Hi all,

I'd like to present to you my self-designed, own built printer that has been conceived and created over a year ago.

Short overview:

• Duet Maestro mainboard

• genuine E3D v6 gold hotend (why yes, I do consider myself a fancy individuum), mounted to a genuine Bondtech BMG with a 0.9° 1.2 A stepper motor from Stepperonline (17HM08-1204S)

• custom 160 x 210 mm heatbed (5 mm cast aluminium) with custom 200 W 24 V silicone heater with a PT1000 temperature sensor, powered directly by the Duet

• highly integrated motion system based on igus Drylin W linear rails (6 mm square profile, more on that later), belts on all axes, driven by About3D (RIP) 1.8° stepper motors

• optical endstops for y (x not implemented yet), BL-Touch for bed leveling

• black 2040 extrusion frame with bamboo base plates

• Separate 5 V and 24 V power supplys by Mean Well, the 24 V supply is switched by M80/M81 via relais

• all of the wiring is hidden in the mysterious black box that makes up the base of the frame. It's connected to the network so it doesn't need an own control interface, however I will propably dedicate an old smartphone as a seperate touch screen to control the printer when the PC is off.

Some of you might find the design somewhat familiar; the use of the Drylin linear rails in the way that I did it was inspired by the Protoworx Tiny, which is a precious little machine that is capable of some very nice prints when it's properly set up. Check it out here. I'm not affiliated with the creators, but I felt it necessary to mention the design because credit is due. I did however route the belts very differently.

some pics of the build process:

itsy bitsy sample print:

The hotend mount has been upgraded to mount a 40 mm Noctua fan for absolutely silent operation. The heated bed is "mounted" (read: laid down) Mark Rehorst style on two ballhead screws and a flathead screw. There should be springs holding it down, but you can see the tip of the broken thread tool still sticking out of the base plate from whence this operation failed and the motivation left me to fix it permanently. It works at low-ish speeds due to the weight of the cast aluminium plate, but you can hear it flapping around a bit when it moves to quickly.

The bed surface is actually quite nifty, I bought plain black PEI sheet from a german distributor, and glued it to magnetic foil that is temperature stable to >100 °C. This "foil" is rather flexible but is held down to the build plate quite strongly. I haven't worked with warp-heavy materials though, there I would deem it possible that the part lifts this foil off the bed. I might also look into getting a spring steel sheet that would work better.

So this is the printer as it exists up until now, but won't for much longer. At the moment it's printing parts for its next big upgrade. I'm using Colorfabbs XT-CF 20 filament for structural parts, which seems to yield very strong parts yet is somewhat easy to print.

In the next post I will explain the upgrades that are going to happen to this machine, which will for the most part change its appearance radically. I'm ditching the igus Drylin rails - not because Drylin isn't suited for 3D printers, but because I chose the wrong type (I have to say this, because I work at igus and am somewhat a fan of the components).

I hope you enjoy this thread, I will post updates here on the remodelling that is happening, and show some sample prints once it's done.

oh yes: @wilriker you were interested.

Best regards, Niklas

I've acutally written my master's thesis about designing and building a HT printer. In my case, HT refers to a build chamber temperature of about 160-200 °C and nozzle temperatures of 350-450 °C.

The main challenge was in fact to design a motion system that would either withstand the heat or be excluded from the heated and isolated build chamber. I chose igus drylin in a stainless version with HT capable gliding foils, as well as high pitch spindles with nuts from the same polymer (I work at igus and did my master's there, if someone wants to look at the design, do so here). In this case, the linear rails are kept in the build chamber while the spindles protrude through the isolation to the outside, where they are driven by the steppers.

Doing so allowed me to bypass the Stratasys patent which seemed to be the sensible thing at the time.
If I were to design one such printer again, I would change a few things over the last design (aside from general considerations like accessibility and manufacturability). Most notably I would consider changing to a belt-driven, maybe coreXY system that is isolated by bellows as suggested before. A design that incorporates this is shown here.

In contrast to some who commented before, I'm very much of the opinion that the higher the chamber temperature, the better. While you can certainly produce some nice parts at 70 °C (at which temperature most available belts start to go out) sneaking up to Tg of the polymer is ideal and will allow to freely print parts of any shape without problems. And while for most use cases, materials like PA and PC (natural or filled) will do the trick, if you want to process materials like Ultem or PEEK (that have not been highly altered to be suited for lesser temperatures), you need that 160-200 °C chamber temperature at least.

