It's been a busy week and I was a bit surprised that the Voron kit I ordered just a few days ago was already here (which is awesome just unexpected it would be so fast to arrive).  I did a full inventory on the kit and my first impression is that it is a very impressive kit!  Take that with a grain of salt though, since I have never built a Voron, though I have built a few printers and assembled some more, with some other relevant experience that I hope will help me to evaluate this kit.  I also should point out that no deals or discounts were involved here, I'm just posting what I find.  So with that out of the way, I will just post some initial pros and cons, and then a ton of pics since those do the best speaking.  I was going off the Voron 2.4 V1.3 BOM which was linked from the AliExpress listing when I bought the printer (and everything was accounted for).  

Pros:

• MY KIT INCUDED A RASPBERRY Pi (3B+)
• The 2020 extrusions are all cut perfectly to the right lengths, drilled and tapped (where needed) and have the ends anodized with no sharp edges.
• Includes the correct Omron G3NB-225B-1 which is not the exact model spec'ed in the Voron config tool (Omron G3A-210B-DC5 SSR), but it looks like a bit of an upgrade (25A vs 10A).
• The cable chains are the opening type which is something that will be appreciated if ever the wires inside need to be replaced.
• It includes ALL Gates belts (initially I did not see the Gates branding on all of them, but they are indeed ALL Gates brand belts).
• The 5mm dowel pins have D profiles or notches cut to allow the grub screws to hold onto them tighter.
• A MeanWell LRS-200-24 power supply is included (this is the same as the Voron spec).  
• The parts are included to add a Klicky Probe for auto bed leveling.
• There is an XY Microswitch board included.
• They included some nice cloth like split loom in two sizes, which is something I have not seen before. It looks really cool for split loom.
• The v6 clone hot end kit looks decent, and includes a bi-metal copper and probably titanium heatbreak, as well as a standard steel (bowden) heatbreak, with a couple of 0.4mm brass nozzles to boot.
• The kit includes Genuine 3M VHB tape.
• The overall quality of the packing is excellent, and even the included cutters are nice.  

Cons:

• The screws are all black oxide steel which will probably rust in some climates.  I am also possibly missing a couple of M5x16 screws (but according to the Voron docs I will have enough - just not as many as was noted in the kit).  I may replace these with stainless.  (Update - I spent about $60 to replace these and get a ton of spares by not ordering a fastener kit)
• The fans are all sleeve bearing which is probably expected at this price point, but they are still not worth trusting in a printer application.  I'm definitely going to replace any critical or hard to access fans with double ball bearing fans.  (Update - I ordered some GDSTime dual ball bearing fans for the 4020 blower and 4010 axial fan which are used in the hot end / stealthburner).
• The build plate hole pattern is not to the Voron 2 spec.  This is not functionally a problem, but it means that a kinematic mounting mod is not gonna work without some drilling.  See the pics below to see the difference:

​Neutral and Other Interesting Stuff:

• The inductive probe is a FloTek PL-08N
• The kit includes a normal inlet power socket, which is fine since it's not a R2 spec, but I may upgrade it to the Voron 2.4 R2 spec which calls for a TycoElectronics 10EGG1-1 Filtered Power Inlet (NA/UK).  I'm not sure if it is really necessary so that will be a "later" thing if there are issues.
• I will have to reserve judgement on the wire harnesses, but they looked OK and they included a bunch of connectors and crimps.
• The steppers are the house brand which should be expected, but they look nice and I'm sure they will work fine. 
• The included thermistors for the bed and hot end read OK.  I am not sure if the bed has another integrated heat fuse or not, but I do recall seeing an (external) heat fuse included in the parts.  The BOM does say the silicone bed has a "Thermal Fuse RH15A125 wired".
• A 5V (Mean Well RS-25-5 PSU) supply is not included (because this is not a 2.4 R2 kit).  Since I may add some 5V LED's, and there will be at least two cameras (main and nozzle), I picked up the 5v Mean Well RS-25-5 PSU at Amazon for about $17.  Having a good 5V supply will insure that the Pi has sufficient power, and declutter the build a bit.
• The Voron 2.4 kit requires some M5x40mm and M5x30mm screws to act as the axles for the idler bearings.  I would prefer to use pins for the idlers though, since using a threaded bolt as an axle can wear things down over time.  But the parts kit I received is the voron spec parts (of course since what else would it be really?), and so it is not designed to work with pins.  So I thought about using some partly threaded M5x40mm bolts, and using them for both the M5x40 and M5x30mm bolts (I will cut down the threaded part of the 40mm bolts to 30mm where those are needed).  The partly threaded M5 bolts have 22mm of thread so it should work in both cases (40mm and cut down to 30mm) and it will allow the idlers to ride on a non-threaded part of the bolt as their axle.  I'm hoping the result could be similar to the Pins Mod but without having to print new parts.  Worst case, I still have some M5 threaded bolts I can use.

And now some pics of the unboxing and inventory.  I used the V1.3 of the BOM that FYSETC linked in the AliExpress listing and checked off each item as I went though it.  Nothing of real importance was missing (just maybe a couple M5 screws).  Again I was overall very impressed and the included Raspberry Pi was awesome to find nestled in it's space when I went through the 2nd box.  Having a good metric tape measure or ruler is a good idea for checking things.  I bought this one a long time ago and it is still my go-to for anything bigger than what my calipers can handle, and needing a metric scale.

