The Artillery Genius Pro is a Cartesian-XY-Head 3D printer that comes loaded with a great set of features surrounding its 220 x 220 x 250 mm build volume. It’s mostly a straight continuation of the preceding Artillery Genius with some added quality-of-life hardware like stock auto bed-leveling (ABL) and Artillery’s new 32-bit in-house “Ruby” mainboard. Also, importantly, dramatically improved cabling with pre-installed strain relief and metal Z-carriages.

If you take a peek at Artillery’s Sidewinder X2, you’ll notice there’s hardware parity between the printers – which differ only in size. Don’t take that to mean these printers perform the same, though. The varied sizes came with some serious tradeoffs that led to problems not existing in this smaller version.

GOOD-LOOKING BUILD

Artillery’s Genius Pro continues the original Genius’ clean, colourful look. Its black aluminium base is appealing and serves as great housing for its main board and power supply. We’re fans of the blue injection-moulded casing that makes the printer look like consumer hardware that can fit into any room without being too jarring.

Clean cabling also serves the printer’s quality aesthetics and is one way the Genius Pro has improved on its previous iteration. The original Genius had the clean-looking wide cables along the left Y extrusion and the X-axis that have carried over to the Pro, but they were of concern. Though the issue wasn’t as notable as it was on the Genius’ bigger sibling, the Sidewinder X1, cable wear and strain were still concerns. The Genius Pro has addressed those concerns with injection-moulded strain reliefs that come pre-installed and a thick but flexible cable for the fast-heating AC print bed with a guide sunk into the printer’s base to ensure it only moves as intended. Top marks for thoughtful and safe cable solutions.

One concern about the Genius Pro’s outward appearance came in the form of a sticker. Artillery’s latest printers seem to have a sticker reading “warranty void if seal is broken” attempting to deter users from getting into the electronics… on a 3D printer. What?

In many places, these warranty restrictions aren’t enforceable but still show up as a ploy to deter would-be tinkerers from taking a look inside. As far as we’re concerned, this is a huge faux pas for the 3D printer industry. At All3DP, we firmly support the right to repair and, beyond that, 3D printer users need to have access to the mainboard and power supply to verify solid connections and the absence of fire hazards. We couldn’t think of another 3D printer we’ve seen these stickers on, and it’s a huge disappointment to see from a manufacturer making waves in the industry.

UP-TO-DATE HARDWARE

The Genius Pro has everything you could expect from hardware in today’s budget systems, and the fast-heating AC print bed is a welcome cherry on top. The printer uses a direct Titan-style extruder with a cloned Volcano nozzle that can keep up when printing at high speeds, and the included touch probe adds ever-helpful ABL from stock.

Artillery’s AC-powered fast-heating print bed with a tempered glass build surface makes a return on the Genius Pro. We’re fans of how quickly these beds get up to temperature, reaching 70 °C in about two minutes, but that’s the only highlight for these beds. They have consistently suffered from poor thermal uniformity across Artillery’s products, and the issue is compounded by the surface itself being adhered to its heat pad — making it difficult to both clean and replace. To remove these glass tops, you need to heat the bed and peel the padding off. Not ideal. What’s wrong with an aluminium heat plate and some good old clips?

The Genius Pro’s mainboard has received a notable upgrade in the form of Artillery’s 32-bit “Ruby” mainboard. The last Genius was only 8-bit, but that’s simply too slow for the number of commands 3D printers are processing these days. Artillery opted to develop its mainboard with an ARM processor for this, and it’s finding use in all its new products. It’s a fine board, and we’re happy to see 32-bit becoming a standard feature. However, we do wish Artillery used this power to include a few more Marlin features like linear advance — which may have helped where the Genius Pro struggled most.

The Genius Pro is missing a few features that would have made our troubleshooting a little easier, the key among them being belt tensioners. It’s honestly baffling that this is missing from an otherwise premium feature set. To adjust belt tension, users must loosen the two screws attaching the belt pulley to the X or Y axis and push the pulley to tense the belt. As you might imagine, there’s little play and, in our case, it didn’t create enough tension in either belt. For the print head’s belt, we had to loosen the pulley again, remove the print head’s casing and electronics to access the cable tie that attached the belt to the print head, cut the tie and re-tighten the belt on the print head before finally tensing and resecuring the belt pulley. A simple knob should be available to adjust tension, and third parties have provided a solution for this since the original Genius.