My Snapmaker U1 Journey

3d Printing / Slicers / Setup / Problems
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Never been a big fan of Kickstarter projects. In the past I had backed a few & either never got the product or it was junk. When I fist ran across the U1 it KS campaign had just ended but the printer was available as a preorder. I inquired about when I would be charged & was told when I ordered it. Wasn’t keen on giving someone $900+ to hold & use for what would have been about 6 months at the time. So instead I just keep watching YouTube videos of the printer by people who had been sent one to evaluate. Fast forward to Black Friday weekend by this time I was pretty impressed with what I’d seen about the printer & how Snapmaker was handling the feedback from the influencers, did I mention this journey started in Sept of 2025? I decided to preorder the U1 with an estimated delivery of mid April. I keep watching YouTube videos & reading the Snapmaker forum as well as Reddit. Never did I ever have 2nd thoughts.

Comes the end of February & I get an email saying my U1 was being prepared for shipment. On March 1, 2026 it showed up on my front porch. I already had an area setup to unbox it & put it together. When I ordered it I had a Bambu X1C with AMS & a Creality K2 Plus with the CFS. Because of limited space one of them had to go. Out of the 2 the Bambu was the best printer with the worst company behind it. The K2 Plus had the bigger build plate which I had become use to. So when the U1 arrived I packed up the X1C to make room for the U1.

The only issue I had when I put mine together was the head kept having issues picking up the tool head. In the end it was user error I had the locking bar in the correct position but was putting the pin on the wrong side. After I figured that out the rest went smooth.

The only other issue I’ve had with mine is I kept getting the error message on tool head #1 that the filament was broken or jammed, which neither was true. Here I had to fall back on my troubleshooting skills I’d picked up from all the Creality printers that I had owned. I bypassed the feeder on tool head #1 & the error went away. Took the feeder off the U1 & removed the cover. Inside I found a bunch of excess grease, cleaned that out & it’s been working fine ever since.

For slicing I’ve been using Snorca slicer & it has done everything I need it to do & I’ve had no problems with it. Mine runs an AppImage on Linux. Most problems I have heard about Snorca was running on Windows.

About the only time the K2 Plus gets used is I need to print something that won’t fit on the U1 or the U1 is busy & I don’t want to wait. Don’t keep track but I do know that a spool of filament now last me much longer & my print times are shorter.

Maybe 2 weeks after I bought the U1 in put Paxx12 firmware on it & the printer has been working flawlessly with it. Snapmaker has been pumping out new firmware every couple of months fixing issues & adding features. All of then except the current v1.5.0 & v1.5.1 both have issues. Hasn’t affected me because I’m running Paxx firmware & his is still based on v1.4.1 which doesn’t have the issue. Now how wide spread the issue with v1.5.1 all I got to go by are the ones complaining about it. If it’s working for anyone they are saying or aren’t on the forums. This is normal people don’t normally go to a forum to talk about their successes only their issues for the most part.

Now I’m waiting for the next version of the U1 which I hope has a build plate close to the K2 Plus & I’ll replace it.

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In an effort to see join in, my story is a little different. Like most of us, I follow a bunch of you tubers and all the hype surrounding new printers all the time. So I have been aware of the multitude of multi color machines that have come out in the past couple of years but with all the waste generated was not interested. Besides I have been involved in a long term project of trying to build my own tool changer. But then around the first of April, I was approached by a friend wanting to know if I would sell him my bass boat! Well long story short, I ended up selling the boat and now had some cash on hand. The end of the pre-order period “sale” was ending soon for the Snapmaker and the new Creator 5 was just being announced. While the price of the Creator was better (cheaper), I decided to go with Snapmaker mainly for two reasons. 1. most importantly was the bigger build volume. I would prefer a bigger one, but it was bigger than the creator. 2. And this is a big one for me is the Snapmaker is open source.

So I pull out the ole cc and start praying that things go quickly and smoothly. One outa two isn’t to bad. The shipping was quick, however the process was bad. They unfortunately shipped fedex and ended up delivering my printer to house about 1.5 miles down the road! Thank God for tracking. Jumped in the truck and hauled buggy to find my printer! Found it and put it in the truck and came home!
Took my time to get it unpacked and set up and fortunately for me, my son had also ordered one abot the same time and warned me about the screw length in the tool head problem! (He had to replace one). Anyhow, got the printer set up and did the obligatory dragon as the first print. I think in all the years of printing this is the first “figurine” I have ever printed. Anyhow it came out fantastic so I used some double sided tape and “Frankie” now rides on top of the tool holder for every print:}). With the exception of the first print, anytime I would try a multi color one, it would error out with the toolhead going out of bounds. Surfing the forum and discourse gave a couple of suggestions, but what they said had either been done or wouldn’t fix it. So in desperation on a friday evening, we sent an email to teck support hoping we would get a response sometime (previous vendors had not given us much hope) and waited! Much to our delight and surprise we had an email response when we got up the next morning! I have to say, this was a shocker. Over the course of the next few days and several exchanges back and forth, the problem was sorted out.
Things have rocked along with mostly successful prints (the non successful were operator error) but then we ran into a problem of intermittent failure to capture time-lapse videos. I use Snorca and always operate in lan mode (I am NOT a fan of cloud based anything) and sometimes when I check the box it won’t capture the video. Of course it always the ones I want the most. When I inquired on the forum and discourse, got crickets so back to opening a ticket. Once again we got quick response and were going back and forth when the latest firmware and Snorca versions came out. That seemed to fix the problem, but then it started reoccurring again. When it seemed to fix the problem we responded to support indicating probable success, but said we would still monitor it. A week or so passes, the problem starts showing up again and before we can revisit the problem, we get a followup mail from support! Again some back and forth and now they are supposed to have a firmware update this week sometime again V 1.6??? so we are waiting on that.

