J1 Community Update - Apri 2023

Snapmaker J1
1

Dear Snapmaker J1 owners,

This is Jade from Snapmaker. I’m now working as a UX manager in the team. I like it since it matches what I care about. :slight_smile: It has been almost two years since the J1 project was successfully funded on Kickstarter. While there have been several major changes to the J1 project, our plan for making a better J1 remains the same. Here in the community, we share the same goal, which is building a thriving community where we feel belonging, communicate authentically, and grow together. Therefore, I want to restart the update sharing and make it complete community-driven content.

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A Thriving Community

The J1 Facebook group membership has doubled compared to Kickstarter time. And there are 130 topics in the J1 category on Snapmaker forum. As we continue to grow our community, we’re always looking for ways to improve and make it a more welcoming and supportive place for all J1 owners. That’s why I’m asking for your help! I’ve created a quick survey to gather feedback. Please take two minutes to fill it out and share your thoughts.

Projects Spotlight

I always feel thankful to the Kickstarter community. And I like reading the Kickstarter newsletter - Projects We Love. In the J1 community, we also see many creative and amazing projects. I want to highlight these WOW moments. Seeing fulfillment, enjoyment, and happiness in these projects is a wonderful treat for everyone in the community.

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Topics We Care About

There are a lot of topics we care about. However, I can not include all of them here. So I just focus on talking about three topics in each update.

Clogging

While most J1 printers work great out of the box, some users encounter clogging issues. We have received feedback and are working on internal projects to improve the J1’s user experience.

Is it the most annoying problem? I would say when it happens, yes it is. While not all J1 owners encounter this problem, we understand that it can be frustrating for those who do. We have found that clogging issues can happen when printing models that require frequent retractions, setting too much retraction, or when using certain materials such as Silk PLA. To help troubleshoot this issue, we recommend checking out our Wiki for general troubleshooting steps.

Does every J1 owner encounter frequent clogging issues? Of course not. It seems that negative feedback tends to bubble to the top in an online community. Most people care about issues and want to provide help, so the issue discussions usually appear above the rest.

Should every J1 owner make modifications to eliminate this issue? Of course not. There are some great findings for the clogging problem on the forum shared by three professional users. @Mechanikus @MrBean @i3sven This kind of testing and modification is welcomed, helpful, and supported in the J1 community. However, it doesn’t mean that most owners need to make modifications to their printers. If you encounter a problem when using J1, please contact the official support team via the ticket system.

Are we doing anything to help fix the clogging issue? Yes, it’s in progress. We are continuously working on improving the J1 and addressing any issues that arise. While I can’t share any internal projects publicly at this stage, we are making progress and will share more details soon.

Open Source

J1 Controller Firmware Open Source Update - Expected release time: mid-May, 2023. This is awesome news for the community! The code is ready and the team is preparing the documentation. All of us will learn technical details about the project soon. We encourage transparency and collaboration, and we look forward to seeing some talented users from the community contributing to this project!

Support Request Waiting Time

I understand timely support is crucial to ensure a seamless experience with your Snapmaker products. I want to update you on the current support request waiting time for Artisan and J1 technical issues, which currently takes 1-5 working days to receive a reply. However, we aim to reduce this waiting time by the end of June with the addition of three new technical support staff who are currently undergoing training.

For general service tickets such as order status and shipping questions, our support team typically responds within one working day. Ongoing support tickets also receive replies within a day. We are actively seeking other solutions to further shorten the waiting time for technical support requests.

We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work towards improving our support services. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to our support team via the ticket system or contact support@snapmaker.com. It’s recommended to use the ticket system for technical issues.

Reviews

Which J1 reviews help you get valuable information? Here are some review videos that I recently found on YouTube. Some are made by professional reviewers, and others by J1 owners. It seems that there are many reviews sharing opinions on unboxing, printer setup, and initial printing tests. There is little content sharing deeper findings on IDEX printing applications and speed performance. As the J1 community grows, I hope that we will see more content on exploring IDEX printing potentials and analytics on J1’s performance.

