So, I wanted a 3D printer that would print out of the box, so I chose a K1c. I pieced it together in the cheapest possible way with printer, CFS upgrade kit and CFS box itself from separate sources. The printer came in first, and I’ve been using it using Orcaslicer just fine. I put about 20 hours on the thing, and in general I’m quite happy with it. Then the CFS upgrade kit came in. Earlier this week, I installed it, did the firmware upgrade and the printer still does what it needs to do. So far so good. But then I started noticing little things. First of all, the wiping thing. I didn’t stick on the new wiper on the plate as I hate that design. Who came up with that? I like to use different style of plates, also dual sided ones. And the original Creality wipers are unobtainium. So I found and printed the required offset wiper adapter that screws on to the Z-axis screw block thing. Then I modified it to take readily available 36mm Bambu silicone wipers. But when I paid attention to the whole process, I noticed that with the new firmware for the CFS the whole wiping process only uses like 5mm of the silicone wiper and the speed of the wiping seems to be tied to the print speed the model is sliced with. In short, the printer doesn’t really do much wiping and if it does it’s so slow it doesn’t do anything. I’m just as happy not to use any wiping at all (none of my other printers have this “feature”, but if it’s there (and can’t be turned off) it would be nice if it works properly. Anyone else have this issue with CFS upgraded K1c or just me?
Second…slicer. Man, oh man, what a disaster that is in the 3D printing community lately. There’s perfectly good slicers around but for some reason OEMs are hellbent on creating “their own”, wasting precious developer resources which could better be spent on inproving on what’s already out there. I would even wager they’d sell more printers because of proper integration with whatever slicer people choose to use, not are forced to. But I digress.
I’ve been using the bog standard K1c just fine with Orcaslicer. It sliced, I sent prints to it over the network and I could even do things from the device manager. Until the upgrade to the CFS firmware. I could still send prints and stuff, and watch the print in the device manager, but then I started noticing things. The file manager doesn’t work. Homing and moving buttons don’t work. All kinds of little things that just simply stopped working seemingly at random.
So I installed Creality Print. Great, now I have two slicers that are basically the same on my PC. And lo and behold, everything suddenly works again! Unbelievable how companies like Creality think this is a good idea and a way to cather to their customers. I like the printer. It works. I hate everything else around it. The braindead design decisions on the plate bound silicone wiper. The forced use of a copy of a port of a clone of otherwise perfectly good software. And I haven’t even started on the lockdown of the firmware yet. Yes, you can get root access still. Creality kinda made that happen probably because they wanted to fake commitment to the community. But with this 2.whatever software…well, it’s useless. I would love to just wipe the whole thing and start over with Kipper, but I don’t have the desire to tinker with this thing too much (I already have too many project printers). I just need this thing to work. And it does. Within the unneeded and artificial confines Creality thinks is good for their customers for some reason.
This is my first and probably my last Creality printer. As said, I like the printer itself, but I detest everything else around it. Please, Creality, refind your way to the community’s heart. You don’t need to be like Bambu in behaviour, just in quality.