My mods to the machine are minimal. I printed a fan adapter to cover the stepper drivers and main board chips along with putting heatsinks on the main chips. The lowered my temps by 30°C with the side cover still off, but with the cover back on, its only 20°C. As the fans are moderated by a buck converter running at 18V, the next time we have the cover off, will probably increase the voltage some. We also noticed the big hole between the print chamber and the board cavity so printed a shield to kind of block the opening to hold the heat in the chamber if we decided to go down the need for heated chamber route.
As I live in the very humid south, started making my own dry boxes out of cereal containers like I have for the Ender 5. Because of this, I pulled the filament feeders off the side of the printer and mounted them on “towers” to afford a smoother filament path for the ptfe tubes and filament betweenthe boxes and the feeders.

Then because we don’t like standing on our head to read the vertical touch screen, printed an angled mount for the screen and this makes life much easier when we have to use it.

The final thing was to make my own ‘top hat’ from a plastic tub and print some adapters based on some found on one of the online places.

Bottom line, at my age when buying green bananas is showing brave optimism, I am glad that I put the diy tool changer on the back burner and got the Snapmaker! For the most part it has worked out of the box and product support has been fantastic so far! Just hope it keeps up!

Cheers

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I totally forgot to mention my U1 only runs in the LAN mode, I too don’t have any use for cloud printing.

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I also have a Snapmaker U1 it has been good. Prior to Snapmaker top release, I ordered a PopCap and Panda Breath from Biqu. I installed a vent fan (92mm x 38mm) with filter in PopCap lid, with a PWM controller with NTC sensor. I built a cable to use 24V along with buck converter for fan power. More info and models on Printables. I found that NTC temperature ran a few degrees warmer than toolhead and cabinet temperatures. TinkermanHK on YouTube has a few videos on making cables. I also added the right side leadscrew cover, and used adhesive backed radiant foil on inside surface. While U1 right side cover removed, a 35mm 24V fan and 40C thermal switch was added to cool stepper divers heatsink. The thermal switch is in a TO-220 two lead package, and is in series with 24V + with connection to nearby 24V supply. When routing wiring, I discovered that, line voltage for bed heat, was mixed along with 24V wiring. There are two channels, so I was able to properly separate, but it is a tight fit. There is a relay in that vicinity, and wonder if bed heat is on that? I guess we might discover that later :).

I installed Panda Breath, upgraded firmware from v1.0 to V1.3. Setting up with phone, and binding to U1 involved trial and error, I’m not a networking guru. There is a Wiki support page and a few YT videos by others. I haven’t tried to print high temperature filament yet.

I use regular Orca, it has U1 in printer choice wizard. I did copy and paste printer start, and end of print Gcode from SnOrca, and also lowered 10,000 accelerations to 5,000 to make machine quieter.

I mainly do functional prints, I changed to 0.6mm nozzles, and purchase spare toolheads to easily go back to 0.4mm. I plan to use E1 for TPU, E2 for PLA, E3&4 for PETG.

I purchased a refurb Creality SpacePi 4X (filament dryer) and mounted it on top of PopCap with simple printed retainer, also see on Pintables (KitCarlson_4047304). It was oly $100, 4 spools, 2 temp compartments. I used PTFE tubes to connect to U1 filament feeders, except E1, and manual load that for TPU. I added printed PTFE stops at outlets. I also made a RFID tag holder, to mount spool tag for auto read, avoiding manual entry for filament type. For TPU, in U1 setting, set for manual load, to avoid error, by no filament in feeder.

My favorite YT place to keep up on U1 news is: https://www.youtube.com/@DerDrucktSchonWieder

Setting often enable CC for english, and audio AI translation.

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I also purchased spare toolhead cables, they are not standard USB type C data cables. I used a USB cable tester and compared to standard data cable. I was going to post picture of test LED indicators but cannot seem to find way to do that.

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