Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I received my Palette 2 Dec 3, 2018 This is an updated review now that the Palette is printing... terribly still Let me just preface this with a quote from the bottom - ...printing a small multi-color clownfish you can find on thigiverse - and unlike the 11-13 splices of the very carefully designed keychain (with huge room for error) - this one requires over 500 splices. This small fish is 1/30th of the warranty or about ~$20 worth of the Palette 2 ($8 of the Palette 2 Pro). Top it off for you, there's probably 2-3x more filament in the waste tower than there is in the model... =========== Terminology for those new: =========== CANVAS: Web based slicer, promises to eventually be point and click to color things. That's with an *, as are most promised features. Mosaic plans on charging money for some of the features, but leaving a 'basic' model of Canvas available CANVAS Hub: This is a raspberry Pi 3 flashed with the free/open source octoprint/octopi, that has 2 free plugins installed. Looking at the plugins, they're very basic, today (A day or two worth of work for a proficient python dev) Chroma: Offline slicer, like CANVAS CURA/S3D: Slicers most people use, myself included =========== Very important things to keep in mind: =========== Palette 2 warranty is *3* months/about $6.66 a day pro-rated price if it lasts that long OR 15,000 splices Whichever comes first Palette 2 Pro warrenty/Pallet 2 with extended warranty is 12 months OR 50,000 splices whichever comes first The refund policy is no refunds, no returns Support has been VERY short with me - some "I'm Sorry's" and "Send me a pic" but 0 solutions have been provided I didn't secure on my own. They've also been unresponsive on the most important aspects - literally the part where I try to print anything =========== Pros: =========== 1) It does look very nice. It's really a beautiful machine 2) It comes with some mounting options (Lay it flat, a stand, and of course you can print some mounts) 3) It does indeed print multi-material/multi-color but it's so inefficient and has been such a rough road so far... =========== Cons: =========== 1) Shipped with firmware that was bricked intentionally - required a firmware update. Note: Support stated they were aware of the issue and are working on it 2) Firmware update was non-function when I was attempting to use it. Note: Support stated they were aware of the issue and are working on it 3) Didn't ship with a jumper they knew was required to perform the firmware update in this circumstance, saving the company maybe a few bucks over thousands of units Note: Support stated they were "very sorry" and "This mandatory firmware update is only applicable to this first batch of Palette 2's because of the issues we identified, but moving forward this will not be the norm." 4) Following all instructions carefully - Firmware updater would not connect to palette 2 even when jumpered for flashing the 3 pieces of firmware individually. Required hours with hundreds of attempts to get a successful flash. Note: Support stated they were aware of the issue and are working on it 5) Flashing the firmware required disassembling almost the entire device, and working on the device powered with exposed connectors. Its a recipe to further brick units, and even though I think most people with 3d printers are tinkerers its ridiculous to be doing this day 1 when you were told it works out of the box 6) Both the firmware updater, and Chroma (Their downloadable version of CANVAS - a slicer) will install without a EULA, and without prompting you or informing you what is going on. You end up with shortcuts, used up hard drive space, and no information on what occurred. This is very bad taste, and a big red flag for anybody serious about security and transparency. I know not everyone cares - and thats fine but really if anything open source/closed source has been used, id like to be told where i can poke at it and read the licenses and components that i may be legally bound to comply with Note: Support send me 1 EULA 7) The recommend use of the Palette 2/Pallet 2 Pro is with the 'Canvas Hub' and 'Canvas'. You can build your own Canvas Hub for 1/2-1/4 the cost of what's being charged in less than 20 minutes 8) CANVAS Hub fails to connect to the Palette 2. It's not just a couple times, its happened over 100 times so far. You have to run back and forth between the Palette, the Pi, and the computer and keep attempting to connect and power cycling. Note: Support stated they were aware of the issue and are working on it 9) CANVAS Hub disconnects from the Palette 2, occasionally during prints, before prints, after prints, while getting filament ready, etc. You have to throw everything away and start the repeated attempts to connect again - because both the Canvas Hub and Palette have no way of telling you they disconnected... Note: Support stated they were aware of the issue and are working on it 10) CANVAS Hub fails to send the Palette into 'Initializing' mode. This has happened to me at least 20 times so far Note: Support was made aware, I didn't hear back on this 11) CANVAS is a tire fire. I have encountered numerous 404s, its managed to refuse to slice tons of files depending on what gcode is inside there - requiring manual editing prior to importing. It is terribly slow - and attempting to slice anything larger (Lets say a 200x200x200 object with 4 colors, .4 layer height) can take several minutes before it stops responding. Many times it 'slices' something and presents me with a blank screen with nothing sliced but a few minutes of my day wasted. It provides almost zero feedback on any issues its encountering. A large portion of your setup is 'estimating', and providing exact values (like a bowden tube length) causes issues - they recommend just putting 1500mm or something ('Larger is better than smaller' as Mosaic says) 12) CANVAS / CANVAS Hub integration has multiple bugs I have encountered already. From sending a file to the hub locking one or both up, to the hub failing to ever send a file, to files getting sent that aren't possible to be deleted, to files