As you become more familiar with the various settings as well as getting used to its various quirks, you can reliably make great 3D prints and etches. While it isn’t necessarily the most difficult to “fix” or get working, it can be overwhelming at times. There will be times where something goes wrong or doesn’t print exactly as you expected. However, to get the most value and use out of this printer, especially if you are completely new to 3D printing, you'll need to be patient and expect to invest lots of time learning your new tools and software. Especially if you’re on the fence about getting your first printer, its relatively low price and overall beginner-friendly experience make it a great choice. The SC-10 V2 stands out with its price and now standard attachments which help it be a more versatile tool that is not only easier to use and setup but can also laser etch too. This is especially important for prints with moving or connecting parts that have lower tolerances for error. I would rather wait longer for a print to come out right than to save a bit of time and have a completely unusable print. It can be easy to get a little greedy and try to speed things up, but in my experience, it wasn’t worth it.įrequently, this is where I encountered the majority of my issues with prints. If you really want your prints to turn out well with minimum issues, longer printing times will be needed. It was here that I began to research and better understand the importance of those slicing settings. It would have been great to have the ability to send the sliced files over USB to the printer to store and print locally.
While printing directly from a PC is possible and might seem more convenient than copying over the files to the micro-SD card and then reattaching the card to the printer, it’s not as reliable as it requires the PC and the slicing program to stay awake during the entire print. Now that the printer is fully set up and adjusted, there are two ways to print 3D files and etched images. Seems like there should be a simple setting available to avoid this, or just smarter software. Second, and really frustrating, if your first filament on the left is ever out, even if you have the printer set to only print with the second, it will give you an error that your filament is out and it will not allow you to continue until at least a few cm of filament have been pushed through the first sensor so that it can detect it.īecause of this last limitation, with my later prints a few weeks into my review, I had to completely switch the filament out of the second extruder into the first to allow it to print anything. First, I would have liked for the option, if it’s a single color print, to allow the printer to default to using the second filament if the first runs out. The filament sensor is useful with pausing a print if you run out of filament during it, but it has some limitations. Using the dials underneath the bed, the goal is to tighten them each just enough that it creates slight friction at each point when you pull on a test piece of paper.
If you’re doing manual leveling, which I recommend, the setup screen will have five points that the extruder will travel to the 4 corners and the 1 center point. Through the on-screen settings menu, there are two leveling setups available, automatic and manual. Underneath the print bed, there are four large dials that can be turned to adjust each of the sides’ heights. Something that takes more time figuring out is leveling. This is another example of where the manual doesn’t walk you through the process, but I did find their short YouTube video to be clear enough.
I would recommend visiting Lotmaxx's support page first to download the latest available firmware, which you can then flash via the included 16GB micro-SD card. Once you actually manage to assemble everything and power on the Lotmaxx SC-10 V2, you can continue with the setup process. A simple problem with a simple fix, but this would be just the first.
While it would be nice for the units to ship out with their localized voltage switch pre-configured, I would be more than happy to also have the instructions clearly indicate this crucial step in the right spot.