My new simplified printer design

Chriss

Hi *,

I want to give you a sneak preview of my new printer concept.
My main learning from former builds it that the movement of the print head or the part causes 80% of the problems with prints, specially artifacts, ringing and problems with layer shifts etc. So I came to the conclusion to reduce the moving parts to the absolute minimum.
The next problem is the bed, all of the size limitation, flatness and the first layer issues. I tried to solve that with a entire new bed design reusing some old hardware I had in the shelf. (You can see the bed on the right top side of the build. )

There are still some problems to solve but the entire new concept looks promising to me till now.

OK, enough joking for now. Since a while I was thinking about turning my bench board into a real test bench for software and configuration tests. So I created this printer dummy.
The horizontal space in front of the board will be used for a kind a plate for some leds and switches to simulate input etc. And I will place a 2nd V6 clone next to the bed simulator to simulate a chamber heater. And the wires need some labels to make it faster to change setups.

The thing has no name yet, I'm open for suggestions.

Cheers, Chriss

droftarts

@Chriss good work! Having no moving parts should certainly reduce ringing! I should probably build one of these for firmware testing, rather than cannibalising my working machines every time.

Ian

Chriss

@droftarts Thanks Ian,
I came to that Idea when we had this unexpected reboots during prints, I guess you remember. I was not able to test more because I needed the printer. And you had no printer which matched my hardware.

More steppers will be connected later to simulate even more axes or multi steppers per axis. Maybe a display I have a old lcd display left. I think that there a plenty of options to add to the rig if needed.
I think about a beadboard too. To connect other kind of sensors or servors or whatever.

And I need at least one CAN device, not sure how to do that without buying a toolboard, maybe will source a clone, or something from a 3rd party. I will decide that as soon as I have the need for it.

Cheers, Chriss

oliof

@droftarts maybe do something like the test rig one of the FluidNC devs came up with

T3P3Tony

You mean there is a better choice than the IKEA "Wall 'O Boards" with max reconfigurable can bus options

!

oliof

@T3P3Tony that needs just a couple of led lit cable guides (-:

T3P3Tony

@oliof cable guides make it too much of a faff to reconfigure it

Dad003

@T3P3Tony need some cables tray lol

Chriss

I see, there are plenty of other good ideas. I like the ides with the stepper endstops from the pic @oliof posted.

Yes, @T3P3Tony, you have the biggest so far.