That's honestly some impressive engineering. They clearly weren't thoughtless about all the cost cutting, they really put in the effort to get as close to a workable machine as they could within the budget.

Would love to see a "sleeper" rebuild, that sounds like a great project!

Engineering to make it cheap as possible is respectable. Looking at some of the cheap stuff i've ordered, a lot of them just to see how in the hell they manage to make it so cheap.. it is like looking the work of a genius. Overengineering and using the best parts.. is quite easy. Most of the work is done for you, those solutions exist already. But trying to make it cheap... requires real innovation and deep knowledge. Like here, preloading the bushings using the geometry of the whole thing: genius. There is one specific niche that is maybe the most interesting, and that is when companies buy failed batches of chips, and then repurpose them.. You can have things like... signal output pin used as a mosfet driver... because they have dug in to the schematics of the chip and found that "if we short these two pins, then that output turns into an input..".. And it can be that this part of the chip is all right in the whole batch, and now we have a lot of very cheap, almost free mosfet drivers, that are not efficient, or may heat up a bit too much... And sure, it can have 12 pins unused but who cares if it is just powering a 500mW led on a 2€ gadget.

Bought that for my 9 year old. Added the heat bed. The extruder stepper motor broke after 2 prints. Took 3 weeks to get replacement. Still haven't repaired it but I grabbed a raspberry pi to set up octoprint on it. The 3 prints she completed turned out very well

I bought an EasyThreed from AliExpress, about $120 aussie dolalrs. It was surprisingly good (except for its slicer) and I actually made 3 times the cost back by printing custom gluestick holders for the local women's scrapbooking group members. Minimal assembly needed, just enough for a beginner to understand how the printer works and fix simple issues, which is a win as far as I'm concerned.

New speed benchy category, "most inexpensive printer". I support this.

The hollow tubes are smart, the outer shell of a hollow body (especially a round one) takes the vast majority of the load. So if you have the dimensions to spare, you can make quite a strong part very very light by making it much bigger but only including the material that contributes to the strength and not the useless interior

The Easythreed printers make great practical TPU printers with their direct drive. Practical or useful TPU prints like rubber feet or handles for a tool don’t typically require great looking prints. So I use mine as dedicated TPU printers.

the amount of injection molding engineering that went into this is impressive. Like the materials are totally crap, but the connection of the axis and all that is very clearly custom to this device, which I find wild.

This video was a joy to watch, because honestly everything about this tiny printer was better than I expected! I can't wait to see what you do with it in the future, it seems like a great machine for just tinkering and having fun.

It's amazing that in 2024 a toy-like printer like this actually works and prints usable parts! I'm not a 3D print enthusiast and I don't even own a 3D printer yet, but I remember 3 or 4 years ago printers 10 times the price of this would require a lot of tuning to even produce a benchie without major failures

The fact that thing even printed a benchy that actually looks like a benchy is impressive.

That hotend looks like it came straight from a 3d printing pen xD

First thought: I saw used ender 3 printers in similar prices. Second thought: Its crazy how accessible 3D printers are because of second hand market, you barely can produce a printer in price of ok quality used printer

As a new viewer and non-3D printer owner, I thought the prints weren’t too bad. It would be interesting to see what improvements or extremely cheap mods could be made to it just for the fun of it!

this thing is just so elegant, i can appreciate the drive to maximize (or minimize in this case) a parameter to the absolute limit, idk this thing is a work of art.

Actually, pretty amazing for the price. As an occasional maker of PCBs for personal use, one thing caught my attention: tactile switches can be surprisingly expensive in comparison to many of the other components. Thanks for taking the time and expense to experiment with that printer!😁

having seen other channels try this thing, the real strength is in flexible materials. It's direct drive, and you can get pretty impressive results

Actually hollow tubular rails is sound engineering for optimum stiffness-to-mass ratio; others should do trhe same.

This reminds me of my childhood. When the other kids got cool toys, my father would always research and buy the absolute cheapest alternative.

It's fascinating how cheap it is to make injection moulded plastic parts and apparently how many they (intend) to sell of these printers to turn a profit.

If the filament spool was positioned on the right side of the printer, tugging on the filament would not unload the bearings, but rather would increase the load. That might make the printer more stable as it pulled filament into the extruder. Interesting machine. Thanks.

