Wed, 29 Apr 2026 19:42:35 UTC
Flashforge sometimes ships the AD5X with the extruder rotation distance miscalibrated. Most people fix it by either compensating in the slicer or by modifying the printer's firmware. I tend not to like the slicer calibration strategy since you have to remember to do it for every material profile, and I'm not about to install modded firmware on customer printers. For the Adventurer 5M/Pro I usually take the back off and plug into the UART header but Flashforge disabled that on the AD5X. We still have an option though: the offline update mechanism.
As part of the boot process, the Adventurer 5M, Adventurer 5M Pro, and AD5X will attempt to mount the plugged in USB drive and run flashforge_init.sh as root if it is present. We can write a flashforge_init.sh file to edit the config for us. While we could put the entire calibration routine into this file it is much easier to do it manually and just use the script to write the new value.
There is a "secret" menu you can use to check the current values and issue manual commands. On the printer's screen go to the info tab in the lower left then press and hold on the "Device Info" text for 10-20 seconds (time depends on firnware revision). The menu should open. Go to the Manual tab, tap on the text field, and plug in a USB keyboard. You can plug it into the same USB port as you would a flash drive, the printer does support this. Type "SET_EXTRUDER_ROTATION_DISTANCE EXTRUDER=extruder" (without the quotes) and tap Send. Pressing enter on the keyboard doesnt work. Take note of the number on the right, it is your current extruder rotation distance.
Close the menu with the X button in the upper right, go to the Home tab, and heat up the nozzle to 230C or so. Make sure to wait for it to finish heating, if it's too cold when you go to calibrate it will throw off your results. Go back into the secret menu like you did before and go back to the Manual tab. Follow the instructions on Ellis' Print Tuning Guide to figure out what your rotation distance should be. The page has instructions for multiple setups; you are calibrating hot on a Klipper printer.
You can find the Guide here: https://ellis3dp.com/Print-Tuning-Guide/articles/extruder_calibration.html
While your new rotation distance value should be pretty close to the original value, I have seen it be wrong enough to cause 12% underextrusion before. Once you have the new value you'll want to grab a USB flash drive. It doesn't matter if it's empty or not but I like to clear it out for simplicity. Make a file on the flash drive called flashforge_init.sh and put the following line of text in it:
sed -i -E "s/^rotation_distance:.+$/rotation_distance: 21.9/" /usr/data/config/printer.cfg
For my printer the correct rotation distance value is 21.9. If yours is different, change the number in the text. Save the file and eject the flash drive. Turn the printer off, plug the flash drive in, and turn it back on. The printer will either boot fully or get stuck showing the Flashforge logo and not finish booting. This is normal. If it seems stuck, leave it for 30 seconds or so then turn it off, unplug the flash drive, and turn it back on. You can now go back into the secret menu and send "SET_EXTRUDER_ROTATION_DISTANCE EXTRUDER=extruder" again to check if the value was successfully updated. Don't forget to remove the file from the flash drive.