3D Printing with the FLSun XL Cube FDM printer

The latest addition to my repository of hobbies is that of 3D printing. December 2018, I bought the FLSun XL Cube 3D printer for my dad as a Christmas gift.

The FLSun XL Cube 3D FDM printer is a Chinese “assemble yourself” kit with a big print volume of 260 × 260 × 350 mm. My father managed to assembly the printer, but he never really got it to print great results.

A month ago I got the printer from him and have been doing tweaks and upgrades here and there. Upgrades include:

• Raspberry Pi runnig Octoprint, such that I can send prints directly to it from my PC without resorting to SD card swapping!
• A USB camera to watch the print-bed and to do time-lapse videos
• A new self-printed carriage to hold the hothead
• A part cooler to cool the printed parts.
• A filament cleaner (a sponge in which the filimant travels to remove dust)
• A glass bed to increase adheasion.

The setup looks like this (sitting in my shed):

Raspberry sitting on the front beam to the left,
camera on the left beam in the middle

In addition to the hardware upgrades above, I have done a lot of tweaking of my CURA profile by primarily printing miniatures from D&D and Battletech. (yeah I know, I am a geek)

All in all, with my hardware upgrades and software tweaks, the FLSun XL Cube Printer can do amazing stuff.