Snapmaker 2.0 Upgrade

Snapmaker 2.0
1

I have received an invitation to upgrade my Snapmaker 2.0 A250/A350 (50% off).
I purchased the 3D printing module, linear module (bundle), and power module set on October 20.

The air purifier is out of the question, but the announced rotary module and emergency stop button followed by the announced items are unconditionally purchased.

I think it’s not good to complain without buying, so I buy and evaluate, but this time I complain even before I buy.

I have no complaints about the new 3D printing module.
Do the power modules need to be replaced…?
Does the sound need to be silenced (just a different fan with variable speed)…
I’ll just have to convince myself that I bought a replacement part.

The problem is the linear module.
It says on the forum and in the 50% off information notice that the 5 linear modules cannot be mixed old and new.

The 5 incompatible ones are a complete waste.
I would like to see you come out with an upgrade kit so that we can make the best use of the 5 modules.

It would be nice to have a kit to build a second unit using the 5 old linear modules (touch screen panel, aluminum base plate, heat bed plate, aluminum platform, splitter, controller, and Z-AxisHolder).

The price of five unusable ones can’t be wasted.
If I could use a mix of old and new, it wouldn’t be a problem in the first place…

Did you guys buy the set of 3D printing module, linear module, and power module at 50% off?

What’s the benefit…
Somebody please tell me…

On another note
I wrote many times about Snapmaker’s poor response to the GitHub description, and I got a response that they will share the information with Snapmaker R&D.
If you have posted on GitHub, please speak up and throw it to Snapmaker.
All Snapmaker 2.0 owners will benefit from the bug fixes and feature improvements.

2

I’ve ordered all three items available at 50% off. I have an A350 and an A250. The linear modules on the A350 are a bit clunky now, I bought the machine 2nd hand, it was one of the very first Kickstarter ones. The first user printed from many hours and I’ve used it extensively. I haven’t ordered linear modules for the A250, its much newer and it was new when I got it.

I ordered the power supply and print head because I like to have spares and the opportunity to pay half price was just too tempting.

3

If you don’t want quieter rails I don’t think there is much point doing anything until a few folks here have received the rails. There is some open topics ( have you read the other threads) that go quite deep on possible changes like less torque, less precision etc. but it’s all speculation (informed) until rails are in multiple folks hands.

As to your GitHub comments I cannot decide wtf you are talking about? Do you have an ask? They have been responding to my issues and other folks - it’s how the leveling bug got fixed. I don’t think they have accepted many community PRs but the community isn’t posting many PRs (we really need the touchscreen code source too).

4

I think the most common purpose is to hold them as maintenance parts.

I am jealous of the two A350/A250 owners.

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5

I have an A250, and neither the fan noise of the power module nor the noise of the linear module operation is noisy to me.

I have five Anycubic MegaZero2.0 units in operation, and the noise level is about the same, so I don’t mind.

I read the other thread after I bought it at 50% off.
The details of the accuracy issue and the torque and incompatibility story have been written in the forum, but no official comments have been made.

This is something Snapmaker should be answering, but I don’t think it’s a good idea for them to “not” answer, even if they are looking at the forums.

Not sure about GitHub?
There are a lot of things written on GitHub about problems, suggestions for improvements, what you want to see improved, requests for additional features, etc., but Snapmaker leaves a lot of stuff out.

Snapmaker does not and is not obligated to address everything.

There are many things that have been posted on GitHub that have been left unanswered.

There are actually bug fixes that address issues written about on GitHub, but those are just fixes for things that have been asked about not only on GitHub, but on the forums, Facebook, and Snapmaker.

The fact that so many ideas and improvements are posted on GitHub is partly due to the anticipation of Snapmaker and partly due to the anticipation of open sourcing it.

However, if there is no action, people will just leave.
Some of you who use the forum may have suggested improvements or features to GitHub.

The goal should not be “write it on GitHub and be done with it”.

If you don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s not an option.

6

Great, I look forward to you contributing some pull requests.

7

What accuracy issues? There have been no numbers provided about the torque so as of right now it’s all conjecture.

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8

I too just saw the offer to upgrade the modules that came with my 350 ver2.0. I have owned my 350 less than six months so I need to understand more why the upgrades are required. Even with a 50% discount, this is over 500USD, so deal or not, help with more clarification, is welcome.

1.) The linear modules, do they provide greater resolution? How do they improve the performance of the 350? Will the Linear modules work with the existing power supply? ( if I don’t upgrade the power supply)

2.) The power supply module: Seem the fan noise is the only real improvement. I don’t have an issue with the fan noise. Also, the power draw is minimal and only while the unit is powered on during printing. at 15 cents per kilowatt hour, the unit would have to be on for years to payback the power savings (cost of watts) for the cost of the upgrade. Does it provide better power, more watts, more regulation, less ripple, why is this upgrade required to “improve the printing/resolution performance of the 350”?

