Hi everyone,

First post here, I thought I'd present my machine first because I think I might have a few questions about how to use/improve/pimp my duet board later.

So, basically my goal is to build a big printer. So far the print volume measures 720 x 720 x 600 mm or so. The frame is made out of 4545 aluminum extrusions, it is entirely my design but I did build a MPCNC before, which was my inspiration for making this one, hence the tubes.

Anyway, this is my first time using a Duet, my other machines were using the traditional Arduino Mega/Ramps/Marlin, which worked nicely but, well, they did their time. So far I'm pretty pleased with how the Duet board works, it is really convenient to use, though editing the firmware is maybe a bit less intuitive since you use gcode all along instead of commenting/uncommenting stuff in a more understandable language. But I guess I'll get used to it eventually.
But again, the list of upsides is long enough that I don't really care about that, this board is awesome so kudos to the team who designed it.

I started this build 2 months ago and it made its first test print yesterday. Here is how it looks like so far:

The machine itself measures 1m x 1m x 1m40 so it takes quite some space in the shop. The bed is made of a big 10 mm plate of cast aluminum. It will be heated by 9 silicon pads of 300W each, so about 2700W of heating power (goal is for the plate to reach the temp quickly). I'm currently using the double Z axis feature, which works well, but I'll probably add the extension board and go for triple Z axis later.

The bed is very heavy (30kg), but the motor have enough power to lift it pretty quickly, it takes less than 30 seconds to travel the 600+ mm which is actually quite impressive to see IRL since the machine is big. I had to go to 8 microstepping in order to do that reliably, but it doesn't matter in terms of resolution since I'm using a 3:1 belt reduction as well as 4mm per turn pitch ballscrews so in the end that's 1200steps per mm, way more than necessary.

The print head is water cooled, because from my experience it makes a big difference on large format printers. I've designed a fully 3D printed nozzle system using just a regular E3Dv6 extrusion system. So far it seems to work well. That's not the first watercooling system I designed this way, my previous one lasted a few years without any issue so I know this works well

The heating block is a full copper volcano with a stainless steel nozzle, insulated with aerogel sheets.

The part cooling fans are blowing 360 degree around the nozzle to hopefully avoid any blind spot. The aerogel insulation is very useful here because otherwise the fans would cool the hotend, which obviously wouldn't be ideal
The Z probe is using a BL touch.

Also added a LED strip to better see what's going on during printing:

I took a lot of care designing a nice casing to protect my marvelous Duet board, since it deserved it:

It features active cooling with a blower fan placed after a dust filter:

I needed active cooling because the Z drivers were running too hot, the bed is heavy so I had to push the motor drivers up to 2.4Amps.

I tried to be original here and used something unorthodox for wiring: using USB and HDMI cables. USB is used for the motors, the endstops, the paneldue and the heating bed relay control, and HDMI is used for the whole print head (heating element, temp sensor, BLtouch, extruder motor, LED light, fans).

It makes wiring extremely easy, and so far it seems to work really well. I'll see in the long run how reliable this is, now is a bit too soon to give a proper feedback.

Anyway, first successful print attempt yesterday and it looks really nice for a first try:

Also a short video of the first print:
https://youtu.be/mw_b87EWHZk

Here is the build thread, in case anyone wants to follow
https://forum.v1engineering.com/t/mpcnc-made-in-china-new-build/19393

I'm really pleased with my Duet so far, it's a great board!
Thanks for reading and see you on the forum!

OK so new extruder installed and after fixing a few small issues I installed the heat bed:
it's made of 9 heating pads of 300W each, so that's 2700W in total.

It works really well, the bed is able to hit 60 degree in less than 5 minutes. And since then, no warping anymore.

I've already printed lots of stuff with the printer and so far it works really well. It's getting to the point where it starts being really reliable.

Some parts for my screen articulated arm:

An enclosure for my motorbike's battery monitoring system:

A spool holder system for the printer:

Most of the work on this printer is done, now I'll try making it as reliable as possible.

Also, I received a DueX5 board, so I'll add lots of new functions in the next months, I plan to start ith a 3rd Z axis and then add multi color/multi material capabilities.

@tratoon said in Printer actions after filament run out:

Hello. I need some help creating a filament-runout.g. When the printer runs out of filament, I would like it to move the bed down my 10mm, then move to X0 Y0 and pause, then wait for filament to be loaded, then home X and Y ONLY, and then when I press the resume print button, it should resume.

I wouldn't home X and Y because it would be likely to introduce some inaccuracies (limit switches positions aren't totally repeatable).
Is there a specific reason why you'd want to do that?

On my printer I just resume the print from wherever the print head was parked during the filament change procedure. Just mke sure the steppers stay energized long enough and at sufficient power so they hold their position and everything should be fine.

Hello everyone,

I was wondering if and how it would be possible to edit the Panel Due screen interface. I saw a few threads where people showed different icon designs or even splash screens, but I have no idea how they managed to do that.
Is there a thread or a tutorial somewhere? My searches were unfruitful.

I'd also like to know aside from icons and splashscreen, can we add functions or edit the information displayed?

Thanks in advance!

@tgarr said in BOx Large Format DIY Printer:

@MrDui thanks for the close up. That clarifies quite a bit for me.

May I ask what drove the decision to package the belts and motors this way? It looks like you essentially made a rack and pinion setup from a belt. Seems pretty cool. And comments on how it performs relative to stationary motors or a metal rack and pinion?

Well a few years ago I built a MPCNC, which works this way. So I knew it was working just fine. I chose to keep this solution for this printer because I wanted to avoid using giganticly long belts, and I wanted to have everything contained within the limits of the chassis while keeping the smallest non printable/useless footprint.
Other solutions like leadscrew or rack and pinion were either slower, less precise, more expensive, bulkier and/or more complicated. This was, in my opinion, the best compromize.

It works great actually, Only downside would be that you get a bit more inertia since you have more moving weight, but you also have two motors on each axis instead of just one so that's more power available too. I think it is better than a rack and pinion because this has virtually no backlash (but in practice belts can stretch very, very slightly). To give you an idea of how good a belt setup can be, the MPCNC which uses a similar belt system, is capable of milling aluminum and even steel... So yeah, works just fine!

Anyway, I made a few test prints this weekend:

The Red one has been made with my old machine, and I just printed the orange one withthe printer I just built:

The orange one was printed with a 0.8mm nozzle at 0.4mm height per layer.
Really satisfied with how my printer works so far, and the Duet board works very well.
I'll need to experiment a little with the linear advance to get better corners and path starts, but aside from this both prints were almost flawless.

Very interesting and pretty cool tools you got there!
What about maximum flow comparison between both nozzles?

Hello to you, fellow large format printer maker

@bernardomattiucci said in Controller for my larg format 3D printer:

This plan should be calibrated every time the Z axis is zeroed, to do this I thought of controlling the 4 motors independently and using the (optical) limit switches, 1 for each motor, in order to have a fixed reference for each edge of the XY plane.

Instead of this, I'd suggest you to use only one limit switch at the top of one of your Z axis corner and install a BL touch or any other probe you like somewhere on your tool head.

The printer will first go to its home position, moving until it hits the endstop. Then it will go down until the Z probe hits the bed. Next step will be to probe each corner, near your leadscrews. After that, the printer will adjust the bed to make it leveled automatically.

I only have 2 Z axis on my printer but that's how I did it, same principle for you there with 4 axis. It's much easier to do it this way.

@T3P3Tony said in BOx Large Format DIY Printer:

@MrDui sorry for going off topic on your thread. the printer looks and yes, HDMI cables are a surprisingly good way to connect things, did you get the breakout boards off the shelf or make them yourself?

No problem, and thanks for the kind words
I've got the breakout board off the shelf, as it turns out it's easy and cheap to find, these things are used for home cinema application, they put these in wall plugs.

I don't know in which country you live, I'm in China so I can't recommend you a store, but a quick search on Google shows them available on Adafruit here: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3121

It is really super convenient to use for a print head since you can just wire everything in a few minutes, only downside being that the HDMI cables are usually pretty thick and not super flexible.

@Phaedrux Well it seems to be a cloned one then, I probably could have guessed it earlier if I had paid attention to the silkscreen you mentionned:

I don't think that the original ones are both assembled in the UK and assembled in China!

Sometimes we can find real/non cloned hardware even though there is no authorized resellers here, some people import them and then resell without the creator's consent or knowledge. That's how I got my BL touch for instance, some guy imported it from Korea into China. But it's always a bit of a gamble, even the price isn't always a good indicator...

Anyway, thanks a ton for the help, and sorry for not having bought the real one. Maybe you should consider having a reseller here, most people here are ok to pay a premium for quality hardware nowadays in China

Good news : we can now add a label "repaired in China" to the "Assembled in China" and "assembled in the UK" on the clone board!

I am lucky to have some very skilled colleagues, this one in particular who repaired the board in less than 5 minutes without breaking a sweat. Amazing guy, really impressive to see!

The board now seem to work just fine, the 5V and 3.3V leds indicate that the voltages are back!
I'll test it later with a SD card, but I'm fairly confident there won't be any problem, it does behave exactly the same as if it were powered up from the USB port. Great success!

@jay_s_uk This thread is the first one we find on Google when doing a search for this issue, it's better for everyone if the information stays in one place no matter when it came from.
I'd really like an answer to this problem if you don't mind

@dc42 said in Warning: motor phase B may be disconnected:

if you get warnings for both phase A and phase B then they may be false positives,

I think I am exactly in this case right now: the printer works fine, but it reports error on the Z axis for all three motors :
Warning: motor phase A may be disconnected reported by driver(s) 5 6 7
Warning: motor phase B may be disconnected reported by driver(s) 5 6 7

Is there a way to fix it that you would be aware of?

Thanks !

Very interesting and pretty cool tools you got there!
What about maximum flow comparison between both nozzles?

@deckingman said in Input Shaping makes no difference whatsoever:

@mrdui I have a theory which is purely conjecture, and based on two things that you have mentioned. Firstly that your print head has a mass of 8Kgs and secondly that you only see the artefacts when printing detailed parts. So it could be that small, probably segmented moves, start and end at some micro-stepping value in between full steps.

Sorry I should have been clearer: ringing only bothers me when I do details parts because the goal of detailed parts is usually to get a good aesthetics result.
But most of the time I print functional parts so I just don't care about the appearance, My only concerns is for the parts to be mechanically sound and to print as fast as possible. But the ringing is the same no matter what parts I'm doing, even when the parts are gigantic.

Out of curiousity, what is this print head that has a mass of 8Kgs? I have a 6 input, liquid cooled hot end with parts made from stainless steel and brass as well as aluminium, mounted on a metal gantry between two parallel rails but that only has a moving mass of around 2Kgs. Above that, I have 6 extruders mounted on a separate gantry (the UV axes) which weighs in around 3Kgs. The combined mass of both gantries is around 5Kgs so I'm curious to know what your configuration is that has a mass is 8Kgs.

Actually 8 kilos is the mass of the whole gantry system, so thats the carriage itself, the tubes, the linear bearings, the rollers and the motors. Basically everything that moves, besides the bed. The carriage just by itself is more around 2kilos.
Here is a link to my build thread, in case you're interested to see: https://forum.v1engineering.com/t/mpcnc-made-in-china-new-build/19393/508

Most of the weight actually comes from the metal tubes which are very heavy duty industrial smooth rods. Reason being that I was using the previous version of this machine as a CNC router too.

@deckingman said in Input Shaping makes no difference whatsoever:

@mrdui Maybe what you are seeing isn't ringing at all. In fact, with an 8Kg print head I'd be very surprised if it is. Have you tried printing at different speeds to see if the pattern changes?

Yes, as suggested earlier by @oliof .

@tratoon said in Printer actions after filament run out:

Hello. I need some help creating a filament-runout.g. When the printer runs out of filament, I would like it to move the bed down my 10mm, then move to X0 Y0 and pause, then wait for filament to be loaded, then home X and Y ONLY, and then when I press the resume print button, it should resume.

I wouldn't home X and Y because it would be likely to introduce some inaccuracies (limit switches positions aren't totally repeatable).
Is there a specific reason why you'd want to do that?

On my printer I just resume the print from wherever the print head was parked during the filament change procedure. Just mke sure the steppers stay energized long enough and at sufficient power so they hold their position and everything should be fine.

@gloomyandy said in Input Shaping makes no difference whatsoever:

@mrdui Unfortunately whatever is happening on your setup is not a simple problem, input shaping certainly works on my own setup (which includes a height map, so I don't think that is the problem). The only difference I can see is that I either set the input shaper values directly in my config.g file (once I have tuned them), or set them manually via the console during tuning. I would suggest that you try that (simply enter the M593 command plus the required parameters in the console during the test print), to see if that works for you. Perhaps as suggested above the mass of your print head means that input shaping simply does not work?

I've already tried that, unfortunately it didn't work.

It would be a bummer if it couldn't work on high mass setups, those are arguably the ones that need input shaping/inertia correction the most (at least I think so).
But I do understand that this is the very beginning of the implementation of this feature, so I'm not complaining or anything, I've been printing hundreds of kilos of plastic with this machine without input shaping over the past few years and I'm very happy with it! The ringing doesnt' bother me 99% of the time, it's only annoying when I try to print some very detailed parts, which rarely happens since most of the stuff I print is functional, not aesthetic.

Just reporting some strange behavior in case it helps improving the firmware is all. It could also come from my machine itself, but I assume if it were to be the case I would at least see some difference in the ringing patterns when trying different shapers, the same way I see different patterns after increasing the speed. It's a bit weird

@gloomyandy said in Input Shaping makes no difference whatsoever:

@mrdui 20Hz is a pretty low frequency for the input shaper. You might want to try something higher like 40Hz, just to see if that makes any difference. Some of the shapers cover a fairly wide frequency range so even if not on the primary frequency they may still help with the ringing.

I've got the same result with 40Hz, and tried many other frequencies, both lower or higher.
I don't think its a problem of settings anymore, there would be at least some pattern change, it looks like it is just off.

@oliof said in Input Shaping makes no difference whatsoever:

@mrdui pretty close by, true. I would try with 20Hz mzv and a damping factor 0f 0.1 just to be safe.

Doesn't make any difference at all.

@oliof said in Input Shaping makes no difference whatsoever:

@mrdui OK. You can measure the distance between repeats of the ringing (peak-to-peak) and divide your speed by that distance to get the ringing frequency. Compare that to your accelerometer values and let us know what the results are.

The measures indicate about 20 Hz. The accelerometer said 16Hz so I guess it's close enough.