Anycubic I3 Mega Mod questions

pauledd · 19 Sept 2019, 18:00

Seems to work, will test extensively tomorrow but I am quite optimistic, thanks so far

grizewald · 19 Sept 2019, 18:08

Good news!

dc42 · 20 Sept 2019, 03:06

@pauledd said in Anycubic I3 Mega Mod questions:

Yes, I consider that if everything else works perfectly.

14.3A is not a problem for the Duet. It's normal for fuses to get hot when you run them close to rated current.

pauledd · 20 Sept 2019, 06:14

@dc42 said in Anycubic I3 Mega Mod questions:

@pauledd said in Anycubic I3 Mega Mod questions:

Yes, I consider that if everything else works perfectly.

14.3A is not a problem for the Duet. It's normal for fuses to get hot when you run them close to rated current.

Thanks, that would have been the next question today, to order a SSD or a Mosfet Module. So I can now put that money into something else.

One more question. Is it somehow harmful to the drivers to move any of the axis
by hand (of cause disabled corresponding steppers prior with M18...)?

I ask because it is kind of routine to level the Anycubic bed by hand, I've done this since years and its standard procedure with the old Anycubic mainboard and I do not consider yet to upgrade to Z probing sensors because I had no problems levelling by hand...

grizewald · 20 Sept 2019, 07:55

@pauledd said in Anycubic I3 Mega Mod questions:

One more question. Is it somehow harmful to the drivers to move any of the axis
by hand (of cause disabled corresponding steppers prior with M18...)?

I'm sure dc42 will correct me if I'm mistaken, but as long as the printer and the Duet are powered, there's no problem moving the bed by hand.

When it's not powered, make sure you move the bed slowly. The stepper motors, like all motors, are actually generators if you spin them and moving the bed quickly while the machine is not powered on will generate enough voltage to make the LCD display light up. I believe that the danger is here when the machine is not powered and the rest of the circuitry is not set up to cope with the generated voltage.

On all my machines, I try to avoid any rapid manual axis movement when they are not powered up.

pauledd · 20 Sept 2019, 16:55

I did a lot of "Homings" today and the Z-axis didn't crash in the endstops again. I consider this Anycubic to Anyduet conversion as success!

The rest is just optimizing, putting all the stuff together an waiting for delivery of new cables. Thanks a lot for your help.

dc42 · 20 Sept 2019, 19:30

@pauledd said in Anycubic I3 Mega Mod questions:

One more question. Is it somehow harmful to the drivers to move any of the axis
by hand (of cause disabled corresponding steppers prior with M18...)?

It can be harmful if you move the stepper motors quickly, especially if the Duet is not powered. So move them slowly.

grizewald · 20 Sept 2019, 22:04

@pauledd said in Anycubic I3 Mega Mod questions:

Thanks a lot for your help.

My pleasure!

My i3 Mega came with the Mega2560 controller board, so I could flash a custom build of Marlin to add a BLTouch probe and things like that, so I never considered upgrading the board. I did swap out the stepper drivers for TMC2208s though which made a real difference in terms of noise. To keep everything nice and cool, I reworked the cooling inside the case. From the beginning, it would make terrible noises when it was cold and the cooling for the stepper drivers was very poor.

I also upgraded the bed holder and added a drag chain for the bed heater wires. At the same time, I swapped out the bearings for the Y rails with new, better quality ones and only three of them instead of four.

Then I swapped the bearings on the X axis and replaced the entire hot end assembly to add a BLTouch and a genuine E3D V6 full metal hot end all in a 3D printed mount.

After about three months, the power supply died and was duly replaced with a good quality Mean Well supply.

It's now a very stable and reliable little machine and it made most of the printed parts for my big Core-XY printer which dwarfs the Anycubic in every way.

I hope you enjoy your Duet powered machine! If you want details of any of the improvements that I made, just drop me a PM. I think I have pictures of most of what I did.

mikefallen · 10 Dec 2019, 06:13

@pauledd

I have an anycubic i3 Mega and was thinking about doing the same mod, would you mind posting your full configuration that i could use as a starting point

Any updates on how this is working? Thanks !

pauledd · 10 Dec 2019, 07:44

Sure:
http://p-bg.de/files/AnyDuet_config.rar

But be careful and always have one finger in the power switch when testing my config. Config without warranty