If it doesn't become clear from this, IMO it's not the main challenge to reach the required nozzle temps. A 60 W heater, maybe water cooling for the hotend and a berd-air system for part cooling (or pressurized air for both, which is available in most workshops) does the trick. In my setup I'm running an E3D setup with the standard heater cartridge. The standard temperature sensor cartridges are garbage in this application and have been replaced by a high quality, braided-line version.

Hi,

I've used igus chainflex CF884.006 which packs the following cores into one cable of about 9 mm diameter:
3 pairs of 0,14 mm^2 twisted pair sensor wires (shielded)
4 wires of 0,14 mm^2 (for fans, LEDs)
4 wires of 0,22 mm^2 (for 1 stepper)
2 wires of 0,5 mm^2 (for 1 heater element)

there is another shield around the whole package. It's made for energy chains, so it allows for quite tight radii and is flexible enough so it won't break. I fit a print head with direct drive, heater, sensor, 2 fans and a bltouch (and even an optical endstop) with this cable, I can see if I can still find the according diagram later at home.

Best regards, Niklas

Hi,

you're putting a lot of torque on the bearing blocks, which leads to a lot of binding (what you call "chattering"). This might work with stiff ball bearings, which still move under high load, but not with gliding bearings such as igus. The forces in the bearing surface become too high to allow a smooth gliding motion.

To eliminate the torque on the bearing block, either move the linear rail to the center of the bed's side (which would have been the sensible thing to do in the first place), or add another bearing block per rail that is spaced to the original one at least half of the distance between rail and the bed's center of gravity.

igus calls this the "2:1 rule", check out this document: https://www.igus.de/_wpck/pdf/global/2zu1Regel.pdf

HTH, Niklas

Hi all,

"next weekend" turned into a few weeks, but with the holidays and everything I only had limited time to work on this project. However, the remodeling is more or less completed.

I announced that I would be ditching the igus linear rails. I did so in favor of used/new old stock THK linear rails that I obtained from ebay. In particular, I bought RSR12 (ZMUU) and RSR9 (WVM - double wide rail) rails, which will help this build achieve a much higher mechanical quality but will also be carried over to future builds (the lenghts allow for a bigger build volume than this has).
The problem with the igus rails was, as mentioned, that I chose the square profile rails which are not tensionable. The round profile drylin W rail has options for setting the tension of the gilder with a screw.

For the new rails, I obviously had to account for the missing structural components of the drylin rails. The easiest and most precise thing for me was to have aluminium sheets lasercut for my purpose. So this is what I did.

I further wanted to eliminate the cheap chinese belt idlers, which I replaced with 608zz bearings on which the backsides of the belt run. Obviously there are no flanges to guide the belt, which is a bigger problem than I anticipated, so I will have to replace some of those with flanged bearings.

I opted for genuine Gates GT3 belt, to eliminate further influence from cheap components. So far the print results are way better than before, regarding the quality aspects that can be traced to the mechanics of the printer.

Pictures:

the x-axis plate has mounting options for the rail, idler, motor and optical endstop. The stepper motor is mounted in a seperate printed part that allows it to be pivoted around the lower mounting hole, allowing to tension the belt.

This arrangement is copied for the y-axis. The heatbed will be mounted like before.

assembled and running:

right now the printer is printing some parts for itself, namely the cooling ducts for hotend and part.

A short glimpse under the hood:

Why the board hasn't been mounted with it's edge facing outward to easily connect the ethernet cord, I can't tell I didn't deem it too important at the time, unfortunately.

I still have to tidy up the cabling of the hotend as well; the cables are connected with two 8-pin connectors for which I want to design plug housings and strain reliefs as well.

On the topic of the x-axis falling down when the power is taken off the steppers.... yes it will of course, and unfortunately also when the stepper's coils are shorted. I will design a little lever that the x-axis can run over at the z-max end, which will snap into place to keep the x-axis up after power-off; I have a RC servo lying around which I will use to release it automatically.

I'm overall happy with the rebuild and hope I'll be able to use the printer for railway modelling etc. in the future.

Best regards, Niklas

@mrehorstdmd said in Behavior of drivers at high speeds:

I milled some teflon bearings for the X axis yesterday

albeit a little late (and slightly OT), I'd like to point out Igus filament for this kind of application... since we're 3D printing around here the I150-PF type is the easiest to print and should be sufficient for your bearings.

Best regards, Niklas

(disclosure: I work for igus)

Hi all,

as i mentioned before i orered new sensors to replace the e3d cartridge type ones. A german shop i found stocks both PT100 and Type K sensors in cartridge configuration:
PT100 click
Type K click

the only drawback is that the Type K variant is only available as 4 mm diameter. They are not even expensive however and (to my experience) of much higher build quality than the e3d types. The lead length is variable and they feature ferrule ends matching the Duet Daughterboards perfectly (as opposed to the e3d types which have to be fitted). Last but not least they are specifically rated for 400 °C and 550 °C respectively. I am running the PT100 type right now and am finally able to print again.