Some background info on the AT32 chips: They are indeed 'STM32 clones', although it's not exactly a clone since STM doesn't have an F403A, but it has similar registers and features as STM MCU's. The AT32F403A is a 240MHz M4 MCU with some impressive specs: 1MB flash (1024KB flash + 256KB SRAM), with the first 256KB serving as zero wait stage flash at full 240MHz, and 97KB SRAM (expandable to 224KB by taking 128KB from zero wait stage flash). I've been playing around with these chips recently and I like them a lot, they cost not much, 2 bucks for 64 64-pin variant with 1MB flash.

I built a proper 3d printer, a CR-10 clone, using a printer like that, the EasyThreed X1. It cost me around 130$ in 2021. It was a great way for me to get into the hobby without paying 500$ for an Ender 3, locally or internet bought (them shipping costs...).

Have fun with it! Just for the hack of it! I would absolutely watch this as entertainment and to learn stuff.

My main takeaway with this video is that it's apparently normal that my white PLA strings more than the other colours

You could probably print some internal braces for those linear stages, as well as some gussets for the connections. A spool holder that is up a little higher with a foot for stability, and a reverse bowden mounted to the top of the z stage would probably improve this a lot.

I wonder if you could replace the nozzle and hack something in place that provides a steady supply of frosting, it would probably be awesome for printing out sugary items you could then color and put on cakes and such.

I've started my 3dp journey on an EasyThreed X1. Genius little machine, currently in the storage, neatly packed and waiting for my son to grow old enough to start tinkering. Love the brand and their little beast machines.

You should print all plastic parts to make them stronger and stiffer. Would love to see a series on upgrading this. You could call it trash to treasure, shit to shiny or how to polish a turd. Great video. Keep up the good work.

I'm much more impressed by the fact that an Ender 3 on sale costs just a bit more than this.

I love the idea. A cheap $80 running 800-900mm/sec print speeds. Look forward to it

The cost engineering in these things is honestly super impressive.

one of your best vids lately. entertaining and informative for a wider audience. not just the hardcore super detailed printing nerds. i would have liked to see you use some high quality PLA to see where the “stink” comes from. also, i’d really would looooove a follow up to see what mods you can come up with to make it faster and more quality prints with the least amount of money spent. maybe Aliexpress mods? or an giant external aux fan?

That is SHOCKINGLY good. I really like the engineering with being able to use the same assembly for each axis is so smart. The hot end looks pretty smartly designed. Obviously, wouldn’t be something I ever recommend, but could be a fun project printer.

Oh I would absolutely love a special video showcasing your tweaks and upgrades to this printer. Full kipper would be awesome, along with a heated bed of some sort and if you can solve that backlash issue. Then do a serious speed benchy test!

Important note: the seller explicitly states that the usb port is only for "firmware updates". But I've been helping make a Marlin 2 custom firmware for this printer and you can just enable the usb interactions when compiling it. I still use an sd card though.

I bought an Easythreed X1 a couple of years back for fun. Can confirm that backlash is a problem. I managed to somewhat mitigate it with a custom Marlin firmware with backlash compensation enabled. (This was an 8 bit board.) Other than that I was generally positively surprised with it for the price.

As an introductory 'toy' for kids/teens, for parents who don't want to blow a lot of cash on something that might/might not spark interest, it seems fantastic!!! I'd totally buy it, if I had kids who watched YT vids on 3d printing and showed an interest. Seems easy enough for non-tech people to set up, and robust enough to play with for a while. Actually, even as an old woman, I'd probably shell out 72 Euros to have a play around with it as an introductory machine. I've fancied 'having a go' but I don't know if 3D printing is something I'd find a lot of use for, so again, I admire the engineering to be able to create something basically functional so cheaply.

More of this, as much as I love the high budget stuff it's amazing to see what's kicking around at the bottom end of the 3D printing market!

You can print a 720€ 3D printer with it.

I'd like to see the molded parts replaced with 3D printed parts that are the same design, maybe slightly more robust, but yes, putting klipper on it would be amazing

I love it! Lots of comments already exist for the design. My view: probably a result of lots of iteration. Some person made a printer (probably on Kickstarter, which is infamous for "team does engineering, sends to Chinese manufacturer, within weeks, clones of the printer show up on Aliexpress before Kickstarter even finished"), then someone did work to cut the cost/parts of some element. Then someone (else) did work to cut the cost/parts of another element. Then someone... you get the point. Do that enough times and you get a functional item at dirt cheap. May not last more then a couple uses, but so long as it works 1-2 times, it probably passed any benchmark it needed to.

