I've been helping some artists improve their LED control for "Breathing trees" here in Massachusetts by replacing a string of individually-controlled RGBW LEDs with a simple string of 12 Volt LEDs and a variable-voltage, Arduino-controlled power supply.

It's working wonderfully and I built them nine controller boards that plug into Arduinos and they are able to change the Arduino code, upload and design breathing patterns by themselves which is an awesome thing for the artists to be able to do.

They are documenting everything and hoping to teach other artists how to control very dim LEDs without flickering for outdoor/dark use, so I'm sketching a schematic and documenting things.

I dug around to credit the people who did the original work I copied and guess what????

The original circuit I used as inspiration was from the good old @dc42 !!!

So, thanks Dave, your ideas spread far and wide and hopefully will be all the rage in artist/maker spaces in the future.

I'll add a link in the schematic to your posting so people can reference the original design.

@exerqtor said in Advice for combined sensor and end stop wiring.:

@fcwilt

Nothings carved in stone yet, but why would NC be better?

If a wire falls off a NC switch or you have an intermittent connection it will trigger early which will stop movement safely.

If those things happen on a NO switch, it will fail to trigger when homing and you will crash your mechanics.

If you have electrically-induced noise on the endstop wires caused by stepper motor wires or a heated bed, it <may> cause the endstop to accidentally trigger. NC switches are more immune to that kind of noise.

@RogerPodacter said in Filament monitor that actually works?:

@Adamfilip the method i use is set the magnetic filament sensor to a really wide range: 10% to 190%. this way it monitors gross movement and still pauses if a true stop happens.

That's what I do also.

Except today, the darn think kept triggering while I was trying to print and wouldn't settle down. Sometimes I have to print the first layer VERY VERY close to the bed for a large print because my bed isn't perfectly flat and that causes a nozzle "clog" during part of the first layer so I just allow the monitor to notice the jam, I restart and when it gets to the second layer it's fine.

But today it kept going off even on later layers, so I eventually disabled the darn thing so I could keep printing.

What a pain in the kaboose.

A few hours later I noticed the print wasn't getting any taller and the filament had gotten tangled on the spool and was 100% jammed.

So, the monitor was telling the truth and would have saved me an hour or more if I had actually believed it.

Sorry for doubting you magnetic filament monitor.

I have installed a Duet/Ethernet onto a Rostock Max V3 with an SE300 hotend and I'm trying to print a NASA Saturn V S-IC F-1 combustion chamber by faithfully printing the 356 lower tubes and 178 upper tubes using G2 circles over and over and over and over and over.

This part has 226,000 G2 commands in it.

I'm literally amazed that I can print a 1mm diameter circle using a 0.5mm diameter nozzle and it looks great.

I <almost> can't see the stepper motors turn as it's printing a circle.

And the extruder also seems to not be moving.

It's very impressive that the Duet can handle such teensy-tiny movements on a delta printer.

Thanks for all your work.

@educatingsavvas
I'm not an expert on the syntax of conditional code, but something like this might work: (Assuming the sensor you want to ignore is 5)

if sensors.endstops[iterations].triggered && iterations != 5

or, right after the while skip the check for iteration 5:

if iterations == 5
  continue

@jrcl OK, that probably explains it.

If you have the VFan set to Vin, you'll put either 12 or 24 Volts across your 5 Volt fan depending on what voltage you have on VIN

@MakeStuffMakeStuff said in NC Microswitch Z Probe with 3.2.2:

what does the pull up resistor do

You have a switch connected from ground to an input pin on the CPU.

The CPU reads the voltage at the pin.

• If it's above a certain level, it returns a binary one.
• If it's below a certain value, it returns a binary zero.

When your switch is closed, it's connecting the pin to ground, and when the CPU reads the voltage at the pin, it's pretty close to zero and it returns a binary zero.

When your switch is open, the pin is not connected to anything, and is just floating around. Sometimes, the CPU will read a low voltage and STILL return a binary zero.

