An Affordable, Large Format 3D Printer – The Alfawise U20

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Take a look at the Alfawise U20 and see what makes it great and why it’s one of the most affordable, feature-rich 3D Printers out there.

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Hello there. My name is Nils and welcome to the 3d printing zone. So in this video, we’re going to be checking out the Alfawise U20. This is a large format printer, lots of features, lots of cool things. And I want to walk through the whole thing with you in case you’re checking out different printers, see if this is the right one for you.

Okay. So first thing I want to show you are some of the really cool features that this printer has. So there’s several, let me, let me think of where to start. So probably the, the one that I enjoy the most is there is a sensor on the extruder here that allows you to pause the, or automatically actually pauses the print when it detects that there’s no more filament coming in. So it’s a filament runout detector, very handy thing to have. I have not had that on my other printers. So that’s a really cool one. What that does is if you’re at the end of your school if your filament breaks, if there’s an issue of some sort and there’s not filament coming in, it detects that pauses, the print moves the head out of the way. So it’s not sitting there melting. And then it also keeps the temperature going on the hot end, as well as the bed and that, and it lets you know, and then that way you can just go ahead and swap out that filament and then just resume right where you left off.

Very cool. So that’s a really nice feature. And one that would have saved me from having several ruined prints in the past. And so something I wish I had for a little bit longer, I don’t know if you’ve ever printed something and had it just sitting there printing nothing for awhile. It’s pretty frustrating. So that’s an awesome one, right along those lines that also has power failure detection. So let’s say you’re printing along you’re 22 hours into a 24 hour print and the power goes out. That’s the worst. And so if that were to happen with this print or with this machine, then it’s actually just going to resume right where it left off when, or it’ll give you the option to when the power comes back up. So it’s got a nice little, 2.8 inch full color touch screen over there, and it will say, Hey, the power ran out.

It looks like there was a power failure. Do you want to resume your print? Say yes. And then let it just keep on going. So that’s a really cool one. I just mentioned the color touch screen, which is actually very intuitive. It’s about just shy of three inches in size. And then it actually has a really nice interface. It’s full color. It’s got good icons. It’s easy to navigate. One downside, I would say with it is the screen, the touch screen part of it is okay. You kind of have to push hard a couple of times. It doesn’t always register the touches. So that’s something that I would say could use a little work maybe but not too bad, definitely not a game changer, like a deal breaker of any storm. Another cool thing that this has is the bed has a couple of options that come with it.

So it’s just some clips and then the bed itself is really great. It’s one of the better ones I’ve worked with. It holds on really well. So this is a nice material holds on a little too well. In some cases I actually have had to use a razor blade to try to pry under there. And then just still ha was having a really hard time getting the print off. And I’ve gouged the map a few times here. So on the backside of this, you have the option to just use glass. So it’s got a filter clean open surface here, easy to use. And so I printed several of these pieces here with the glass side as well, just to try them both out, but all in all I do like the mat a little bit better. I think it has great adhesion and it’s easy to work with with so, so there’s the mat.

So it’s got nice that you can use. Either either side of that, the print bed goes up to about a hundred degrees cells and then the hot end up to 250. So fairly standard there allows you to print most of materials. A few, few other things I really like about this printer. The hot end is a standard 0.4 millimeter hot end, and it has a standard thread on it, which means you can easily upgrade or swap out that re that hot in there. So one of the things I did is I purchased several different little bags of different hot ends ranging from 0.2 millimeter up to 1.0 millimeter. Now, if you haven’t printed with one millimeter, I’ll do another video on that probably, but you should check it out. It’s pretty fun. You can do things like this, where you can print.

It almost looks like small band of toothpaste coming out of the hot end. And so you can print really quickly, especially in vase mode, something like this. And it’s pretty thick. I printed this out at 0.8 millimeter layer height, and it came out really nice. It even has some wood filament in the middle and a bonded those together without any problems I printed this headphone stand also in the 0.8 millimeter using that one millimeter hot end. And this thing printed in, I want to say it was two and a half hours. So two and a half hours to print a full headphone stand. It’s pretty good. The quality is not like amazing and perfect. But if you’re looking for something rough and functional and sturdy, this thing is nice and solid than that one millimeter hot and is going to allow you to do some cool stuff like that.