Please Snapmaker, provide a side by side performance comparison between the modules you included with the machine as delivered and the new modules.

I will say that having to spend an additional 500USD clearly shows a product that was shipped before the correct components were ready. This should have been handled as a recall of materials/components.

9

No, less resolution by an insignificant amount. Also higher speed by an also insignificant amount. Performance is improved by being quieter. That’s it. They are fine with the existing power supply. The only difference with the power supply is it’s quieter and the lights are dimmer.

Same internal off-the-shelf power supply. It’s quieter and the lights are dimmer.

They shorta have, just not in a single spot. Not all of the listed “features” are new features, otherwise the list would’ve been really short.

For example, for the power supply:
image

Linear modules:
image

3D print head:
image

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10

Thank you for reply.

11

@brent113 i love how they say “easy attachment to other modules and addons” when the new rails are less modular than the original ones…

As for the resolution, the z is still the same but the x and y is less, which to me is negligible and doesn’t matter. If you’re printing something that has a noticeable difference with the slightly less x and y resolution then you’re attempting something that should be done on a resin printer anyway.

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13

Read from here to get an idea why most of us are quite sure that torque and resolution will be less than with the old modules. Resolution might be improved again by microstepping, but as brent113 wrote: It’s not anything significant - the new (worse) resolution is still more than enough. On print speed I might disagree with brent113, an increase will come in handy with large objects - although that I must admit that in the end it is not really significant if your print takes 2 or 3 days. With torque I think that with milling the 2.5 factor will be felt.

14

@Hauke yeah, I never said it didn’t have less, we just don’t know how much of a difference it is, but there is no doubt a change.

15

I avoided posting this previously, but #yolo. This is purely discussing liner module speed and assuming this would be used for travel or other non-extrusion, non-laser burning, non-CNC moves which would be limited by work speed.

Simple kinematic equations, let’s see what conclusions we can draw about this machine in the process of working through them.

First the knowns:
The firmware default acceleration is 1000mm/s^2
We will be calculating from an initial velocity of 0mm/min

The assumptions:
The new v2 module will have a maximum speed of 2.5x the v1 module based on the reduction of steps/mm from 400 to 160.

  • This is an assumption because it has yet to be proven that the new modules can handle the same pulse rate from the controller, but it’s likely as the TMC chips are not known to be pulse rate limited in that range from what I can tell.

The acceleration will be the same on v1 and v2 modules as the acceleration is a property of the entire assembled machine’s rigidity and as there have been no internal structural changes to the linear modules there would be no increase in machine rigidity.

The calculations:
We want to find the distance travelled for constant acceleration from 0mm/min to the maximum speed achievable. This will tell us the minimum length of a single segment on a print in a straight line to utilize the increased speed. Any segment length shorter than that distance will not achieve the maximum speed and therefore will not benefit from the increased speed.

Maximum speed of the v1 module: 150mm/s (9000mm/min) (from testing)
New v2 module maximum speed = 2.5*150 = 375mm/s (22,500 mm/min)

The math:
s = displacement, u = initial velocity, t = time, a = acceleration

  1. given s = ut + 1/2at2

    As we have an initial velocity is 0 the first term can be eliminated as follows:

  2. s = 0*t + 1/2at2 = 1/2at2

  3. given v = at, rewritten as t = v/a

    Substitute 3 into 2 to get

  4. s = 1/2a(v/a)2 = 1/2v2/a

    Plugging in values:

    For the v1 module: v = 150mm/s, a = 1000mm/sec2

  5. v1 s = 1/2*1502/1000 = 11.25mm ≈ 11mm

    For the v2 modules: v = 375mm/s, a = 1000mm/sec2

  6. v2 s = 1/2*3752/1000 = 70.3125mm ≈ 70mm

    As we can can see in 5 and 6 the time to accelerate to full velocity is 11mm and 70mm, which is half of the journey. The same time is required to decelerate.

    This puts the minimum segment length to achieve full velocity and then decelerate to a stop at 22mm for v1 and 140mm for v2.

    We can calculate the time it takes to travel a given distance on each machine. Let’s choose a large distance which would have the maximum benefit. Let’s choose 140mm as it’s the smallest distance the v2 will reach full velocity. Now let’s solve for time

  7. rewrite 4 as t = √(2s/a)

    For v1 it will accelerate, travel at max speed, then decelerate. The distance at maximum velocity is:

  8. v1 max v distance = 140mm - 2 * 11.25mm = 117.5mm

    Rewriting 1 for constant velocity and combining with 7 and plugging in the values for each we get:

  9. v1 time to travel 140mm = 2 * √(2s/a) + s/u = 2 * √(2*11.25/1000) + 117.5/150 = 1.08s

    Repeating for v2, which only accelerates and decelerates we get:

  10. v2 time to travel 140mm = 2 * √(2s/a) = 2 * √(2*70/1000) = 0.748s

So at each maximally beneficial move we save 0.33s.