The "pull-up" resistor is a high-value resistor that connects to a positive voltage, so when your switch is open, it "pulls-up" the pin to a higher voltage and the CPU reads it as a high-enough voltage to return a binary one.

When your switch is closed, the resistor still tries to "pull" the pin up to a higher voltage, but the resistor's value is too large to do that and your switch wins the fight and can drive the voltage at the pin close to zero.

We couldn't find any double-wide camping cots, so we bought two single-wide ones and I printed some clips to hold them together, and BANG! we had a solution for getting us off the dirt while camping.

I printed up several 1/4" thick test pieces until I thought I had the design perfect and them did 4 3" long pieces.

These turned out to be WAY too stiff to clip on, so I did an update making a thinner wall and larger opening, but this design had a wall thickness of 6.7 extrusion widths, so there was an unfilled gap in the center that made them too weak.

Adjusting the design in CAD reducing the wall thickness by 0.05" and reslicing get me a design with nicely filled-in walls that are the perfect strength to clip on and (barely) able to be removed.

#iteration

Thanks Duet team for getting my SeeMeCNC machine off Rambo and onto something I can just design/slice/print and be happy with.

@Nordle The most compatible way would be to duplicate the input circuitry used for the X, Y and Z_STOP inputs like this:

Then connect your normally-closed switch between ground and Ex_STOP_CONN in this schematic.

If you want a more simple input without all the protections and lights, you can try this:

@dc42 said in Question about the quality of the Duet software..:

If everyone using our software was prepared to pay a few £1000s for the privilege plus several £100s in annual maintenance fees, then we could no doubt afford such a team.

I've only ever bought one Duet2 and since it's likely to keep running for the rest of my printer's life I won't be sending any additional funds your way.

Do you have a way for those of us with some extra folding money to be able to support your work financially through a donation once in a while?

If anyone is interested, Authelia is open-source, and there are many ways to contact them listed in this github page.

Maybe jumping on a discord server or Matrix Space (whatever that is) and asking this question could provide an answer and maybe even a solution.

https://github.com/authelia/authelia

@Masterjuggler Ar those other services running on an embedded processor with like 128 kilobytes of RAM?

The Duet is a pretty specialized machine and "normal" (read wasteful. profligate bloatware) software development practices do not necessarily apply.

I worked with a vendor once that wanted to send me a 4 gigabyte JSON file to grab some values out of and when I mentioned I had a TOTAL ram of 96 kilobytes, he called me a liar on a Zoom call. Well...... We eventually chose a different data vendor and they lost out on a million dollar a year contract.

So, this is a special machine that has very strict limits and "It works with other PC-based applications" isn't really going to apply here.

Can you grab the GET packet and post it so we can see all the headers your application is adding to the stream please? That would be incredibly helpful and you might be able to help the Duet team make an even better product.

@FBG Would it work to convert the Duet's PWM to 4-20ma with something like this?

I don't really know what the signal looks like when the Duet controls the bed in PID mode.

PWM to 4-20ma converter

@editux That is because your delta parameters are not perfectly correct.

How did you set them?

• Using autocalibration? If so, how many factors did you use in your autocalibration?
• By measuring?

@JlunaMX Yes, you need to attach a magnet to the stepper motor and mount the boards on the back of the stepper motors with the correct spacing.

THIS DOCUMENT talks about how to attach the magnet to the back of the stepper motor.

@FLSMichael OK, sorry about that.

It looks like you need to buy an HISU Adjuster to change the parameters.

It's good to look at everything you need to use before deciding on a motor driver.

@FLSMichael This YOUTUBE VIDEO should get you everything you need to talk to the motor driver.

@Design THIS LINK should help you get it working.

@Lexan

• Why do you need a closed-loop motion control system on a 3D printer?
• What aspect of your motion-control system do you want to get out of a closed-loop system that an open-loop system cannot deliver?

@FLSMichael

I couldn't find ANY manual that describes SIX blinks on the LED. Are you sure they both blink SIX times?

Do both drivers blink when the print fails?

What do you have the position error limit (register P16) set to on the drive?
While you're at it, what do you have the gain registers P1 through P9 set to?