My printer is a FlashForge Adventurer 5M. I got it for about $211 shipped, which is the only reason I bought this unit really. They seem to be hovering around $249 right now. In most ways I am very happy with it, but I ran into an irritating problem today.
There's a lot to like about this printer besides the price. The load cell-based bed leveling system is very accurate and simple, it is a very fast printer capable of high volumetric speeds, parts are cheap, it's Linux and Klipper-based, and the modding community is strong. But I have come around to the opinion that no one should buy the basic 5M.
Adventurer 5M Series
The Adventurer 5 line includes three members right now: The base Adventurer 5M, the more advanced Adventurer 5M Pro, and the multi-color Adventurer 5X. While they are all based on the same platform, the 5X has quite a bit more hardware. The 5M and the Pro are essentially the same thing except the Pro has a whole lot of things the 5M doesn't, most commonly mentioned to include an enclosure but equally as important also including double the RAM. I would recommend the 5X if you are only going to print PLA and PETG and want to be able to do occasional automatic color changes. As a single-extruder printer, it "poops" a lot. Using mods you can reduce the poop, but then you either increase slicing difficulty or reduce print quality. If you want to make a lot of color changes, you're going to want to buy a tool changing or at least multi-nozzle printer. FlashForge is bringing out a new four-head tool changing model called the Creator 5.
The RAM becomes a big important deal when doing complex prints at high speeds. High speeds are these printers' party piece, and they support volumetric speeds up to about 34mm^3/second and traveling print speeds up to 600mm/second, depending on filament and nozzle. I have achieved real-world speeds with acceptable quality (for some things, anyway) as high as 500mm/sec with an 0.4mm nozzle and a 0.2mm layer height. The printer shakes like all get-out when printing infill over about 200mm/sec, but input shaping apparently does mitigate the effect on print quality fairly successfully.
Derailment
I do not only want "acceptable" quality, however, I want maximum quality, and for that you realistically must use adaptive pressure advance. Without diving down the rabbit hole of exactly what that means, the important part is that pressure advance is critical to print quality, and adaptive pressure advance allows your printer to be accurate at a range of speeds. This means you're able to print some features of your model at higher speeds than others, getting good quality out of all elements while also minimizing print time. For very large and complex models this can literally mean saving days of print time.
Unfortunately, starting to use this feature has led to a whole mess of failed prints for me. Thankfully they have so far all failed relatively early in the printing process. I'm getting the following error:
MCU 'eboard' shutdown: Timer too close
The Klipper knowledge base says that:
A “Timer too close” error occurs when the MCU is asked to schedule an action at a time that is already in the past. This typically results from delayed communication between the host and the MCU - for instance, if the host was busy or the message was blocked en route.
A variety of example causes are given. But in general, these problems either are communications issues between the computer (on these and many other printers, the "screen") or they have something specific in common, which is that they can either overload the processor directly or make it easier for some other process to overload the processor. Then the two systems (the control board inside of the printer which actually controls the motors, fans and such; and the control system inside of the display which feeds it gcode, which in this case runs Linux) get desynchronized and printing stops.
A wild SOLUTION appears!
I am using the Forge-X mod for my printer, and apparently I skipped a couple of real important steps, one of which is supposed to prevent this from happening. The PRINTING document says that the frequent recurrence of this problem on the 5M series is caused by a misconfiguration of Klipper as shipped by FlashForge:
In stock firmware, some internal Klipper parameters controlling MCU Communication and the Move Queue are not optimally configured, which can cause the E0011 and the E0017 error.
It goes on to provide a fix, entering the following command in the console:
SET_MOD PARAM="tune_klipper" VALUE=1
But as is noted in the root documentation, and the only other step I haven't done yet, you should also "Enable config tuning for a better first layer" with:
SET_MOD PARAM=tune_config VALUE=1
Since quality is very much what I want here, first layer quality is of the utmost importance, so I recalibrated flow rate (it went from 1.02 to 1.01) and Z offset (from .16 to .02) and now I'm printing the same objects that gave me grief with the newly calibrated profile, and with tune_klipper active.
I have Fluidd in another browser window next to the one I'm writing this post in, and I can see that I'm now several layers past where my print failed the last two times, so I'm going to tentatively declare this particular problem solved.
Wrap
Finally, lest I be accused of title clickbait, you want to know what I really think about the FlashForge Adventurer 5M? I don't think you should buy it. I think you should buy the Adventurer 5M Pro. Yes, it is almost $200 more than the 5M, but it has a seriously rich set of features. You get an enclosure with internal air circulation, automatic venting, and filtration; Twice the RAM; And sensors for enclosure temperature and VOCs. Speaking from experience, you're going to spend at least $60 buying parts for and printing an enclosure for the AD5M, and then you'll have to implement some type of drag chain unless you're paying more for a kit which includes it. And at that point, you still won't have a Pro. Another $40 in fans and some more printed parts will get you some simple ventilation, but it won't be as good as the Pro.