I recently got a new 3d printer...the Qidi Q2.
It seems to be reasonably well priced and I figured it's worth a try. After intial setup it printed ok. I started with PETG the surface quality was generally excellent but unfortunately there were some major defects (underextusion after an overhang) that caused unacceptable prints on one model.
I decided to try ABS, and after changing filaments, it tried to move to the front corner to "home" itself but got stuck at the discard chute due to dried filament (since it didn't wipe the nozzle after changing filaments and the cooled filament prevented the head from moving). Since there are no actual end stop sensors for X and Y it thought it was homed and then tried to home Z but rammed the bed into the printer head... After noticing the problem I quickly powered it off, restarted it, and manually moved the bed using the touchscreen controls.
After clearing the dried filament, I re-ran the print and ABS printed really well and is quite fast. I haven't tried PLA.
To avoid the problem after switching filament again, I thought I would try a firmware update...
As a security measure I block internet access to printers and IOT devices.
After looking on their wiki and not seeing any offline firmware downloads anywhere, I emailed support and they told me to do an online update (despite me saying the printer does not have internet and specifically asking for an offline update). Unfortunately it does not seem like they want to support offline updates for the Q2 or maybe they just didnt actually read my email subject or message.
Edit: After posting this article I received another email from their after sales support which provided instructions and a separate download link.
Since I could not do an online update, I decided to poke around in the host system where I discovered the QIDILink-client which uses frp aka a reverse proxy allowing QIDILink (the app) to remotely control your printer .
Given this has practially no security (it uses a hard coded access token that is trivial to find) I strongly recommend also disabling that service by running systemctl mask QIDILink-client.service or even modifying the service file.
After some more searching I found new updates can be manually checked by going to https://api.qidi3dprinter.com/code/x_q_2_version_info and looking at the version field.
The offline updates can be downloaded via https://download_aws.qidi3dprinter.com/QD_Q2/Q2_<version>.zip and then installed via USB as shown on their wiki (create a folder QD_Update and extract the Q2_version.zip there).
Why they don't just provide a link on the wiki? IDK, perhaps to save bandwith costs.
Overall I'm happy with the printer so far. Other than a few minor issues, that can be worked out by editing the klipper macros I think it's a nice unit.