Best regards, Niklas

Hi everyone,

thanks for the replies. The tap end is stuck there for sure, but it's not a big problem as 1) the position of the spring is variable as long as it's in the proximity of the respective support screw and 2) I have a second base plate left over. The only slight nuisance was that I had to go back to the hardware store to get another M3 tap.

@mrehorstdmd ,
the heater was custom made to my drawing. I had every component (well, the critical ones) designed before I ordered the first part for this build.
the bearings are not adjustable, which is my big concern with these rails. That's the wrong choice I was referring to earlier. The Drylin W rail is also available with round guides (which is actually the standard variant). For the round rails, there are bearing blocks with pre-tension by spring or screw available.

The play in the bearing blocks plus not perfectly tensioned belts lead to backlash which leads to un-round holes (at least that's my theory).

@Phaedrux ,

see below the setup of the z axis. There is a 8 mm rod underneath that connects both belts, which is driven by the stepper with a 2:1 reduction for extra resolution and torque. There are standard pulleys on each end driving the belt. There are little idler plates at the top of the frame, which are also used for tensioning the belt by pushing these upward (a screw through the upper frame member would propably be the more elegant solution).

Edit: the obvious disadvantage is that the x-axis drops like a stone when the steppers have no power applied. I'm thinking about a little servo with a lever that will support the x-axis in the upmost position, once the print has finished. Another Idea would be to add a relais that could short-circuit one or two coils of the z-axis stepper motor, which would be controllable by G-Code, with the short-circuited coils having enough holding torque to steady the x-axis. Has anyone tried this? Problem could be that this acts like unplugging the stepper from the board while on, which is a no-go...

Best regards, Niklas

Hi,

first of all, I think DWC is a remarkable puzzle piece in the 3d printing world, which made having a dedicated Control unit on the Printer completely obsolete for me. My printer only has its power button and nothing else (it's sitting directly next to my PC though). Before I worked with Duet, I was constantly searching for "the perfect" UI, considering everything from 12864-style displays with encoder to full fledged touchscreens. So this shows how much of a game changer this well done web interface was for me personally.

That being said, this use case is not for everyone. To answer your question and offer my 2 cents:
I think DWC might have potential to be the truly universal UI for remote and non-remote operation of the printer. Therefore beyond the screen size adapting to smaller (smartphone) and bigger (desktop) screens, there should be different "modes" that you can set up. I'm thinking "printer display" mode which offers at least the functionality that classical 12864-style controllers (or Paneldue ) offer, and "admin" mode like the current DWC UI, offering full access to the printers configuration, files etc. "Printer Display" mode should adapt to smartphones or tablets, maybe offering more tactile UI elements (e.g. knobs for temperature adjustment, if possible), which leaves the user to choose if they want to use their smartphone, or fix a tablet or RPI display to the printer itself (offering the possibility to even add mouse and keyboard there).

I can't really offer any feedback on features I find missing in DWC, because for me personally there are none. Maybe one thing (which would apply to "printer display" and "admin" mode both):
My Anycubic Photon (DLP printer) uses a Chitu board and touchscreen, which shows a little representation of the model in the slicer. It's a screenshot of the slicer window, which makes it difficult to implement in our FDM world as I know of no slicer that offers this atm, but maybe there is a way to have a little graphical representation of the model in the Gcode file list?

HTH, Niklas

for anyone interested, meet me at the igus booth (hall 11.1 / booth C19) and check out my duet powered high temperature printer, and find out why I'm so desperately in need of chamber temperature display and control on the PanelDue!
Best regards, Niklas

Hi,

you're putting a lot of torque on the bearing blocks, which leads to a lot of binding (what you call "chattering"). This might work with stiff ball bearings, which still move under high load, but not with gliding bearings such as igus. The forces in the bearing surface become too high to allow a smooth gliding motion.

To eliminate the torque on the bearing block, either move the linear rail to the center of the bed's side (which would have been the sensible thing to do in the first place), or add another bearing block per rail that is spaced to the original one at least half of the distance between rail and the bed's center of gravity.

igus calls this the "2:1 rule", check out this document: https://www.igus.de/_wpck/pdf/global/2zu1Regel.pdf

HTH, Niklas

@owlfab yeah, imo lead screws is the way to go (if you want to put all of the linear motion system into the heat chamber). Using high pitch (say 10 mm) screws gives you reasonable speeds while maintaining resolution.