I have two of the orange ones from the 2020 time period. Still work great, once you get the nozzle end figured out for clearing. Lots of little parts to print to make it better. I ended up adding a quieter and bigger print head fan...Good product experience.

Great video as usual. I think it would be interesting how far this machine can go when using reasonable upgrades. Maybe give yourself a budget of 20-30$ and a roll of filament for printed parts and try to make it print better than a stock ender 3, which would be price comparable at this point.

Heroic HR4988 are NOT Allegro driver clones, they're completely different drivers with a drop-in compatible IC pinout. They support microstep input up to 1/128, so obviously the meaning of MS straps is completely different, though they've made 1/16th mode match. They are fairly well behaved, there isn't much weirdness going on there, though funny noises are definitely an option sometimes even more so than with the Allegro.

I appreciate your take on this printer plus the motion of modding the hell out of it just for fun. Great video

We bought a similar priced printer ($60) from Wish a number of years ago. The MakerPi M1 Mini had 1 button and a 3 way switch for loading/unloading filament. We recently klipperized it and added a linear Z support while upgrading the motors to some Nema 14 takeoffs from the Clockwork 1 (Voron) extruder. Ridiculous? A bit, but it's a fun little PLA printer.

the anet a8 went for 120 bucks back in 2016. ignoring the one or two cases where it went up in flames, it was a banger deal that just worked if you didnt mess up the assembly and it printed very well. 8 years and 50 bucks cheaper you get this printer, its smaller, without heated bed, slower and not as capable. so not really a step forward in affordablity they could have made this in 2016 for the same price.

Maybe replacing those "bearings" with a new 3d printed set a little tighter than those and adding some lubricant would take a little stress from those motors and make the whole thing less wobbly

I've found that a zip-tie loosely wrapped around those loose filament coils keeps them from going all wonky, and doesn't interfere with feeding at all.

Interesting. ACs air directors use the same trick by running motors in one direction until the motor stalls. They also use the same motors

The theme may be "as cheap as possible"! Speaking of funny: how about aluminium hockey stick axes? 😅

Reprint all the plastic parts with an ABS/carbon filament to get more rigidity, add more screw holes for better attachment. Reprint the derlin bearings for tighter tolerances. Upgrade the cooling fan for higher air flow. That is all you really need to do to make it a bit better.

Interestingly two years ago a variant of this (not with the cool clipping together) was also available from easythreed for 72 bucks. It's probably just about the lowest they can make and ship it with any sort of profit. It had the Marlin firmware just like yours with a bunch of ports and stuff, but also a lot more room in the bottom --- I modded it to add an old car jumper battery and make it portable (for almost an hour at least). You can get an extra 5 minutes or so if you unplug the fan!

I have an earlier version that, in orange, i was actually suprised at how will it printed giving it being basically a sunday fun construction kit!

Thanks for the great video as always 💪🏼 Just one little Klugscheißerei: The D in LCD stands for display so 'LCD screen' is a bit of doppelt gemoppelt 😉

Man, you need to do a rigitity mod on it. And replace the hollow bars with solid ones. Man, this would be such a fun project to keep improving it piece by piece and seeing what you can do with it!

I recently purchased a fully assembled semi-enclosed Humbrol 3D Mini Printer from Airfix in the UK. Like this printer, the Humbrol does not have a LCD screen and does not have a heated bed. To print, you need to only have one file on the micro-SD card. For £135, the printer came with four extra 250g reels of PLA (making five in total). The printer would fit on the print bed of my Flashforge Guider 2s.

I bought this one about a year ago. Very impressive for my proof of concepts. Only had to adjust the bed once before the first run.

I have no idea how they can sell this thing for 72 euros and still make a profit. Thomas has impressive 3d printing skills to make this POS actually print something

I have a Easytreed X1, you can run klipper on that board just fine

I have the x4 and it is direct drive, I use it to make awesome tpu prints. It has made stuff in pla that rivals more expensive machines. It got me my start into the foray of printing.

I bought an easytreed as a first printer and I eventually used it to print parts for a larger coreXY printer that i am using now. Great entry to 3d printing

Sensorless homing is the future. I use it on all printers. Less points of failure and faster/cheaper assembly.

