The Problem
I got my first 3D printer in December, an Elegoo Neptune 4. The learning curve was bigger than expected but I got it setup and calibrated. I say calibrated but I mean kind of Calibrated. The printer would do some very weird things, without explanation:
- The Z Offset would change every time I turned the printer off. The number would stay but the printer would print very differently and would need it’s Z offset calibrated again.
- The printer would sometimes ignore its bed mesh, other times it would not. There was no pattern I could even observe for when this would happen, it was always a surprise.
In addition to that, there were some other issues with the printer as well:
- The OS on the embedded Raspberry PI was already End of Life when I received the printer
- The version of Klipper on the printer was very far out of date and not updatable. You had to wait on updates to flash from Elegoo
- The Web UI would sometimes just not work and you would have to restart the printer
All of these issues are related! Elegoo did not use standard Klipper in the Neptune 4 line of printers, they modified it and changed things. Their changes lead to the issues above. Our fix will remove their modified Klipper and replace it with a more standard version of Klipper.
The Fix
The fix is OpenNept4une! This is a project created by the Elegoo community, mainly Phillip Thelen, barrenechea, SQUIRRELYMOOSE, DanDonut & Jaerax.1 They have removed Elegoo’s customizations and modernized things. The Pi gets a much more recent OS, and a much newer version of Klipper!
Their Installation Wiki has all the info you need to install this to your Elegoo printer. You will need a EMMC reader, and I personally recommend doing it on a new bigger EMMC chip. It is not required at all, but it’s so cheap, why not?
The Results
All of the issues I listed earlier were fixed by this project. My prints are now much more consistent and higher quality. I can see more info in Fluidd and everything just works better!