Prusa i3 3D printer

[mapstar]

Looks absolutely superb Dave really impressed

[Gina]

Great looking prints Dave   Good work on the printer wiring too   That is not an easy kit to make tidy looking.

[tekkydave]

I printed the rest of the components for the extruder today. I also upped the printing speed from 60 to 80mm/s. Seems to cope fine so I'll try 100mm/s next.

[Gina]

That looks good Dave   Is that a Thingiverse design or did you design it yourself?  I shall be wanting another filament feeder for my Large 3D Printer and though I was originally thinking of designing my own there's no point in "reinventing the wheel"

[tekkydave]

It's the one that came with the kit. It's based on a Greg's Wade Accessible Extruder I think but the kit supplier (Greg Colbourn) has modified it to suit the kit design. The full set of plastic parts for the kit can be downloaded from http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:534731in file i3xyze14.stl

[Gina]

Cheers Dave

[tekkydave]

For details of the kit: http://www.emakershop.com/browse/listing?l=1126

[tekkydave]

I was thinking about a fume enclosure for the printer at some stage as it lives in my office. I was thinking it would be a solid enclosure using perspex but I was in B&Q today for something unrelated and spotted this. It is a replacement plastic cover for their mini-greenhouse and I got to thinking 'if I cut that down and put an extract fan in it that would be ideal'.

So I bought it and I also visited the plumbing section and bought some flexible 100mm tubing and some fittings. I have some 5" fans I could fit on the extract and as an inlet to keep a level of air-flow.

Watch this space....

[Gina]

Interesting

[mapstar]

Looks like you should've been on the APOLLO 13 mission although I think your missing the duct tape?

[tekkydave]

Looks like you should've been on the APOLLO 13 mission although I think your missing the duct tape?

Cheers. Hold on - I have some here somewhere

[tekkydave]

Printed a panel for the control box. I have put the mounting holes for the Neutrik connectors at the wrong angle and thay are a bit too big at 3mm so that will need fixing.

[mapstar]

Looks impressive even with a little mistake

[Gina]

Ah yes...  I have totally lost count of the number of times I've made a mistake and had to adjust my SketchUp model and reprint it long since   I now have quite a vast amount of used filament parts and fragments ready for recycling   A "recyclebot" is on my project list for some time in the future

[tekkydave]

First step today making the enclosure. Mostly woodworking. I made a base from some square section 34mm wood and some spare loft boards. I had some adjustable feet I bought on Amazon so I drilled some holes to take the threaded section and a slightly larger hole to embed an M8 nut into. I squeezed the nut into the hole using a vice and its in there pretty tight. I also put a locking nut on the thread.

Placed on my bench and levelled up.

Finally put the printer back on. Not shown in this shot I later added some adhesive neoprene pads under the adjustable feet to stop it sliding on the bench and isolate it a bit. I want to add some form of vibration control between printer & base but need to experiment a bit with that.

I made the edges of the base quite deep as I want some surface area to attach the cover. I have some 50mm velcro I will try to use and see how it goes. It doesn't need to be perfectly air-tight as there will be an extraction fan pulling the air & fumes out.

[mapstar]

Looking really good and nice to see a bit of wood work in all this technical stuff.

Keep up the good work Dave it's a fine achievement and an inspiration.

Damian

[Gina]

Glad to see you making progress with the box Dave

My Large printer uses wood for base and back   I too have been woodworking today even if it is only boring holes

[tekkydave]

I modified the ATX power supply I'm using to bring out the PS-ON and 5VSB signals. The PS-ON (Green wire) is used to turn the PSU on and is usually connected to the on/off button on a PC. The 5VSB (Purple wire) supplies a standby 5V/2A supply even when the PSU is off. I followed the instructions on the Octoprint website https://github.com/foosel/OctoPrint/wiki/Control-your-printer%27s-ATX-PSU-through-a-RAMPS-board-using-OctoPrint

I have the PS-ON connected up to the PS_ON signal on the Ramps board and recompiled the firmware with the correct options set. I can now turn the 12V supply and the control box fan on from Pronterface and Octopi. I also connected the 5VSB up to the RPi and it happily supplies enough to power it and the Ramps via the USB connection. This cuts down on a lot of noise from 3 fans until you are ready to actually print.

[Gina]

Very interesting Dave - like it   Saves getting up and going over to the mains switch to stop the racket from the fans

[tekkydave]

Some pictures of the PSU mods.

The PSU with changed output strip. I have changed one of the 0V outputs to the PS-ON signal (green wire). At the other end I have released one of the 3V3 outputs to connect the 5VSB output. I have used a pink wire as I have already used purple for the standard 5V outputs.

This is where the PS-ON connects to the Ramps board in the control box.

This is the 5VSB wire connecting to my custom converter board at the rear of the control box. This takes the incoming 12V and converts to 5V for the Raspberry Pi. When the PSU is in standby this is not available so I added an extra pair of connectors so I can connect the RPi to the 5VSB instead. The 2-pin wire directly underneath the case fan supply feeds the 12V hot-end fan via the 37w d-sub cable.

[tekkydave]

Today I decided to compile a new version of the Ramps firmware using the latest stable version of Marlin (1.0.2). Previously I was using 1.0.1 which needed the old V0023 Arduino IDE. Marlin 1.0.2 can use the latest IDE so I downloaded V1.65. Spent an hour or so modifying the configuration.h file with my printers settings, recompiled and uploaded. No problems testing manual movements, heaters etc so decided to do a test print. I downloaded a printer vibration damper from Thingiverse http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:91720 and printed it.

Seems to be a good construction so I'll print another 3 and see if it reduces the vibrations.

[Gina]

When I first got the Velleman kit working it produced a lot of vibration too but the drive mods I've done have reduced this considerably with the most being due to using Bowden filament drive.  There is no longer half a kilo of motor and filament drive thundering back and forth.

[tekkydave]

When I got the 5VSB connected up I realised there was an issue if you added an M81 to your gcode to turn off the power at the end of a print. It also turns off the extruder fan which needs to be on to cool the extruder down. I decided to get a 5V to 12V DC to DC converter to run the fan from the 5VSB which is always on. This is the one I bought: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00QRBZ8RQ/ref=pe_385721_37038051_TE_3p_dp_1on Amazon for £3.07

I fitted it to some veroboard with some connectors and adjusted the output for 12V using the small blue trimmer pot.

Fitted it into the case in place of the 12V to 5V converter which is now redundant.

The control box fan still needs a 12V supply but only when the main 12V supply is switched on so I connected it up to the RAMPS. There is a pair of pins just behind the yellow fuses which has a 12V supply for fans.

[tekkydave]

Now its all connected up I used Octopi on the RPi to print some more of the vibration absorbing feet for the printer. Here are some screenshots from the Octopi built-in web server. The webcam is sitting on the top of the Prusa frame looking down on the extruder.

[tekkydave]

I have bought one of these http://www.sheepwalkelectronics.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=22&products_id=30 1-wire adapters for the RPi in my control box. Not sure how I'm going to use it at the moment - maybe monitoring temperatures of various components (stepper drivers, motors etc) or control functions yet to be imagined .

I use one of these in my weather station and they are great. Using the OWFS file system you can just read/set the sensor values from a file so easy to use with any language even shell scripts.