Orbiter - Super light weight direct drive extruder on Seckit SK-GO

My Seckit SK-GO has a worn out Flex3drive extruder, so why not replace it with another light weight design: The Orbiter. Open source and featuring a tiny stepper motor, planetary gears and Bondtech style dual drive. Parts can be sourced and printed DIY, or ordered as a complete kit from Aliexpress.

My verdict, a fantastically designed product apart from the filament exit path, which has been fixed in V1.5 (now linked below). This product was purchased with my own money, all opinions expressed are my own. Thanks to my patrons for requesting this video and for their generous support.

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[spedi]

Very nice tutorial again. You make everything look so easy and simple.

[lloydrmc]

Your videos are fabulous! I find this one particularly helpful, as I am piecing together a possible boot build to start

[dragosbatca]

Got mine last week. Glad to see you do a video on this

[F_CPB]

FINALLY someone did it!!! Thanks Michael!!

[santiagoblandon]

I got a Seckit Sk-Go thanks to your videos and it has been the printer of my dreams! =D

[mchanist]

Excellent extruder, very nice engineering. An Orbiter with a planetary gearbox, brilliant ;) And it really is open source, not pretend ..STEP files!

[LPTCK]

Running the orbiter on 3 deltas of mine - awesome extruder really

[ssrix]

I ordered this a few days before this was uploaded, and had hoped you would do a review! What luck!

[anoirbentanfous]

as usual the best product review on youtube

[LukesLaboratory]

A few comments - great job with the assembly and installation process. However - your conversions from mm/min to mm/s are off by a factor of 10 (360mm/min)/(60s/min)=6mm/s not the 60 shown. In addition, it's likely that you are volumetrically limited by the copperhead, not by the linear feedrate of the extruder gear itself. 6mm/s*((1.75mm/2)^2)*pi =14.42mm^3/s, which is in the neighborhood of tested max flow. If testing just the extruder itself, use A) large nozzles and b) high flow hotends for a true comparison of capabilities. 3) instead of using wires to flip the pairs, just reverse it in firmware. Much easier.

[blaze]

I've been researching this extruder so much recently! Thanks for the vid

[avejst]

Great video as always!!
Interesting extruder
Thanks for sharing :-)

[TheBillzilla]

Hi Michael.
At 5:32 the easy way to put that bolt in is to put the bolt in before the geared cover in placed in position, so that you can make sure the bolt is straight as you wind it in. It greatly reduces the chance of stripping the thread that way. The bolt on the other side, as you showed, is relatively easy to do.
Anyway I loved the review, I ordered one last night and am currently designing a mount for it for my Coccon printer. Thanks!

[noelwade]

Thanks a bunch for the deep dive!
I'm a bit bummed that there was so much re-work involved; I'd been eyeing this for my Seckit SK-GO (which sadly has been sitting unassembled for a few months now)... Will keep my fingers crossed that v2 works out better; or that a better FlexDrive kit comes available (as I don't have a resin printer to make those parts myself).

[RomanoPRODUCTION]

Michael's smile is so vampire friendly ❤️❤️❤️

[certified-forklifter]

Hi Michael, great video, I liked seeing the Seckit again! But I'd highly recommend you get a crimping tool (I use a Engineer PA-09, but not for long) so you can make some proper wiring. Cheers and thanks.

[Bionitech]

I got mine working quite well on my ender 3 pros. I personally prefer the micro fan duct for the v6 style hotends like the Dragon as it's low profile and doesn't take much to assemble it. For the motor heat issue I've elected to use small heat sinks made for pcb boards like the raspi and no skipped steps from it as a result

[PaulDominguez]

Wow, TT must have been looking at what I am googling. Because I was just looking at obiter extruder this morning

[orbiterprojects]

Thanks for the appreciations!
During the design phase I used the upside-down heat break as something metal I had lying around :) and fitting to the purpose of a metal filament exit guide. I grinded down the top in an angle as you did. As things came along they picked up my first quick and dirty solution and forget about the grinding . There will be very soon an upcoming V1.5 with properly molded plastic parts including the filament guide :).
The V2 will be smaller with all parts custom made to reduce weight and increase performance.

[StriKFoRCOwO]

definitely interesting, let us know how it holds up after a couple of months.
looking forward to buy this for my cr-10s when V2 gets released