Updated this post to correct two things:
1. I had said that some of the belts were generic.  That was an error, they are ALL Gates belts (I had not unrolled some of them to see the labeling on several of the belts when I was unpacking things).
2. I initially tested the hotend heater at 30 Ohms, which would be faulty.  However I was using some alligator clips which I think may have been causing the incorrect readings.  I re-tested with just my meter and the 50W heater reads 12.2 Ohms which is OK for the 50W heater (at 24v).

After seeing the Bambu Labs X1 Carbon, I almost bought one, and still may one day, since it looks awesome.  However, in my view, working against the X1 is firstly the cost (but it is probably worth it), and secondly the proprietary nature of pretty much everything associated with it.  I have mixed feelings about the walled garden they are building around their printer, since I know they had to make some design choices due to the tightly controlled design and simple user experience they are going for.  But on the other hand, they have leveraged off many opensource projects, and aside from some updates to PrusaSlicer, it does not seem like they are doing much for the 3D printing community.  They are just starting off though, and I know they will get big in time, so it's too early to judge.  For now though, despite the awesome looking product they have created, I'm gonna pass, I'm too cheap to plop down that much cash at one time, and like to tinker with my printers - and be able to fix them too.

The X1 did get me thinking about something new though.  I have always wanted to build a Voron, and the 2.4 is pretty much the best kit printer out there IMHO.  When I saw a deal for this kit from AliExpress, which was on sale for around $735 plus tax after the coupons, I left it in my cart for a few days before deciding to go for it.  It is not a smoking deal but if it comes with everything it says it will, then it will be a decent deal (though the price has gone up a bit since I bought mine).  The kit is a for a 2.4 (R1), but I plan to build it out a a 2.4 R2 with a Stealthburner.  I also picked up a Rapido UHF hot end to use with it, along with some extra parts.  Since the functional parts kit was less than $80 (after the coupons), and I hate printing ABS, I picked that up as well.

As far as I know, there is no such thing as a "budget" Voron for most folks, and so I expect the costs will go up even more when I find things that need to be updated or modified, but the kit looks very complete.  I expect that in the end, I could be close to the X1 Carbon territory for the outlay in cash, but the Voron is larger and I can at least work on it with readily available parts, and have tons of options to upgrade it if I want to.  I hope for now though, that I can restrain myself from trying to add every possible cool mod to the printer before it ever see's it's first speed benchy.  It's definitely gonna be a project, but hopefully worth it, and I will get to learn a bit about setting up kipper as well.

The nozzle cam which was installed on my CR10S Pro Hydra remix has been working great, however the one downside is that it is limited to 1280x720, and more importantly the cable is rigid which can cause it to get out of alignment.  

I recently received a flexible (soft) cabled endoscope camera which claimed to be 1080P which I bought from AliExpress, and so I tried it out.  I found that it only supports up to 1280x960 resolution.  I would have been fine with that even though it is not the advertised 1080P, however I also found that it was locking up, though my Logitech camera was working fine (I run multicam on the Pi).  So I tried another official Raspberry Pi power supply and unplugged all the other USB devices, but still found that the streams locked up after several minutes.  When I put my original nozzlecam back on (with the rigid cable) it was fine, so I'm thinking the AliExpress endoscope cam was a bust, but it was only 12 bucks.  I will continue to keep an eye out for a flexible cable endoscope camera which may be suitable as a nozzle camera, but for now I'm still using the original.


Update 9/1/2022: The seller of the first camera I bought seems convinced it is 1080P (big surprise) and told me to download their drivers which is not worth my time since it will not work with the Pi anyway at the correct resolution (and locks up).  I may take it apart though and if I do, will post some pics.  I bought another endoscope camera which is unfortunately a rigid cable version (but I have plans to change that if it works).  I have a bit more confidence in the brand of the new camera though, since I already own one of their endoscope cameras (a standalone version) and that seems to be pretty decent.  I will review the new endoscope when I get it, and update on how to set it up with the Pi.

I ran into a problem where one of my Pi's that has not been used in months, would not connect to my WiFi.  I found the issue was in the octopi-wpa-supplicant.txt file (which can be found when installing the microSD from the printer in a PC and browsing the files there.  For some reason I had not added the key_mgmt field (in bold below), but everything else was set correctly.  When I fix that, it worked again.  I know this Pi had worked when it was last used so it's strange that the line was missing, but in any case it's fixed now.

This is the entry from octopi-wpa-supplicant.txt that I updated on the MicroSD ( done from my PC using Notepad++, but notepad works too ):

## WPA/WPA2 secured
network={
  ssid="YOURNETWORKNAME"
  psk="YOURPassword"
  key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
}

Some other commands I found helpful to see what WiFi was doing are below (I used these while I had the Pi connected via wired Ethernet and ssh'ed in using Putty):

ifconfig -a
iwconfig
iwlist wlan0 scan | grep ESSID:

The last one clued me into the problem since I could see my network, but it was not connecting.

While I was ssh'ed into the Pi, I took the opportunity to run these as well (the 2nd one takes several minutes to complete):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Then I rebooted and updated Octopi itself (from the browser, login to Octoprint, click the wrench at the top left, select "Software Update" and then click "Update All").  After that and blowing the dust off this neglected Pi, it's back in working order.