Since a year I’m a little bit into 3d print. I’ve started with a DYI kit from Geeetech (Prusa I3) and since I’ve learned enough from this experience, I moved to the “office” variant.
The new Geeetech E180 is a neat little printer, well built and pretty accurate. Since the extruder can go only to the 230 Celsius you can’t use this printer for ABS or PLA+. Because of the Bowden extruder you will probably not be able to print flexible filament. The bed is not heated therefore it is very important to stick the objects on the bed by using brim and extruding more filament on the first layer or using rafts.
The bundle I got (end of February 2018) had the following issues:
- Bed
- Timing belt on the bed was not correctly mounted one of the fastening bolt was loose
- After fixing it, the prints gave strange offsets
- After goofing around and blaming the slicer, looked back to the bed and found out that actually has two point where the movement was not smooth
- Cleaned the belt, tuned up the screws, problem went away
- Extruder
- It looks that is under-extruding.
I’ve gave to the filament flow a 120 percent and it looks better.
Update: I’ve Measured my filament and roughly they are between 1.68 and 1.72mm. I have set the flow back to 100% and decrease the filament size to 1.68mm.
- It looks that is under-extruding.
- Spool support
- Looks nice but it is improperly designed. The holes are shifted and the screws are too short. You will need o print your one.
- LCD Screen
- Nice, responsive, easy to use but probably has bugs. Sometimes the screen starts up with noise, shifted, etc. Unstable… Only a power off solves the issue
- Sticking to the bed
- On the 1st layer I’m always extruding more filament. This is reflected in the Cura profiles bellow.
- At first, their software EasyPrint looks nice, but as you use it you want back toy your slicer. It is unstable and has annoying usability issues e.g useless dialogs
The unresolved problem:
The USB Serial communication between the PC and printer stops responding randomly after 20-30 minute (sometimes quicker with other USB cables) when used with Repetier Host.
Probably there are issues with:
Printer Firmware/ChipUSB CableFTDI DriverThe USB cables inside the printer are unshielded (10 cm long). This might generate communication issue since they are very close to the Y motorThat’s not the cause. Replaced the cable with a shielded one. Same issues.
- E180 Firmware is slow/buggy
After reducing the receive buffer to 63 bytes and using ping-pong the print is more stable… But still issues.
This shows that there are still some issues with the FW
This is a 0.1mm print
You can download the settings for the Repetier Cura profiles for 0.1 mm, 0.2 mm, 0.3mm and 0.4 mm.
You will need to copy them into the following RepetierHost folder C:\Users\[YOUR USER]\AppData\Local\RepetierHost\CuraEngine
After starting the Repetier you should see them in the Print Configuration list.
