Let's first run through the specs of the ender 3 s1. The Ender 3 s1 has a build area of 220 x 220 x 270mm, which is similar to the previous Ender3 printers, but gives you 20mm of extra height. Creality Ender3 S1 comes standard with a magnetic flex plate system for the bed, that is made up of a very thin spring steel and a textile sheet. The bed does include four large bed leveling knobs which are common seen on most of the other Creality printers. Ender3 S1 also has a CR touch for automatic bed leveling. CR Touch is basically creality's version of the bltouch. It works very similarly with bltouch, 3D touch leveling sensor. You can use it with any sort of build surface material.
Sprite Extruder of Ender 3 S1
Ender 3 S1 features the new sprite extruder which is by far the biggest advancement of this 3D printer. The sprite extruder is a fairly compact and lightweight extruder, weighing roughly 210 grams has dual gears and a fairly short and constrained filament path. There's a compact stepper motor used with it and it has two fans. One for hot and cooling and one for the layer cooling. The Sprite direct extruder comes with a ptfe lined or non all metal hot end which is something i am a bit saddened about. But Creality released the Sprite Pro which is a full mental direct extruder. The Ender 3 S1 has a filament runout sensor, X-axis and Y-axis belt tensioners and dual z-axis lead screw, that are connected with a belt to maintain alignment. You can print directly from the lcd screen using a full size sd card, which is really nice to see over the previous generation boards using a micro sd card, or you can hook up the printer to either your computer to print directly from it, or something like octoprint using a usb C cable, which is also something that's pretty cool to see.
The screen itself seems near identical to the one on the Ender 3v2 with, perhaps, a different firmware which supports auto dims after a few minutes of not being used. It works fine, but there's not a whole lot of options as far as control goes or getting feedback from the machine. However someone did tell me that there is already some form of a custom community firmware available for this.
There's a storage drawer in the front right of the printer for spare nozzles or holding various tools. i never really had any issues with the wiring on the previous generations of ender 3, but they definitely beefed up the strain relief on the bed for the ender 3s1. The cable management as far as how it's routed for the x carriage is also much cleaner. The Creality Ender 3 S1 is a 24 volt system running marlin. And they relocated the power supply to the underside of the machine to make space for second z motor and second lead screw. I opened the bottom of the machine to take a look at the electronics and found a 350 watt crowley branded power supply as well as a new controller from crowley called the crfdm v24 s1 301 which is quite a name and seems to have been made specifically for this printer. Cable management was quite nice. Ferro connectors were used and there is a fan in the case to help out with heat.
The ender 3 S1 came packaged very nicely and setup was pretty much the same as all previous ender 3 machines. You’ll get the bottom of the machine fully assembled, and the x axis and z axis need to be attached with a couple of bolts. For most people from unboxing to printing, it's probably around 20 to 30 minutes tops.
Once powered on, you will need to run the automatic bed leveling, which does a 16 point grid. It does a couple of probes at each spot and it is a fairly slow process. It takes a couple of minutes but in the time i've been testing out this machine i think i've only done that the initial time and maybe one other time. It's not something you should be having to play around very often, especially if you make sure that the bed knobs are all nice and secured.
Once the leveling sequence has been ran, all that's left to do is set the z offset using a piece of paper and you are ready to start printing.
Print PLA with Ender 3 S1
We started off on stream loading up some blue pla to printing out the lucky cat model that most of the creality ender 3 have come with. And it turned out really really nice.
Once done, i was ready to slice up some files of my own. so i took the included sd card find the Creality slicer, which is just a skinned version of Cura. There is a new version of it is available on Creality’s website. You should find a built-in slicer profile for the creality ender 3 s1.
The first print i started off with was a Mardi gras mask from chaos cortec which was a pretty large print that required supports on the underside and a little bit more for the eyes. It was close to a 20 hour print. and i was very pleased with the results. the supports came off really nicely and i felt like the s1 did a nice job with this model.
all of the files and all of the things i've sliced up to print out on the ender 3s1 have been printed with a 0.2mm layer height.
next i moved on to a more challenging mechanical part that required tight
tolerances created by 3d printing world. I started off printing out his mini planetary gear which although looked nice had fused together on the bottom. i felt confident that if i adjusted the z offset and i watched the first couple of layers that the printer could get it. so i sliced up his mini planetary gear compartment and i adjusted the z offset a bit to give less of a squish on the bed surface that print turned out perfect. and it is such a cool print in that it shows quite complex geometries tolerance compatibilities and it's functional for storage.
At this point the red pla i was using was getting low so i sliced up the atoms family thing model, which i didn't think i had enough material for in order to test out the filament runout sensor. the filament ran out, the printer paused and the head moved out of the way. i was able to swap in another spool. hit resume and finish the print without any issues.
I followed this up with two prints of the spiral rings ornament from 3d print bunny, which is a pretty tough model with some serious overhangs. The first time i printed it out. it did complete but early on maybe 25 into the print the nozzle did bump one of the rings causing it to sort of break off. and it did correct itself and complete the printing process.
I went ahead and changed the filament for some proto pasta pla, and resized it with all the same settings. but i enabled z-hop and this time it was able to complete without bumping any of the parts. i wouldn't say that it is perfect, but considering the difficulty that this model is with all of its overhangs and really sort of small surface areas to build off of, I think the Ender 3 S1 did a great job. and i'm sure that if you spent time dialing in speeds and a few other cooling settings, you can get even better results with this model.
Print PETG with Ender 3 S1
Next i decided to throw some petg at this printer. and I'm in the process of building the voron switch wire and wanted to print out one of my little hardware organizers.
while i'm building so i loaded up the hardware organizer, which is a fairly large print. i sliced it at a larger 0.3mm layer height, because i don't really need tight tolerances with this. I sliced it up at 0.3mm at 240 celsius on the hot end. The print didn't turn out bad and it's absolutely usable. but there's definitely some slight room for improvement. there's a couple areas of some sort of inconsistencies with extrusion.
but because this hot end is not all metal. normally if i'm printing a 0.3mm layer height of petg i would have bumped that temp up to about 250 celsius. but because it's not all metal. the highest i really will ever go is 245, but i wanted to play it extra careful and so i printed it out at 240. i do think that was a huge contributing factor to some of those imperfections, but i still think that overall it did a pretty good job. and again messing around with the settings with a lower layer height, it will definitely yield some better results.
Before unloading that ptg i needed to print out a couple of small hooks for the carts that i used. and i printed that out with the exact same settings at 240 celsius at a 0.2mm layer height and those prints turned out really really nice. so again i absolutely think that this extruder is fully capable of printing with ptg.
It's just the hot end limitation of not being on metal, that i wasn't able to print at the temperature that i typically would have. i did also print out all 20 drawers for this organizer but just in pla on this printer. and it had no problem doing that. i could have loaded up the entire bed, but i did them in batches of five, and each time i just hit print flexed them off hit print again and rinsed and
repeated and the s1 had no problems
printing out those parts.
The last thing i wanted to throw at the ender 3s1 with some tpu. not that you can't print tpu on bowdoin type extrusion systems. You absolutely can. but with this direct drive i felt that it should be able to do it quite well and it definitely can.
i found a tree frog model over on prusa printers that i scaled up and printed it
12:38
at i believe 45 millimeters a second, which is pretty damn quick for a 95 a
short hardness uh filament so the the
machine had absolutely zero issues with extruding. there was no under extrusion