@Print3d thanks for the confirmation. Yeah I'm pretty sure it's just about the wattage of the heater. My problem is also that the Duet is thrown off when the enclosure is not as hot as it was during PID tuning.
How do you solve heating the build volume? What temperatures can you reach?

I've acutally written my master's thesis about designing and building a HT printer. In my case, HT refers to a build chamber temperature of about 160-200 °C and nozzle temperatures of 350-450 °C.

The main challenge was in fact to design a motion system that would either withstand the heat or be excluded from the heated and isolated build chamber. I chose igus drylin in a stainless version with HT capable gliding foils, as well as high pitch spindles with nuts from the same polymer (I work at igus and did my master's there, if someone wants to look at the design, do so here). In this case, the linear rails are kept in the build chamber while the spindles protrude through the isolation to the outside, where they are driven by the steppers.

Doing so allowed me to bypass the Stratasys patent which seemed to be the sensible thing at the time.
If I were to design one such printer again, I would change a few things over the last design (aside from general considerations like accessibility and manufacturability). Most notably I would consider changing to a belt-driven, maybe coreXY system that is isolated by bellows as suggested before. A design that incorporates this is shown here.

In contrast to some who commented before, I'm very much of the opinion that the higher the chamber temperature, the better. While you can certainly produce some nice parts at 70 °C (at which temperature most available belts start to go out) sneaking up to Tg of the polymer is ideal and will allow to freely print parts of any shape without problems. And while for most use cases, materials like PA and PC (natural or filled) will do the trick, if you want to process materials like Ultem or PEEK (that have not been highly altered to be suited for lesser temperatures), you need that 160-200 °C chamber temperature at least.

If it doesn't become clear from this, IMO it's not the main challenge to reach the required nozzle temps. A 60 W heater, maybe water cooling for the hotend and a berd-air system for part cooling (or pressurized air for both, which is available in most workshops) does the trick. In my setup I'm running an E3D setup with the standard heater cartridge. The standard temperature sensor cartridges are garbage in this application and have been replaced by a high quality, braided-line version.

Hi bearer and David,

thanks for the very quick reply, as usual!

We figured it out... our admin says it was not about filtering the MAC but it was not allowed in the security guideline.... not sure if this means the same thing - my networking knowledge is fully exhausted at this point - but he says he has lowered the security guidelines for this specific port and MAC adress and now it works.

Note that this was after I omitted the MAC I've had in the config.g and reverted to the native MAC, still without success.

thanks again,
Best regards, Niklas

Hi all,

I have a rather specific problem bringing my Duet powered 3D printer into our companys network.

About my machine:
Duet Ethernet 1.0
Firmware 1.20
Web Interface Version: 1.20
(a.k.a. never change a running system)

config.g
Networking section in the config.g.:

; Network
M550 PBender HTP                       ; Set machine name
; M551 PHTPP455W0RD                   ; Set password
M540 PBE:EF:DE:AD:FE:ED             ; Set MAC address
; M552 P192.168.2.142 S1                    ; Enable network and set fixed IP Adresse (std: acquire dynamic address via DHCP)
M552 P10.6.221.192 S1			; Enable network and set fixed IP Address: igus Druckernetzwerk
M553 P255.255.255.0			; Set Netmask
M554 P10.6.221.1			; Set Gateway: igus Druckernetzwerk

M586 P0 S1                          ; Enable HTTP
M586 P1 S0                          ; Disable FTP
M586 P2 S0                          ; Disable Telnet

I've been using the printer in the past connected to a "private" router that I had it attached to, with a little private Wifi that I could connect to with my notebook. However, I've moved the other printers to the company network and would like to do the same with the Duet machine.
When connected to the "private" router (the lines in the config.g that are commented out), I had it connect with a fixed IP. It also worked (and still does) when setting networking to DHCP with M552 P0.0.0.0.

Our admin needed the MAC addresses and gave me the IPs for my 4 machines. I set the IP, netmask and gateway according to the info I got from him. He said he double checked IP and MAC combination. However, the Duet can't even be ping'd.... At startup, on the panelDue it says "network enabled" and lists the given IP, but it cannot be reached from outside. There is no DHCP server in this network, so I can't just let it do the work unfortunately.

On the other 3 machines (all Ultimakers) which are in the same network I set fixed IPs, gateway and netmask and they can be reached without problem, so I'm more or less ruling out issues on the network side.

Am I missing any setting that might need to be done for the Duet in my network? HTTP ports etc?
Thanks in advance for your ideas....

If you need more info, just let me know.