Put a Ldo orbiter v2

I love the way you just went with it without being too judgy.

I got a similar model by the same brand about 6 months ago for $76 shipped. Mine is red one that has a heated bed and a color touch screen! It had some some bad layer shifting that I think was due to my overtightening the belts but it sparked my interest, and now I have a nice bambu labs printer

Disappointing you start to diss the product before you even give it a chance. "Flimsy", "too little power" etc before you even know. How can you possibly give an unbiased review when you start like that. I actually get this impression that this is quite impressive despite your comments. BTW, I am an engineer, and design world leading equipment.

"I wouldn't recommend it to anyone because they should just save up more money" man I hate this argument when talking about things that you're not sure whether you want to spend money on or not.

With all of those cold-shoe similar mounts it seems like there would be lots of options to print stuff and attach it. I almost wish my MK3s had a standardized mount to clip stuff too.

more videos with this setup pleaseeeee, lets REALLY put it to the test!

It would be a great project for seeing what the included hardware is capable of. Definitely will be watching for the next episode

I guess one could put it on a 15mm thick MDF board and hot glue around the base of the printer adhering it to the sides and board. Then hot glue a 30°, 60°, 90° perspex set square at right angles on the back of the vertical part and board. Continue reinforcing to stiffen any other part where possible, plus use a few dabs of super glue to make more support to the planes with screws to remove wobble/flex. That could be a cheap and expedient improvement for stiffness and stability to perhaps make some minor improvement without much investment for the sake of fun experimentation.

Your summation is awesome. Great video as always.

Pretty impressive,thanks for sharing! Wonder how this would wort when the injection molds were aluminium casts, the rods solid, some better gearings on the steppers and the thing screwed to the table... What i wouldlike to see is that hotend and extruder mounted on the prusa or bambulab mini.

I love small printers! I recently got a used Fabrikator II Mini for around 40€ from kleinanzeigen and had a lot of fun tinkering with it. The Z nut was horrible and the Z threaded rod was not installed correctly and relied only on the motors thrust bearing. There was about 5mm of backlash from these two sources! I took it apart, printed a replacement and now it works great! It's a solid machine made from bend metal parts and if it weren't for the horrible belt tensioning springs from that era I am sure it could fly at much higher speeds and accelerations. Threw a Pi Zero W in the bottom compartment and soldered it directly to the mainboard's USB. It runs on an STM32F103 and upgrading it to klipper was also my first thought. I wanna see this thing race! Gotta modify the unipolar z stepper to bipolar first though, but that is as easy as scratching of a single trace on the motor's pcb and soldering an A4988 in place of the ULN2003 chip on the mainboard. I could also try to modify Klipper/Marlin to work with the stepping sequence of unipolar motors, but that's surely a multi-day headache I can avoid with 15 minutes of relaxed soldering. For now, I am happy with just octoprint and might even put on a cheap USB webcam. That used to absolutely freeze the tiny Pi Zero W, but the new libcamera stack with camera-streamer is actually very resource-efficient in my testing and limiting to 5 fps at 480p will me more that enough. Don't get me wrong, this is not a Voron Zero in hiding, you'd have to upgrade so many parts it would be like Theseus' printer. Electronics are 12V only, the hotend is probably a bottleneck and the extruder is very much still in the 2015 era. But it's fun!

Fascinating looking at a mass produced product of something that used to be super niche and expensive just 10 years ago. I remember 10 years ago getting a second-hand reprap mendel(? I think) on ebay and getting the winning bid around $300usd without any stepper motors, no hotend, no hotbed. I eventually got it "printing" but never was able to get it calibrated enough to print accurately. It felt like 3D printing was still several decades away from being mass produced. I didn't get back into 3D printing until 2021 because of that disappointing result. It may be a cheap, slow, low quality 28-watt printer but it still prints far better than my first attempt at building a 3D printer for under $500 exactly 10 years ago.

A "sleeper" 3D printer? Hell yeah. Also, "hooning" and 3D printing are two worlds I never thought of as ever colliding, but sign me up. Great video!

Thanks for the review, so my question would be as a newbie to 3D avoid this machine? ppl said get the Ender3 instead but here in UK its 3 x the price is it worth the extra? I have a spare MacBook Air a dry garage and excellent WiFi if that makes a difference. What's your advice plz. Thanks

I bought two of the K7 and used them (well... their kinematics) for projects at work. They now do the job of machines that would've cost us tens of thousands of euros... so, yeah. Big fan.