Super Clean 3d Printer Support Removal (Combining Filaments)

Is The Snapmaker J1 The Ultimate IDEX Experience?

The Fastest IDEX 3D Printer You Can Buy

Snapmaker J1 IDEX 3D Printer SNAP this one up?

Snapmaker J1 IDEX 3D Printer - Full Setup and Printing Tutorial

Snapmaker J1 / PLA Speed Test 350 mm/s

Releases

Firmware Updates: V2.5.9, V2.5.10

What do you think of the lately added Performance option feature?
Learn Performance option feature.

  • Fantastic
  • Somewhat helpful
  • Not at all helpful
  • I have not yet used it.
0 voters

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Software Updates

Luban Updates: V4.7.3

Cura Plugin Updates: V0.9.0

It’s recommended to use the latest Luban or Snapmaker Cura Plugin. We have updated the retraction settings since Luban V4.7.3 and Snapmaker Cura Plugin V0.9.0, which helped to avoid some clogging issues caused by inappropriate retraction settings. If you are using other slicers, here are the recommended retraction settings:

What were your retraction setting values before?

  • The same as the recommended settings below.
  • A bit higher than the recommended settings below.
  • Much higher than the recommended settings below.
  • I don’t know.
0 voters

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Wiki Content Updates

https://forum.snapmaker.com/t/j1-wiki-updates/30973/3

Thanks for giving this a read! This update is not perfect and missing some sections. I hope it will be a good start. Don’t forget to complete the J1 community survey to let us know your thoughts. And feel free to share your feedback and suggestions on community building.

Best, Jade

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Thanks for this update Jade - I’m a bit slow to catch it, but it’s wonderful to see the honesty and transparency - and also the focus on building positivity. I look forward to more and more of that as issues are addressed and the community continues.

Certainly a rocky start for some, myself included - but you’ve really been doing the right things in the right ways to pull through it, and that actually gives me a lot of confidence.

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@Jade After your post I took the freedom to start a survey in the german drucktipps3d.de forum among all J1 users that are registered there.

Here are the results so far after a little more than three weeks of voting:

  • out of 18 J1 users in the forum that participated, seven have made made the heatbreak change. Eleven still have the original hotends.
  • six users claim that their J1 works as it should with the original hotends (partly with a changed nozzle)
  • five users that still use the original hotends claim they have clogging issues - despite the changed retraction settings you released a while ago.
  • six users that have upgraded their hotend after having clogging issues claim their printer works flawlessly now
  • one user still has clogging issues despite having upgraded his hotends.

As a result, only one third of all voters does or did not have clogging issues with the original hotend.

Therefore and even when taking the low number of participants into account, I would state that clogging is indeed a frequent issue with the J1 as it is/was sold until now (I am unsure if you have implement an upgraded heatbreak into production by now).

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@Mechanikus Thank you very much for sharing the small survey result with me! Our support tickets data shows a different percentage regarding the users who encountered clogging issues with the original hot ends. I have shared this info with the team and we will review the related feedback data as well. At the same time, we are going to receive the sample parts of the updated design of the hot end next week. We will assemble them and conducting tests on them. We will share more progress updates soon.

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You are welcome Jade! :smiley:

As far as I can see, the special Snapmaker PLA might significantly contribute to the discrepancy, maybe because of the unusually low printing temperature it has.

The user “Duesentrieb” (completely unrelated to our “heatbreak improvement” group) in the german drucktipps3d forum did a test and found that he could easily increase the occurrance frequency of clogging issues by printing a part that worked well with your PLA with a good 3rd party PLA that - as far as I know - just required higher printing temperatures. He was so kind to also test with the belt tensioning gcode we used for testing acccording to the procedure outlined in our report for and found that that one printed perfectly fine - but only when using Snapmaker PLA.

This means that any J1 owner who is just using the supplied PLA (and maybe additional material bought from Snapmaker) is much less likely to have the issues.8k