Are you printing yet?

Not yet. I need to wait for the replacement for my damaged stepper, build my extruder, and figure out a power supply. Then comes software/firmware. Are any of the other first time builders from this thread printing yet?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/27/2012 07:29PM by MaFraL.

I just built mine, I spent a day building it and at least a day calibrating it. I used a PC power supply with no load and it worked just fine. My biggest problem was calibrating it. The makerfarm kit comes with a plexiglass plate under the heater board and i had problems with mine warping from the heat. Once I replace that with a piece of plywood, calibrating was much easier and I got much more consistent results.

I ended up modifying a PC power supply (crudely). I pulled a +12v, +5v, and two ground leads out of the ATX connector and put a piece of steel wire between the 5v and a ground and spliced the other ground and the 12v onto a round connector I cut off of an old AC/DC wall converter I found laying around the house. It does give me 12v on my meter now. I couldn't get that voltage without the steel wire, which I'm guessing serves the same purpose as the load resistor would have.

The MakerFarm instructions are telling me to just hook the heated bed directly to a 12v power supply since Gen6 doesn't have electronics for it. I can splice it to another 12v from the ATX, but I'm worried about regulating the heat. Do I need something like a SevenSwitch to keep output within a usable range or is it usable like this?

Is there any harm in printing on a cold heat bed if I try to get the printer working before I get the heat bed properly powered?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/30/2012 08:17PM by MaFraL.

I'm pretty sure there's no harm in printing on the cold bed. The heated bed is there to make the plastic stick better and to prevent warping. I tested my bed's temp and found it floating around 110C on it's own, which I have read is the recommended temp for the heat bed for ABS.

Okay, and you just operate your heat bed on a 12v lead from an ATX?

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/30/2012 09:19PM by MaFraL.

Yeps, directly to the 12 volt line. You might want to run it on a separate line than you controller though, the heated bed seems to draw a bit of power an caused problems when on the same line as my controller.

Okay, I'll hook it up that way. Thanks. Here are my RepRap and my power supply. I'm about to power it on and hopefully get the firmware on it and start calibrating and printing.




I ended up going without the wire wraps, so my wires are an ugly mess, but it should work anyway.



The round connector supplies 12v to the Gen6 board and the heat bed is just getting alligator clips for now.

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/30/2012 10:17PM by MaFraL.

looking good! sure the wires are a little messy but it can be hard to get them all hidden with the lengths provided in the kit.

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Ryan
Quality Engineer & Hobbyist
thingsandtrains.blogspot.com

Kits are for sissies!

Check my self sourcing links for best/cheapest components:
[titanpad.com]

I see a lot of people sourcing from more expensive places than I have on my list.

Looking great MaFraL. Cant wait to see your first prints!

A quick tip. Get some glass for the bed. Makerfarm suggested stealing the glass from a picture frame. Working great for me (wife isnt real happy). Without it the heated bed is incredibly uneven, so my first prints were horrid!

WildBill Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Kits are for sissies!

: )

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- akhlut

Just remember - Iterate, Iterate, Iterate!

[myhomelessmind.blogspot.com]

I'm having some trouble with my extruder now. It tends to jam a lot when it's trying to extrude. When I was calibrating and tried to send 50mm of filament through it, it would consistently seize up before the end of the filament. Does it not melt PLA fast enough to push that much through at 300mm/min? I did manage to get something of a print out of it (intended to be a solid cube), but it randomly jammed during that and resulted in terrible quality. I'm guessing I also need to change settings in Skeinforge to improve quality; the object isn't as dense as the printed parts that arrived from MakerFarm.

I did notice that my heat bed is a little uneven, I'll have to look at that later. Also, it does seem to work well when it's connected directly to a 12V lead from my ATX.

WildBill, why couldn't you have posted that two weeks ago? My self sourced parts came out to over $700 so I went with the kit. That was a little over $600.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/01/2012 09:55AM by MaFraL.

Looks like my first print! after my print looked like that this is what I did.... then later I did this... right after that I switched to Marlin and did the same thing again to tweak.

Raprap is fun, you just need to be patient and keep trying different things until you find what works for you. By no means is what I did the best or only way.

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Ryan
Quality Engineer & Hobbyist
thingsandtrains.blogspot.com

What temperature are you running the hot end?
If that's PLA do you have a fan blowing on the hotend?

If it stops then continues I'd increase the temperature a little, aI'd also check the extruder pressure on the filament, to make sure it's not slipping. IME there is both too tight and too loose.

One of the hotends I have here will not extrude PLA for more than a couple of minutes without Jamming unless it has a fan directed at the upper portion of it, but that's a jam that requires disassembly to fix, it sounds like what you're describing is it temporarily stopping extruding.