I definitely thought it was interesting, nice to have someone else analyze things like this so I don't have to; seems like it could be a valid printer with a few modifications , but like you said, I get what they were going for

What a great video! Also, I loved 15:05 because I owned one of these and I had the same exact reaction when attempting to clean the nozzle lol.

Great review! I'm finally interested in 3d printing, and it seems it has finally reached explorative enthusiast level. Nevermind this printer, but something SLIGHTLY more expensive with stepper motors. Regardless, this drops those prices, so I'm all for it :)

Hi, good video! This Artery F435 is a new chipset that is competing with the F405 in the market with great features and at a lower price point. On Drone flight controllers are starting to show this new chip. Good choice with a lower cost!

I think it is good enough for a curious kid in school that wants to play and learn. I love this one! They will get to learn the basics of 3d printing.

Knowing pretty much zero about these printers, this was a very instructional video!

I know almost nothing about 3D printing and printers but would really like to learn. While watching this video, my thought about the wires getting in the way would be to hot glue them to the side. Then, I wondered if a bead of hot glue would keep those parts from wobbling too when the wire was feeding? But thanks for this video. This little thing kinda breaks down the science behind 3D printing rather well.

well this was kinda adorable, its so amazingly pared down and yet somehow works

Kind of a good idea with the filament spool. Just uses the base of the table to stabilize the roll.

There is like... A surprising amount of impressive design that went into this. If you doubled the price and made everything higher quality, it would be a decent printer with really cool assembly.

I used a K1 for about 3 years, worked great till the extruder gears wore out and I bought an ender 3 V2. Now it lives as a cheap plotter for christmas cards.

Very impressive for what this is. The idea of having low cost universal linear actuators being identical is a great idea. Redesigning just the actuators could be a major upgrade. Even if cost €5-10 per axis to upgrade/redesign. (any upgrades/substitutes could be printed on a quality printer, so retains a similar look) It's one thing to source low cost mechanical components, but significant engineering time and effort went into adapting and testing of software that shipped with this printer. This is much harder to dig into and understand, to appreciate. Overall very impressive what was accomplished to be produced in high volume. Risks of manufacturing sourcing and logistics are real and required talent as well.

Reminds me of the first Monoprice printer I got circa 2016 or so. It was really not very good, but got me started on the hobby 😅 Also, yes full on Klipper install with accelerometers would be hilarious

Thank you for a wonderful video. Those gaps in the stepper motors probably come from the fact that there is a gearbox built into the stepper motor. Guessing that the stepper motor is a: Maintex 24BYJ 5V Unipolar High Torque Mini Stepper Gear Motor, if it is correct, the gearbox has a 1/32 ratio. Just replacing the stepper motor to one without a gearbox would probably make up for the gap, but mess up the maths in the motherboard.

I got one of these years ago and its perfect for the one in a 6 month print of a thing. easy to use and gets you used to the software. i paid $97 AUD for mine. There is a trick to using this though, dont use it in a cold environment, heat the bed with a hairdryer and use a gluestick on the pad before use.

I am 100% behind you on the sleeper speed benchy printer. would be hilarious. in line with the design you should do budget tuning, would be beneficial also to people who are actually looking to get into printing as cheaply as possible but not have garbage.

those steppers are from a ac units to be precise there are used for the one in your home for the ozzelating flap to direct the air.

There's another vendor in China going for a similar concept, but with full standard motors, direct extruder, leadscrew, slot in drivers MKS mainboard with marlin source code provided, 2020 v-slots, heated double sided PEI bed, and old E3-like LCD. It's mostly held together by stamped and bent thick acrylic panels, and assembly takes about 2 hours even for super experienced users. Nowhere near as easy to set up or "elegant" as this one, but has pretty much unlimited DIY upgrade potential. Can use most parts designed for the Ender 3 series, which is A LOT. About 50 Eur shipped domestically within China, unfortunately they don't seem to be selling internationally. I bought one when I fucked up halfway through upgrading my main printer, and needed to print replacement parts. It wasn't much more expensive than printing services charge for the parts.

Those Artery microcontrollers are actually decent. I've worked with the AT32F421C6T7 and they are solid little ARM M4 chips. Also run at 120MHz, have 15 analog pins, over 35 i/o pins, and costs about $0.60/chip.