Best regards, Niklas

thanks for the write-up. I myself opted for drylin for my printer build, but got rid of them after all, because the system had some play when changing directions which lead to things like un-round holes etc... but I chose the wrong type which had no way of adjusting play in the bearings. How are your experiences with precision? Can you show some sample prints?

@gtj0 very nice machine! As you're calling it "black beauty", this is probably a bad time to tell you about black anodized igus drylin rails? How's your experience with the igus rails so far?

Best, Niklas

also @wilriker

Hi all,

"next weekend" turned into a few weeks, but with the holidays and everything I only had limited time to work on this project. However, the remodeling is more or less completed.

I announced that I would be ditching the igus linear rails. I did so in favor of used/new old stock THK linear rails that I obtained from ebay. In particular, I bought RSR12 (ZMUU) and RSR9 (WVM - double wide rail) rails, which will help this build achieve a much higher mechanical quality but will also be carried over to future builds (the lenghts allow for a bigger build volume than this has).
The problem with the igus rails was, as mentioned, that I chose the square profile rails which are not tensionable. The round profile drylin W rail has options for setting the tension of the gilder with a screw.

For the new rails, I obviously had to account for the missing structural components of the drylin rails. The easiest and most precise thing for me was to have aluminium sheets lasercut for my purpose. So this is what I did.

I further wanted to eliminate the cheap chinese belt idlers, which I replaced with 608zz bearings on which the backsides of the belt run. Obviously there are no flanges to guide the belt, which is a bigger problem than I anticipated, so I will have to replace some of those with flanged bearings.

I opted for genuine Gates GT3 belt, to eliminate further influence from cheap components. So far the print results are way better than before, regarding the quality aspects that can be traced to the mechanics of the printer.

Pictures:

the x-axis plate has mounting options for the rail, idler, motor and optical endstop. The stepper motor is mounted in a seperate printed part that allows it to be pivoted around the lower mounting hole, allowing to tension the belt.

This arrangement is copied for the y-axis. The heatbed will be mounted like before.

assembled and running:

right now the printer is printing some parts for itself, namely the cooling ducts for hotend and part.

A short glimpse under the hood:

Why the board hasn't been mounted with it's edge facing outward to easily connect the ethernet cord, I can't tell I didn't deem it too important at the time, unfortunately.

I still have to tidy up the cabling of the hotend as well; the cables are connected with two 8-pin connectors for which I want to design plug housings and strain reliefs as well.

On the topic of the x-axis falling down when the power is taken off the steppers.... yes it will of course, and unfortunately also when the stepper's coils are shorted. I will design a little lever that the x-axis can run over at the z-max end, which will snap into place to keep the x-axis up after power-off; I have a RC servo lying around which I will use to release it automatically.

I'm overall happy with the rebuild and hope I'll be able to use the printer for railway modelling etc. in the future.

Best regards, Niklas

Hey all,

thanks for the discussion around keeping the bed, or x-axis beam in my case, steady without enabled steppers. Let's postpone this discussion though, as it seems to get a little pointless without test results from my side.

... I hope to make some progress this weekend.

Hi everyone,

thanks for the replies. The tap end is stuck there for sure, but it's not a big problem as 1) the position of the spring is variable as long as it's in the proximity of the respective support screw and 2) I have a second base plate left over. The only slight nuisance was that I had to go back to the hardware store to get another M3 tap.

@mrehorstdmd ,
the heater was custom made to my drawing. I had every component (well, the critical ones) designed before I ordered the first part for this build.
the bearings are not adjustable, which is my big concern with these rails. That's the wrong choice I was referring to earlier. The Drylin W rail is also available with round guides (which is actually the standard variant). For the round rails, there are bearing blocks with pre-tension by spring or screw available.

The play in the bearing blocks plus not perfectly tensioned belts lead to backlash which leads to un-round holes (at least that's my theory).

@Phaedrux ,

see below the setup of the z axis. There is a 8 mm rod underneath that connects both belts, which is driven by the stepper with a 2:1 reduction for extra resolution and torque. There are standard pulleys on each end driving the belt. There are little idler plates at the top of the frame, which are also used for tensioning the belt by pushing these upward (a screw through the upper frame member would propably be the more elegant solution).

Edit: the obvious disadvantage is that the x-axis drops like a stone when the steppers have no power applied. I'm thinking about a little servo with a lever that will support the x-axis in the upmost position, once the print has finished. Another Idea would be to add a relais that could short-circuit one or two coils of the z-axis stepper motor, which would be controllable by G-Code, with the short-circuited coils having enough holding torque to steady the x-axis. Has anyone tried this? Problem could be that this acts like unplugging the stepper from the board while on, which is a no-go...

Best regards, Niklas