And with this printer, you can easily swap out those hot ends for whatever you need. The printer does come with a decent capacity micro SD card. And on that SD card are multiple files. Most of the ones you see on this side here on your right are all from the micro SD card, all of these guys right here. And so those were all kind of primed for this machine. Tried those all out. They all printed beautifully. This one, for example, I literally opened the box and then within about a assemble that there’s just a little bit of assembly you have to do on this. Not much at all. And then within 20 minutes, 25 minutes, probably I started printing this one, no setting adjustments, no upgrades or anything like that. And I had a successful print within 30 minutes. Well I think it’s, I think this one took half hour, 45 minutes to print, but I was able to print within an hour have something actually produced by the machine from open opening the box to pulling it off the bed.

So very fast pretty impressive. Other things that I printed here, these all look really sharp. If you look for example, at this guy or the Baymax, the finial, the birds, any of these, the layer lines are just about non-existent and just super smooth. It does come with 200 grams of white PLA filament. And that’s what I used to print a lot of these and Oh my goodness. It looks nice. Okay. This is again, just no adjustments, no tweaks right out of the box. It looks great. So if you’re looking for something that’s just going to work, then this has, this is a great printer for you. Let’s talk about build volume for a second. Obviously, if you’re looking at this thing and you’ve got a smaller printer or you haven’t tried 3d printing before, you may be thinking that looks pretty big.

How much can you print with that? So let’s check it out. This guy here, I printed this kind of as a sample of the largest size, you can print with this thing as far as the dimensions. So this is large. So this is 295 millimeters across and about 395 millimeters tall. So this is a good size print. This is not high quality. I put this in what’s called vase mode or spiralize outer contour, which just means it just prints. A perimeter had just goes around one time for each layer and just circles and circles and circles until it gets to the top here. And so I printed it out really thin, but I just wanted to try it out. This thing printed out in no time. And I use the filament detection run out or run out detection to make the different colors here.

So I used up the rest of my blue. I had a little bit of white leftover from the stuff that came out of the box and use that. And I thought I’ve got the blue and the white and might as well do the red. So I’ve got my kind of Americana slash Pepsi, a big old vase here. So it came out really cool. I’m pretty excited to be able to print something that large and that quickly with vase mode on the alpha yzu 20. So pretty cool. Then I needed to do something a little more functional. So I’m working on, well, I guess you could call it functional heads up for debate, I guess that definition, but the idea is what this thing is weird. Looking big, old thing. This is a thigh armor piece for a storm trooper. The Stormtrooper armor set.

So I’m actually printing the entire set of armor for the original storm troopers from the original movies. I’ve got the helmet back there as you can see, we’ve got one of the blasters. I’m just going to do the whole thing, 3d printed. And if you haven’t seen one of those before, stay tuned on the channel, I’m actually going to be taking the whole entire thing, taking it up to a buddy of mine who has a place where he’ll actually make all of it Bulletproof. And so we’re going to have some real fun with a full on Bulletproof Stormtrooper outfit. So stay tuned for that, but this is just a good example of the types of things you can print on a larger printer like this without having to break it down into multiple prints. Just that one, just there like that. So pretty cool.

So all in all my impressions of this printer are that it rocks honestly, it’s pretty great. It would be awesome if it had a bed leveling system that’s a really nice feature to have. It does not have that. It does, however, have the touch where you can set the you can, it helps you with the bed leveling. Basically it makes it a little bit easier to move the head to where it needs to be to position it for bed leveling. And then the touch screen is not as responsive as I would hope. But really not bad. It’s definitely very functional, very usable, but the, the size of this thing, the sturdiness the quality of the prints, both from little teeny tiny prints with great detail, to really large prints that are very voluminous. It handles those really well. The bed functionality takes about five minutes.

It’s not the fastest one I’ve seen as far as heating up the bed. It does take about five minutes. But that said not too bad and it keeps you apprised right there. You can hook it up to OctoPrint, I’ll be doing a video on that shortly to show you how to use the raspberry PI to hook it up to OctoPrint print and control the entire thing remotely, which I highly recommend if you’re doing any 3d printing and all in all, just a great printer. So hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave those in the comments section below. And you can also follow me online at, on Instagram or on Facebook at the 3d printing zone. And we’ll show you time-lapses from this printer and other printers I’ve got here and you can always check those out. And then I think that’s about it for this video. So thanks for watching. My name is Nils and thanks for joining us in the 3d printing zone.