I'd run your first prints really slow, ~15mm/s perimeter maybe 20 infill, iron out any mechanical issues, then increase the speed.

I have my hot end set for 210C. I don't have a fan yet, I'll try that. Extrusion has been stopping and starting. I played with the pressure on the pinch bearing a lot and it varied between being too loose, in which case the hobbed bolt dug a hole in the filament, and being too tight which caused the filament to deform and jam. I'm going to disassemble my extruder and see if I need to clean anything up on it, then put it back together and try the other fixes.

Banthafodder, when you set your hot end to 240C, were you using ABS or PLA?

ABS and it was set to 240 but not calibrated (no idea what temp it actually was) recently I have been playing a lot more with the temp and I have it down 230. I couldnt go much lower with the ABS I have.

The testing I did could still be done on PLA, all I did was keep changing parameters (temp, thickness, z offset for first layer, etc) and looking at the small prints until I was happy with layer thickness, the appearance of the bottom layer, fill amount, etc. There are many other ways to calibrate your machine too.

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Ryan
Quality Engineer & Hobbyist
thingsandtrains.blogspot.com

Does the stopping problem get worse or better at 200 vs 210?

I have some PLA I can't extrude consistently @ < 220, BUT that's colored, for natural assuming it's 4043D it should be closer to 185, but the temperature at the thermister is not the temperature in the melt zone, and thermister tables can be wrong etc etc.

I fixed the jamming. It turned out that I had the large gear on my Greg's extruder on too tightly. I noticed that and loosened it when I took it apart. Now I need to figure out what software settings and temperature to use. I'll post photos of the prints I'm getting later. I'm posting from a cell phone now.

More prints, better prints!



First four attempts to print the "cube." In order from earliest to latest.




A 25mm diameter by 25mm high cylindrical container with a lid. Just to print something other than a cube and to make something of my own.



I seem to have more success as I tighten down the clamping mechanism on the extruder and raise the temperature to around 240C. I'm wondering if I ended up with ABS instead of PLA. The title of the product page on Amazon said the plastic I bought was PLA and the item number further down the page had "ABS" in it. The description didn't do much to clear it up either.

PLA smells kind of sweet while printing. ABS smells like cancer.

PLA is really hard, ABS feels like Lego bricks and stinks when you print with it .
FWIW that looks like PLA to me.

It also looks like you are printing too hot to me.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/02/2012 11:38AM by Polygonhell.

Way too hot! 185C should be fine for pla. When the plastic starts to turn brown turn it down! Seriously.

ABS does have a bit of a stink to it.

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- akhlut

Just remember - Iterate, Iterate, Iterate!

[myhomelessmind.blogspot.com]

Okay, thanks. I'll try to print with a lower temperature. I thought the entire extrusion would be discolored when the temperature was too high. I had assumed the occasional brown pellets were normal.

I printed a whistle from Thingiverse at 200C. The body came out fairly well, aside from some small holes. There was some trouble bridging the large gap to make the last side (the cause of the holes). The plastic sagged somewhat. The whistle also had a 'pea' in it. This was supposed to be a sphere, it also sagged and deformed. Could I expect a lower temperature to help with the sagging, or is there an adjustment I could perform in Skeinforge to fix the issue? If I cover the holes in the side with my finger it does whistle. The pea doesn't bounce around and change the pitch like it's supposed to though.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 06/03/2012 01:31PM by MaFraL.

I'd try even cooler.
Print the 10x10x40 tower calibration piece, it's a good way to dial in temperature.

Okay, I'll have to try that.

I have a classic Atx pc power supply similar to yours, and am not sure what way i should wire the supply to my Ramps 1.3 board. I need a 5 A and 11A supply at 12 V, the sticker on the supply says it can produce 16A at 12V.

There is a 2x2 connector with 2 yellow and 2 black (the wiki says this is high current 12V) will i just put a black and yellow from this into the 5A input on the board and the other yellow and a black into the 11A input on the board?

Or do i take all the yellows and all the blacks from all the connectors and split them between the 11A and 5A inputs on the board as I heard of someone doing this?

Also do i need to connect the green wire to a black to get the power supply to turn on? (if so will a standard switch work to join the wires?)

Thanks

The wires on an ATX PSU are good for something under 5A each, so take two yellows and blacks to the 5A line and three or four to the 11A line. Your PSU doesn't have the capacity to provide 11A to the heated bed as well as run the printer, so you'll need to find or build a higher resistance bed than normal, or buy a new PSU.

ok I tought that the power supply would be ok for powering the entire reprap, because it said on the sticker that it can produce 12v at 16A. Would this not be enough for the 5A and 11A inputs? Or does the power supply not actualy give out 16A?