Cubex to RepRap Conversion

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Revision as of 07:30, 20 November 2015 by Danekshea (talk | contribs) (→‎Strip down)
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Introduction

The Cubex Duo and Cubex Trio are printers by 3D systems released sometime around 2012, 2013, with a hefty price tag and a proprietary system they created a lot of disappointment to customers. The end result being an Amazon review page where 83% of the reviewers gave the product 1 star. Check that out here: to come... The point of this page is to show how the printer can be converted into an open source RepRap machine by stripping everything out of it except for the stepper motors, endstops, smoothrods and frame itself. The electronics, LCD, power supply etc are replaced to produce a printer with a 300x300mm heated bed, 1, 2 or 3 hot-ends, a 24V power supply for the heated bed and electronics and stepper motors and a full graphic LCD controller with SD card support.

This page will have links to all the files, parts and firmware configuration and software necessary to run these printers as RepRap machines rather than 3Dsystems machines.

Strip down

The first part of working with these machines essentially involves removing everything proprietary about them, that includes the electronics, the electronics mounted on the X-carriage, the filament spool cartridge readers in the bottom and for me I also removed the hot-ends, I've seen people that use the existing hot-ends but I wanted to be able to print high-temp materials and didn't want to deal with the fuss of a machine that is basically a RepRap with some unknown hot-end produced by 3Dsystems.

The parts that I kept in place are the stepper motors, the endstops(at least the X and Y) and mechanical setup of the smooth rods, the frame and the outer casing.

There are some things you should know about the existing machines in order to complete this build. A lot of people had trouble finding information on the stepper motors, I was able to find a data sheet on all of the steppers except for the Z-axis stepper which is a Nema 23.

The stepper motors on all axes are M42STH38-1684S from Motion Control Products. The datasheet for the stepper can be found here: http://www.motioncontrolproducts.com/pdfs/nema17-stepper-motor-42mm.pdf

In case they take down the datasheet I've also uploaded the datasheet to the RepRap wiki, get it here: http://reprap.org/mediawiki/images/6/68/MotionControlPlus-Nema17-stepper-motor-42mm-datasheet.pdf

Once you've removed all of the components then you can proceed to start the actual build. For this you'll need some parts some of which are printed and some of which are bought.

Parts

Printed parts:

  • Brackets to hold the e3d V6 hot-ends
  • Case for the 24V PSU
  • Case for the Rumba electronics
  • Filament spool holders
  • Z-axis endstop adjuster
  • LCD case/holder
  • Spacers/plates for heated bed

Electronics:

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