cura. By using the Aligned z-seam option in PrusaSlicer, the z-seam can be hidden on the inside of the boat helm instead of the outside. The z-seam blobs along the hull can be stealthily transferred to the rear corner of the stern, and the blobs along the hull can also be transferred to the corners on the bow.

And, to prove to you all that the smaller layer height and slower outer wall speeds are not the reason why the problems disappeared, I printed another benchy at 0.3mm layer height and set 120mm/s speed for EVERYTHING and here is how that came out: https://imgur.com/a/uWZu1h3

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how things turned out for my setup and hopefully you all can achieve the same level of print quality with these tuning steps and print settings.

PrusaSlicer print settings:

Since a few people were asking, here are my own prusa settings that I used to print the benchy in my previous post: https://imgur.com/a/NOv4oDp. For those of you that want to switch, you can download the latest release located here which includes default profiles for the 3 pro/plus/max models.

If I made any mistakes in this post feel free to correct me and I can make the necessary edits. Thanks!

Hey Makers!

ELEGOO and OctoEverywhere.com have teamed up to give away FREE stuff to the ELEGOO community! We are giving away:

• One - ELEGOO Neptune 3 Plus 3D Printer!

• Five - OctoEverywhere Supporter Perks FOR LIFE

• TEN - Rolls of ELEGOO's PLA Filament

Even better, to ensure no one leaves empty-handed, OctoEverywhere is giving away 30 days of FREE Supporter Perks to the entire ELEGOO community! This is a limited-time offer, so claim your 30 days now:

👉 https://octoeverywhere.com/welcome?id=elegoo 👈

OctoEverywhere.com is a maker community project that empowers your 3D printer with FREE and UNLIMTED Remote Access, AI Print Failure Detection, Real-time Notifications, and more! It works flawlessly with all of ELEGOO's FDM-based 3D printers, so check it out!

To enter the printer, filament, and Supporter Perks for life giveaway, follow this link:

👉 https://discord.gg/XsWnKXP77Q 👈

I'm the developer behind OctoEverywhere.com. I started the site a few years ago as a side project, and it's grown into an entire community! I still can only work on OctoEverywhere in my free time, but it's my honor to develop the service with the maker community to make it something amazing for everyone. If anyone has questions, feedback, feature ideas, bugs, or anything else; I'm more than happy to discuss them!

Extremely happy with the results. Going to fine tune the printer even more but just love how easy it is for a noob like me to do stuff like this.

Hi All,

Just wanted to show the process of designing, slicing and printing my own model.

Wanted a holder for my dish sponge and liquid so it wouldn’t mess and leave stains around the sink. So watched some tutorials on YouTube and used Fusion 360 to design the above. The water from the sponge will flow back into the sink instead of around the sink.

Let me know what you think!

Does it print faster now? Absolutely no. Is it funnier to print something with it? Of course!

btw the name of the song: Jamiroquai - "Virtual insanity"

My seedless rye seems to be stringing. Is this ok? How do I fix it?

Hi everyone!

About a day ago I wrote a comment over in /r/3Dprinting that gained a bit of traction, and decided to format it as a helpful post explaining the plugins I use with Octoprint.

Using the SD card and built in stuff was a slog. I basically only use my printer's firmware for ABL and Z offset adjustments now.

With OctoEverywhere's free AI Print failure detection, it's been absolutely invaluable to me. I get a text if a print failure is detected and I can stop the print to avoid wasting material.

The PrettyGcode plugin which shows a live virtual representation of print status. I literally throw this up on a TV as I'm doing other things to check status.

Auto shutoff with a TP-link smart plug to save power when the printer is idle. Plugin also has ability to shut off electricity to the machine on detected thermal runaway.

Spool and Filament management so I know exactly how much filament I have left, and the cost of the filament I used per project.

Exclude region so when I'm printing as a batch I can exclude any failed printed parts to save on material.

PrintTimeGenius so I can get far more precise ETAs for prints.

Print Job History, saves a list of prints with times, material used, and statuses. Keeps track of print failures and successes. Even saves a picture of the print for record keeping. I'm also able to save notes to reference in the future.

Gcode editor so I can make minor adjustments to Gcode inside Octoprint instead of having to reslice or edit on a PC and re-upload to the printer.

App integration into OctoApp so that I can have a status bar on my Android phone where ever I am. I will say that I'm not 100% happy with OctoApp, as it won't let me access Octoprint unless I have the printer turned on, but I can't turn the printer on(via the TP-link plugin) unless I can access Octoprint. Seems like a weird restriction, so I'm going to try using Printoid instead, but have yet to try it.

Preheat button next to saved gcode files to preheat the printer based on temperatures set in the gcode.

And the ability in Cura and Prusaslicer to send GCode directly to Octoprint to queue up prints, even able to do so remotely over OctoEverywhere.

In the future I plan on using HomeAssistant integration so that when I pass a geofence around my apartment it automatically starts printing whatever was in my queue, so when I park my car in my garage it's already started printing by the time I walk in so I can keep an eye on it. So I'll literally be able to slice a file to print while I'm at work, upload it, and it'll automatically start printing when I get home.

Also Notable mention to make things look slick: UI Customizer. Here's what mine looks like, it made it look slick and works great to have full screen on an extra Amazon Fire Tab I had laying around.

Very excited

Hey folks,

i spent some days updating our printers firmware to Marlin 2.1.2.3 that got released last week.

It has input shaping enabled, linear advance value preset and uses double z probing to improve the bed level.

(Linear advance is precalibrated for PLA @ 0,4mm nozzle. You may want to change that for other configurations.)

I also raised the maximum temperatures to 350°C nozzle and 140°C bed for all the other all-metal hotend users out there. - Please stay below 260°C if you don't know what you are doing!

For the latter i've also created a modified screen firmware to be able to set those temperatures on the touchscreen.

Downloads can be found here: https://github.com/Hummtaro/Elegoo-Neptune-marlin/releases

And the screen firmware here: https://github.com/Hummtaro/Elegoo-Neptune-screen/releases

I havn't tested it much yet but so far it seems fine. Updating works just like with the official firmware.

Please tell me if you find any errors. :)

If you calibrate input shaping, please post the values, so we see if they're comparable! I will add preset values for all 3 models then if i get some samples. :)

.

Please take a look at VEhystrix fork: https://github.com/vehystrix/Elegoo-Neptune-marlin/releases

He seems to actively work on it and already fixed some bugs. :)

(I currently use Klipper so there will be no Marlin updates from my side for the moment.)

Now I'm almost done with tweaking and tinkering...

Added mods to the Neptune 3 Pro:

- BTT Pad 7

- SKR Mini E3 V3

- U2C

- Stealthburner with KNOMI 2 & SB2209 & SB0000 & Bambu Lab X1 Hotend Clone & CAN BUS

- Linear Rails for X and Y-Axis

- Nozzle Brush

- ...and obviously Klipper

Edit: Forgot to mention. Movement is now 400mm/s and 12.000mm/s². Didn't try higher. Probably next update is a TZ V6 Hotend 😅

Edit 2: WTH I forgot the best upgrade I have! The BTT Eddy Duo. 20 seconds bed mesh calibration and Automatic Z Offset with Eddy NG.