FABtotum - Setup

As I mentioned last week in my blog introduction, I have ordered a 3D printer. I'm gonna show off some images and write about the setup of the FABtotum Core Pro launch.

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Introduction

The printer I ordered is the FABtotum Core Pro by the Italian company FABtotum. First when I tried to order, I got some problems with the payment (I wasn't able to pay with USD, but I was on the wrong region configured in the shop) but the same day an employee from FABtotum contacted me and offered me other payment methods. Overall during the order and during its progress I got great support by him as updates over the current status of the order processing.

Additionally to the printer I ordered a variety of different filaments (e.g. flexible filament, wood PLA and the PRO HT PLA). I also ordered the Palette+ launch over them, which is manufactured by Mosaic Design and allows up to four different filaments to be welded together for a multicolored print in one go. But The Palette+ as the special filaments will be covered in another blog post.

The manual I used to setup the 3D printer can be found on the FABtotum support site launch. They also provide information for setting up the other heads (milling & laser head) as the Palette+ and have a variety of other tutorials.

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Unboxing

The Printer was well packed and it felt like opening a really big birthday present you have waited for since a long time. There were very few parts to put together which was well described in the manual.

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Setup

To install the FAB UI Colibri launch I encountered a problem. The printer can be connected with the ethernet cable to the computer and from there it should be accessible via browser on a predefined IP. The problem I encountered was that it was configured on the IP 169.254.1.2 and when I typed in the IP it didn't found it. Fortunately my flatmate suggested to change the subnet mask to 0.255.255.255 and give my computer a static IP close to the one of the printer (I used 169.254.1.3). After that I was able to connect to the printer over the web interface and setting it up without a problem.

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Calibration

There is a lot of calibration and configuration stuff I first didn't thought about. But for the first setup it provides an easy step by step guide in the web interface to follow and setting it up. The only problem I encountered was when configuring the feeder on the printing head. The temperature needs to be manually set, which I didn't knew the first time and took me quite a while to figure out. Otherwise the calibration worked out well for me, even though there are quite a lot of terms and configurations I still didn't know currently and have to figure out.

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First (successful) print

Well... There where a lot of tryes and failed prints at the beginning. Lucky for me, that I received my printer towards the weekend, and had allot of time to try it out. At friday I have completed the first print, which was the keychain model provided in the default library by FABtotum. The layers were way too thin and therefore it didn't turned out well...

At saturday I worked myself into Cura launch, a software provided by Ultimaker which allows to configure the 3D print with a lot of options. Additionally I also applied the blue tape onto the hybrid bed so that the prints stick better to the surface. I had a few unsuccessful prints, until I figured out the perfect options and printed an acceptable object. I'm happy with the result, but I still have to figure out the perfect options for my future prints. The largest problem in this regard are the corners of the object, which are getting filled up with too much filament. But I'm happy how theCali Cat launch by Dezign turned out...

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Further optimization

Towards sunday I installed the 0.2mm nozzle on my FABtotum printer and performed further calibration. The only problem I encountered was by calibrating the feeder, where I needed to switch to the 0.8mm nozzle, because the filament was extruded too fast and I didn't found an option to slow it down during the calibration. Otherwise after a few more test prints and optimization on my Cura profile they started to turn out pretty well...

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The only thing I have changed was to remove the blue tape and test the method with hairspray to get the prints well stuck on the glass. Over the next few weeks I want to try out the Palette+ and milling head. I will post further things I printed out over my social media channels. Otherwise at a later point we will also try out the laser module. I'm also currently conducting the introduction of my personal desk project which will be released at least next week.

Thank you for visiting my blog and reading this post. If there are any questions or opinions you like to share, feel free to write a comment on this post or over my various social media channels.

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2018-03-29T18:00Z - Roger "Equah" Hürzeler