with same names causing major issues. I hit a new bug almost every hour I used the integration. CANVAS is also unable to import cura settings, so if you spent months getting your filaments and printers fine tuned - you have to start over if you're using Canvas (You *can* import into Chroma, and it does 'meh' to 'ok') Note: Support was made aware, I didn't hear back on this 13) If you wanted to bare bones this and print without a Canvas Hub... and you were me... you would be out of luck. My unit didn't and still hasn't recognized a single sliced file on the SD card, nor on a second SD card I threw in to see if it worked. =========== So lets talk about some updates here =========== I have printed >35 prints now, with 3 printers (Ender 3, CR10, Raptor 2.0). The Ender 3 poorly calibrated on it's ***11th*** print. The 12th print looked a little worse, even though I begrudgingly gave the 11th print 5 stars (it was a 2 star print in reality). I didn't buy the palette for the Ender 3 but I couldn't keep my Raptor and CR10 out of production for the week+ nothing even worked in the slightest. Just a note - I was sure to re-set the printers on the Palette 2 so it wasn't using awful data that was miles from being correct the entire time (Which, don't get names they get numbers. So I have a TON of printers listed now with no way to delete them, name them, etc. I have to scroll through that whole list) The CR-10 failed to calibrate on its first, second, third prints. Was re-set and failed to calibrate on its new first and second print. CR-10 wont be using the Palette so I dropped it and put it back to work The Raptor 2.0 is a medium to large form factor - 400x400x500 - and the bowden adapter made by Mosaic doesn't fit in any way shape or form. The 3d printable one also doesn't fit in any way shape or form. The solution was to tape and zip tie the bowden tube to the printer - yes all this engineering and I have to tape and zip tie. (And Yes - They do suggest using things like 'twist ties' and 'zip ties' to hold everything together for many printers). It's a gmax 1.5xt or xinkerbot/orca clone, its listed as a supported printer. I will dive into this more later - but its ***not*** supported by the regular Palette 2, unless I want to pick the whole contraption up and zip tie it to the y axis. The Palette 2 Pro will have the proper bowden tube but of course wont have a connector that will work. The longer bowden tube on the Palette 2 Pro still would have issues with a 400x400x700 or 500x500x500+ printer without being mid mounted to the frame Don't be mislead by the 'Star Ratings' when you complete a print, its a gimmick meant to make people feel good and little more. 1-3 stars it considers the print bad, and the next print is a 'calibration' print or a restore to a 4 or 5 star print setting. That's how it works. I'm dead serious. Test it yourself. I can keep touching on the software, almost 70% of the let downs are the software/firmware on everything... Now lets get serious - repeated failures while printing Using Cura/Chroma and using CANVAS (while using the Canvas hub for both) - the printer has, on at least 4 prints set the printer nozzle to 0 degrees mid print. Of course PETG doesn't like it, The Palette 2 things its all jacked up and all your work calibrating is ruined... and your printer grinds filament to dust while its stuck in your extruder causing you to have to disassemble and clean everything I have had at least 3 jams post stepper on the filament feeds in the Palette 2. They will grind non-stop and send no warnings. Whats happening is the 'straight' cuts being made to splice filament are getting backed up (as designed) and proceed to catch on the slightly out of spec or poorly designed tolerances inside the Palette 2. 2 instances the PLA was ground to dust, i had to disassemble and clean the palette. Of course the software freaked out, and all prints went back to calibration prints it looked like. With PETG it didn't have the strength to grind down the filament - but the stepper got so hot by the time I noticed i don't think that motors going to make it a year if that happens a couple times I have had a couple of jams at the fusion/splicer. Once the filament stuck to it, the remainder of times (twice i think) it didn't splice perfectly cleanly and low and behold due to the tolerances... we already heard this story. Prints fail, you have to re-calibrate I had a beautiful failure at the output stepper. The Palette 2 was unresponsive, had to get power cycled. I was super sad because it was the first non-calibration keychain and it was almost done. Wasted 1/3kg of filament The Palette 2 is now malfunctioning intermittently - reporting 0M of filament extruded when there's been >20M, etc. It can't calibrate because it has no idea what's going on. Still waiting on support to respond... Speaking of waste - in almost any print but the specifically chosen keychain example your going to see *a LOT more splices* and *a lot more waste*. The Raptor is printing a small clownfish you can find on thigiverse - and unlike the 11-13 splices of the very carefully designed keychain with huge room for error - this one requires over 500 splices. This small fish is 1/30th of the warranty or about ~$20 worth of the palette 2. Top it off for you, there's probably 2-3x more filament in the waste tower than there is in the model. You can absolutely squeeze 10-20 fish on a 400x400 build plate - but your waste pile would still be enormous. It's so bad... you get a little less with scale, and if your printing all identical objects you avoid some splices, but man its bad. Oh... and that fish wasn't printed in random mode - its supposed to be distinct layers going the other direction (like a real clownfish)... so much for the last 2 '5 star' prints and the 2 hours adjusting e-steps and carefully calibrating to .01mm... Did I get a lemon? I mean 35% of people gave their old Palette's a 1-3 star review and if I were a business I would consider all of those printers or support cases failures. I do truly hope everyone else gets a '5 star' Palette 2 but mine, its a 1 star all day every day and I don't want it anymore