While possible a print could make use of this savings, it seems unlikely to me that the number of maximally beneficial moves would sum up to more than a minute or so over the course of a job as usually high speed travel moves are minimal compared to work moves limited by the optimal work parameters.

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16

100% agreed and sound math! Still, I’m coming from a different angle. If I want to stay in the recommended operational parameters (e.g. for warranty or out of carefulness), the Snapmaker pages state that you should not go beyond 60-80 mm/s. If I assume that this goes up by the acclaimed 50%, we get at 90-120 mm/s “allowed” - and I guess if we plug in these values into your equations, the benefit will kick in earlier.
As I stated earlier: My plan now is to get a cheap used second set of old modules and drive the ones I have at 1.5-2 R (i.e. 100-150 mm/s or so) - and when they show signs of deterioration, plug in the replacements and play around with the then broken ones.

17

First, I believe the recommended values you are citing in the range of 60-80mm/s to be based on 3D printing and other typical maximum work speeds. That is limited by the process parameters and of no relation to the linear modules.

Here is a citation from Snapmaker staff, of which I’m aware you were in this conversations but I want to link it here for reference:
A recommendation to not exceed sustained 100mm/s, but acknowledging 120mm/s is achievable: Speed Limits on SM2? - #11 by whimsycwd

Just quickly redoing the math to skip straight to the conclusions you get the following (v1 max of 100mm/s, v2 scaled appropriately to 250mm/s)
v1 min segment distance for full speed: 10mm
v2 min segment distance for full speed: 62.5mm

v1 time to travel 62.5mm: 0.73s
v2 time to travel 62.5mm: 0.5s

A quite small difference in time of only 0.23s (about a 32% speed up) for something that would be only a high speed travel and never an extrusion move.

Even with a wild assumption like “printing at only 60mm/s wasn’t achievable before, but now it is somehow possible to print at 90mm/s” the speed up is only for very long segments capable of reaching the max speed. And running with that assumption that the print job is capable of reaching that max speed on every move puts the maximum possible speed up around 40%.

That 40% is unrealistically high, but any further meaningful estimation would require considering typical model geometry, as this is for an ideal model designed specifically for printing as fast as possible, and also is making fundamental assumptions that are provably false regarding how the fused filament process works.

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18

I tried to point this out on another post but the one it was directed at was not understanding lol.

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19

Yeah, I’ve seen this thread, but the only “official” published speed limit Snapmaker to my knowledge ever uttered was that on their Cura profile page, and it says there: 60 mm/s while printing, 80 mm/s travel (which never made sense to me anyhow - why should I not print with 80 mm/s if travel is OK?).

In everything else I agree with you, and it depends on somewhat personal taste if realistic speedups of 10-30% are something you find significant or not. For me it sometimes makes the difference between being able to finish the print before heading for my bed, or the necessity to have the printer powered on overnight.

20

Off topic here, so this will be brief -

  1. Why not print at 80mm/s? If you can get good quality prints on a machine at 80mm/s there’s no reason you can’t.
  2. Why travel for non extrusion moves at 80mm/s instead of the maximum possible like 150mm/s? Because the nozzle is constantly skimming across the top of filament and travelling faster increases the contact velocity as the nozzle is constantly hitting small bumps or curls on the lower layers. Instead of melting through the small amount of filament contacted by the nozzle it will instead break it off or cause the model to become detached from the print surface. That’s not an issue for CNC and laser as travel moves are always a healthy amount above the surface, but most people use a Z lift for travel of a small amount, just enough to skim above and smashing into solid plastic at high speed will guarantee failure of the print.
21

On 1: With my old CoreXY printer (Fabtotum) I’ve been printing a lot with 120 mm/s (PLA), and for anything not in high demand for mechanical robustness, layer adhesion was more than sufficient even at these high speeds. But I admit that with 60 mm/s it is better. On 2: Never had this problem actually… Even at high speed, the nozzle just squeezes past any bump I yet have encountered…
But whatever, your mlilage may vary :slight_smile: Not impossible I just have been lucky so far… I am more the “let’s try it and see where it takes me” type… With my fabtotum, which I got used for just 250 €, I was even more reckless than with SM2 which set me back more than 1000 € - that’s an investment you play it a bit more safe with :slight_smile: