Posts made by Mike

@Nxt-1 Oops, haven't visited i the forum in quite a while... Sure does though, here's a link https://www.dropbox.com/s/1xaf4sxdj74tjb7/Waco_V6_modded v2.step?dl=0.

Got to credit the guy who makes the hotend from the link in the reply above - I'm actually using that particular one on my second printer. I ordered mine from Weerg.com, if you choose the same one I could give you the order number so they might possibly give you the "doing again" rate. Wherever you decide to make those, make sure to get them anodized. My anodized one from youprintin3d.de doesn't have any gunk in it whatsoever and my polished alimunium one needed some gentle scrubbing after a year of use.

@misterj With dual drive gears sometimes too much tension could lead to problems. I'd check whether you have adequate cooling on the heatbreak and whether both drive gears are actually aligned.

@singhm29 You need to consider both values when choosing the thermal fuse. I'd advise to go well beyond your normal current rating, something like a 20 A one. The max temp really depends on how high your bed can go and how high you're usually pushing it. I'd recommend bonding it to the silicone with RTV cement instead of a bracket when it comes to mounting it.

I'd second @DocTrucker on grounding - please don't rely on your bed being grounded via the chassis. Unless it's a delta and there are no moving parts in the bed assembly and you've tested that there's a low resistance electrical connection between the bed and the ground of the chassis.

@veti You're absolutely correct! No wonder that my homed height seemed higher than it should have been.
Thanks a lot! Case closed - I've configured steps per mm for 20-tooth pulleys while running 16-tooth ones.

@veti Yes, with config-override disabled for simplicity's sake.

The plot thickens... Once I allow the auto-calibration routine to adjust delta rod length with 9-point calibration, I get decent calibration, with 0.030 deviation and an almost perfectly flat bed on a G29 probe. A 8-point one nets a 0.4 deviation and some monstrous distortion.
I'd be pretty happy with the former if it didn't adjust my diagonal rod length all the way up to 267 mm. Which is really different from the real life measurement of 215 mm. That's getting confusing.

@veti Wow, that's a really nice reference page. I'm running a 6-factor auto calibration, so both endstop positions and delta radius should have been accounted for.

@phaedrux Yep, although 1 thing I haven't done was put springs/rubber between each pair of rods. Not sure if that could cause that much of an effect, but will do that nonetheless.

I've been resurrecting whatever remained of my old trusty Mini Kossel kit to a semi functional state and ran into some issues I'm having trouble to explain/deal with.

Basically, this -

The printer has a set of 3 under bed piezo sensors, so there shouldn't be any influence from the effector tilt. It's clear there's some underlying mechanical issue here, but I'm at a loss what it could be. I've tightened what could be tightened (pulleys, belts, screws, delta arms...), the bed itself is a cast aluminum plate flat to 0.1 mm. If anyone has any ideas what could be the cause of that, I'd be really grateful.

It'd really depend on what exactly do you want to set up. Separate extruders/heater blocks (like E3D Chimera), mixing extruders (Diamond, E3D Cyclops), IDEX carriages, toolchanger, a switching hotend (Prometheus System, Prusa MMU 1)... There are a lot of possibilities, and all of those would require very different approaches.

I've tried 2 approaches.

One was bonding a thermal fuse (I used 140 degree ones) with RTV silicone directly to the silicone heater. Said fuse is connected in series with the heater. In case a temperature runaway occurs, the fuse breaks and everything is well.

The second one and the one I've settled on in the end for both of my printers is odering heaters with bimetallic themal switches built in them. If you get your heater from Keenovo, they do that for a small extra charge (like a $ or 2), or sometimes waive the charge altogether. This approach is a bit less safe - in case my SSR fails short my bed will oscillate between 130 and 140 degrees. While it's a bit worse than the fuse just breaking, the switch will reset afterwards. So you won't have to bother with replacing it if you accidentally overshoot your max temp or after a failure. And since it's baked in the heater, no need to worry about it ever falling off. Although the last one is hardly a problem is you use RTV silicone.

So, the choice is yours. If you already have a silicone heater - get a tube or RTV silicone and a properly rated fuse/switch. If not - I highly recommend ordering one from Keenovo and just asking them to mould in a switch with the temperature rating of your choice.

What kind of probe are you using?

On a side note, I personally went from dual steppers to just 2 leadscrews off one belt and have been really happy with the result. IMO, independent steppers are only worth it if you have 3 of them and can have a rigid bed mount.

https://reprap.org/wiki/G-code#M584:_Set_drive_mapping should do the job if you have a stepper channel to spare.

Basically, the topic. I've seen the matter discussed on the forum before, but with no definite conclusion.

I'm planning to reassemble what remains of my old printer into a functional machine and was about to get the PSU. The heated bed is main's powered via an SSR, so the only parts consuming power from the 24V rail will be the hotend heater (about 30W), 4 steppers (?), and Duet+PanelDue (?). All of the fans will run from a separate 12V PSU.

Does anyone have a rough estimate of how much 3 2.8V steppers ran at 1.5 A would actually draw?

I'm using this bot https://www.npmjs.com/package/duet-telegram to monitor my prints. It uses the web interface to pull up data, so there's no need to use the Duet in USB mode.

Although it doesn't really have nearly as much functionality as Octoprint, it's still pretty useful if you don't want to run prints off USB.

@c310 Hm, why not get a PC radiator to cool it instead? They're really cheap and a huge overkill cooling-wise, even with the smallest one. I'm rocking something like https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Hot-Aluminum-Computer-Radiator-Water-Cooling-Cooler-For-Computer-Chip-CPU-GPU-VGA-RAM-Heatsink-Heat/32975364663.html with a silent 80mm fan.

Stays cool regardless of the temperature, could also easily handle additional 15 Watts or so if I decided to water cool my steppers with the same loop.

Yeah, I tried to file down a normal heatsink and epoxy an RC jacket on it before. Turns out I'm really not good with a file and epoxy. As a bonus, my current approach allows the whole thing to be potentially disassembled for cleaning some time later on in the future.

@jackal around 45 mm/s, I've had some trouble with the recommended 30.

@timonemycat said in Zesty Nimble configuration:

KL17H248-15-4A

I'd suggest a smaller motor if you'll be fine-tuning the thing. The bigger the stepper, the harder it is to get faster snappier retractions. I personally ended up settling on a 17HS08-1004S at 500 mA, solved my retraction problems for good.

Sure - here you go, in the process of printing a dual color trinket. You can see bits of the radiator and tubing in the back.

I've got 2 Bondtech BMGs in a flying extruder configuration (probably a bit of an overkill, it also worked when they were normally mounted), a small Y-splitter and a Distech Automation heatbreak. The last part is actually the important one - it's really hard to pull off a 20-30 hr print with the stock E3D heatbreak, it inevitably gets stuck after a hundred changes or so.

As for the core - do you mean the heatsink? It's aluminium, the rest are standard E3D V6 parts (apart from the heatbreak). The pump is probably a candidate for replacement - it's now the noisiest part in the system. It's a cheapo Chinesium SysCooling SC 300T pump-reservoir combo. Pretty much any pump/radiator combo would do though - you need to dissipate maximum 10 Watts of heat, in normal operation much less than that. Even the cheapest PC cooling pump would be enough.

My 2 cents: I've got 2 printers with beds heated by 220V AC silicone mats. Both have been ordered from Keenovo - they offer an option to install a bimetallic thermal switch of the temperature rating of your choosing into the heater itself. Which makes the whole thing a lot safer. I've got a 140 degree switch in one and a 150 in the other, which is plenty for the normal operation and should protect you if the SSR fails closed.

Add some sturdy ground wiring and you're good to go, fairly safe and heats up really fast.

I've finally completed transitioning my second printer to a water cooled hotend setup. I admit that's a bit of an overkill, but I really appreciated the performance of this beauty (https://youprintin3d.de/hotendszubehoer/e3d/wasserkuehlung/792/water-cooled-heatsink.html) on my other machine. Luckily for me, the guy behind it has published .step files, so it wasn't hard to modify it for the Smart Effector even with my level of Fusion 360 skills.

Here's what I got (the water cooled one already has the RC cooling jacket on, didn't thing about taking a picture before I put that on):

I got the thread size a bit wrong (I think the original heatsink has moved to 1mm pitch instead of 1.5mm in beta), but other than that it's a drop-in replacement. So there was no need to change my print cooling setup or the config. Oh and the CNC company couldn't do the lip E3D now does for the push-fit connector, so I had to push in an E3D brass fitting instead.

So far I'm pretty happy with the results - the hotend fan was by far the loudest thing on my delta, my retractions are down and I can reliably use soluble filaments in my switching extruder setup. On the minus side water cooling is definitely another hassle, but I haven't had any leaks with my other machine with a similar arrangement for more than a year.

I'll gladly share the source files if anyone's interested. I did use openly shared models to create this anyway.