Creality Ender-5 S1 3D Printer Review

Setup & Calibration

Calibration was mostly an automatic process, the printer guides you through quite easily once you first turn it on and requires little from you as the user to get it running.

The only thing that was a pain to get through was levelling the bed, because whilst there is software to help with this process, it certainly helps to make it as level as possible before you start printing. Part of the set-up process involves manually adjusting the height of each corner of the bed to get as close to level as possible, so the printer can account for the tiny differences that are impossible for you to get exactly right.

We also had the additional task of setting up the Sonic Pad, this was easy enough, but we did unfortunately come into a few struggles with SD card compatibility with the printer. This meant that the firmware we had to load wasn’t being read, so I’d suggest you just stick with the included SD card for this.

Calibration Cube

A Calibration cube is quite as simple as it sounds, it is a cube that features an “X”, “Y” and “Z” embedded in it for each respective axis of the printer. The embedded letters allow you to look for any warping or layer shifts on the corresponding axis and will let you know which axis needs adjusting. Generally, you will be printing many of these cubes one after another, making changes where necessary until you have a perfect cube. The calibration cube we used can be found on Thingiverse here.

Right out of the box, the calibration cube came out without faults in any of the axis