Anyone who tested/purchased the new Anet A8 plus 3d printer?

[Teun]

I'm thinking about buying one is there someone who has experience with it?

[sn4k3]

I always see ANET as cheap junk, if you will buy from china there are better's, for example a clone of Prusa MK3 Bear! Example: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Prusa-i3-MK3-Bear-Upgrade-2040-V-SLOT-aluminum-profiles-rods-Power-panic-PSU-Motors-kit/32951692783.html

The plastic parts are not included, if you have a spare printer you can print, otherwise they are avaiable to buy on same store

I know Anet have larger build print but you can increase Z on prusa too. If you fell the need to.

Also you have CR10s Pro as a good alternative

[beanflying]

I think there is a bottom line on price for 3D printers and some slide under it at the cost of the results you can get out without significant modding of the printer. The Anet would fall into this category be prepared to tinker and have to add parts to it.

Also you have CR10s Pro as a good alternative

I haven't been paying particular attention to the '10S Pro' but it still seems to have unresolved issues? Even a recent review (from a good generally unbiased reviewer) seems to show there is still a few problems.



CR-10S and a pair of Ender 3 Pro's in my collection. All with a greater or lesser degree of tweakage

So my Answer is there isn't one other than if you go to cheap you will get worse results and finish up spending more than the difference of paying a little more up front for a better start point.

[kizmit99]

I'm thinking about buying one is there someone who has experience with it?

I have not used the "Plus", but I have an Anet A8 kit from a few years ago - and personally I found it to be a really good introduction to 3D printing.  Before buying it I had read posts about "you'll need to upgrade a bunch of parts", etc.  I actually ended up ordering some replacement parts at the same time I ordered the printer (heated bed, upgraded controller and interface boards, upgraded power supply).  In the end I didn't use the upgrade parts and never ended up needing to upgrade anything on that printer.  It has worked great for me right from the beginning.  You do have to spend a bit of time (several evenings at least for me) working through the assembly of it.  But if you take your time and are reasonably precise in following the instructions (which were a set of 10 videos when I did mine), I predict you'll end up with a decent printer (at a price that I don't think can be matched).

I did end up building a second printer from scratch (a 300mm HyperCube design), but that was for the experience, not because there was anything I needed the Anet to do that it wouldn't.

[Teun]

I don't see the CR10 as a competator because its almost twice the price. And the prusa doesn't have the desired build volume. I don't really mind tweaking the printer a bit so I felt the A8 plus was a nice choice. But any other alternatives/recommendations are welcome.

[beanflying]

Don't compare the CR-10 Pro against the Anet plastic version on price as they are nothing alike in build quality either. That is like comparing a Toyota to a Lada 4WD.

Consider the price of the CR-10S against the Anet A8 Aluminium as a more fair comparison and then think about what your time and parts will cost you. And then consider the price of both of them.

[martin1454]

I don't see the CR10 as a competator because its almost twice the price. And the prusa doesn't have the desired build volume. I don't really mind tweaking the printer a bit so I felt the A8 plus was a nice choice. But any other alternatives/recommendations are welcome.

Well, with a ANET A8 budget, I would go for a normal Ender-3 or Ender-3 Pro.

ANET's frame is too fragile, and the printer is just wating to burn your house down. The Ender-3 is currently the community's low cost favorit.

[Robbie Goodwin]

If anyone minds reviving this old topic I'll go away and start a fresh one but the title does seem perfect…

I bought and built an Anet A8 Plus and it doesn’t work so I’d like to hear from anyone who’s either had the same or a very similar experience, or knows of useful tests that might be applied specifically to an Anet A8 Plus. (Please, no-one take the time to recommend different printers. I bought the Anet A8 Plus solely because if seemed to be the cheapest experimental entry to the 3D field.)

To the careless eye my printer seems to be working, inasmuch as the head makes apparently useful movements in all three dimensions, but nothing else happens; nothing comes out of the nozzle and nothing seems to be drawn into the head.                                                                       

In the building process, every glitch but one was explained by the maker’s carelessness, whether in technicality or translation. (Am I alone there, or have others found the same?)

The one remaining unexplained problem concerned what seems to be the main heater element - not apparently included in the building instructions or the Parts Lists, though it might be included in the later ’Wiring sheet’ as either ‘Extruder thermistor-A… ’ or `Extruder heating-A…’ and its own stickers proclaim it to be ‘Extruder thermistorE_T-A’ and `Extruder Heat END-A’. I guess it’s safe to call that the main heater element can anyone say whether the exclusions and multiple names might matter?

Since I saw no single word about it in Anet’s instructions, I plugged that otherwise apparently spare item into the one electrical socket it seemed to fit and connected it to the two spare power terminals which had no other apparent purpose.

On powering up, the item soon glowed red hot; perhaps as it was lying loose, rather than being fitted into anything. No part of the instructions; merely the apparent undesirability of the red-hot glow caused me to look further, turning up another, mechanical socket under the extruder head, again apparently unmentioned, into which the heater element fitted perfectly.

Nothing apparently changed: after as before, the mechanism moved in all three dimensions but nothing else happened; nothing came out of the nozzle; nothing seemed to be drawn into the head. In whatever combination, the heater element and the connected sensors continued to report what looked like reasonable initial, rising and final temperatures.

It seems logical that one way forward would be to buy another heating element but before I do that please, has anyone else encountered exactly this situation and found any other solution, as for instance through tweaking either hard- or software?

[Ian.M]

The firmware *should* have shut off the extruder heater very quickly if it failed to detect the expected initial rate of temperature rise from the extruder thermistor.  The fact that it didn't and allowed the heater cartridge to reach red heat is worrying. See https://jgaurorawiki.com/thermal-runaway

If the extruder hot end stabilises at the desired extrusion temperature, there can't be much wrong with its heater and thermistor connections.  Failure to extrude would imply a problem with the extruder motor wiring, or the filament drive mechanism, or a filament jam or a blocked nozzle.   For the latter two you'd hear it as either the knurled drive wheel would be grinding the filament or the extruder motor would be skipping steps due to excessive back-torque.

Further diagnosis is required - remove the nozzle and (with the heaters off) send G-code to disable cold extrusion prevention, then to extrude 50mm of filament.  The filament should come of the hole the nozzle fits in, advancing 50mm each time you send the extrude command, and shouldn't be excessively chewed up.  If it appears OK, cut off the excess filament, retract (negative extrude) 20mm, refit the nozzle, pre-heat extruder to the correct temperature for your filament and try extruding again. 

You'll need a utility like Pronterface to talk G-code to the printer to do these tests + some knowledge of Marlin G-code.