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General discussions. For specific printers / electronics / fabrication methods / softwares, please see other sections.
Re: DIY quick change extruder/hotend system - 5 days ago
Since nobody has replied, maybe nobody has thought of it, but it should not be difficult. I would suggest you start by looking up Pogo pin connectors on eBay or Amazon and google for Maxwell Couplings. You will need something to lock it all together and strong magnets would be a possibility. Mikeby leadinglights - General
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 5 days ago
Almost everything is working well on the auxiliary pump box now but the vacuum pump is too powerful and I have had to rethink how this will work. The printer bed often develops a small leak through the petroleum jelly that is used on the seal and the pump may be called on perhaps once every couple of minutes for about one second to maintain the vacuum. The problem arises in that the pump is decidby leadinglights - General
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 12 days ago
I have got the auxiliary box with the pumps fully working, all that is really left to be done is making a 3D printed part holding the case fan, air filter for the cooling pumps, and silencer for the vacuum pump. I connected up the pumps for the air ring through a gapmeter to find how linear or not the airflow was and found that they are hardly linear at all: At 24V there was hardly any airflow beby leadinglights - General
Re: Why strain gauge? - 16 days ago
@MJLew. It is true that there is no definite answer as to why strain gauges have suddenly become popular, I have wondered if I missed some breakthrough discovery or invention. I have experimented with almost all of the sensor methods that I have heard about and most have some advantages or other, but all have disadvantages or weaknesses. Your point about piezo sensors measuring the rate of changby leadinglights - Tech-Talk
Why strain gauge? - 17 days ago
I have noticed lately that there are a lot of printers using strain gauges for bed leveling, typically with HX711 or HX717 conditioner/ADC ICs. My question is, Why? It is not the use of strain gauges themselves that is my concern: Strain gauges can be stunningly sensitive, fast responding, and mechanically stable for long periods - and they can be cheap as well. My problem is that almost all of tby leadinglights - Tech-Talk
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 27 days ago
A report back on the status of this rebuild. As I said in my last posting, I am working on a box to put the vacuum pump for the build stage (table) and the air ring cooling pumps. As with many projects, it prove to be a bigger task than anticipated, with many parts being unavailable or unacceptably pricy. Fortunately, though, some parts, such as the BLDC pumps for cooling air, were available on eby leadinglights - General
Re: How variable does air cooling need to be? - 5 weeks ago
Thank you deckingman. I have found over the years that steel anywhere in the path from the heater element to the nozzle was really bad news. I have followed your investigations and got very much the same sort of temperature drops with a very short stainless steel tube between the copper heater block and the brass nozzle. I have managed to avoid too much cooling of the nozzle as my various annuby leadinglights - General
Re: My custom watercooling setup - 2 months ago
That is a very nice looking water cooler. While I have used JLC PCB for several PCBs, I have not yet tried their metal 3D printing. I will have to look out for parts that I need just to try out JLCs 3D printing. If I may venture a gentle critique though. Most watercoolers consist of a jacket over a commercial finned cold-end and are massive overkill. I have put links to three pictures on this foby leadinglights - Developers
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 2 months ago
The most recent changes are to reduce the micro-steps on the tower motors from 32 to 16. Using 32 micro-stepping, the Z homing speed was limited to about 18mm per second and X and Y movements would erratically crash out above about 250mm/s, in each case with the message reported in the last post. Back to 16 micro-steps and the speeds don't complain at Z at 75mm/s and X and Y at 300mm/s. A hardwby leadinglights - General
Re: How variable does air cooling need to be? - 2 months ago
@rq3. The reason I have little knowledge of the art of 3D print cooling is that most of my printers had little need for it. This, in turn, was caused by most of my prints being designed not to need bridges: In the more extreme situations, I made things to be screwed or glued together thus eliminating the need for bridges. When I did need extra cooling I either directed the cooling air from the hoby leadinglights - General
Re: VFA (vertical fine artefacts) - 2 months ago
The article on the Profifi site that you linked to was very interesting and a number of there points were well taken. Having said that, there are almost as many causes of ripples as printers - sometimes multiple causes. Below is from my own observations and your mileage may vary. I tend to divide ripples into three categories:- Ripples that start at a corner or other sharp feature and die awayby leadinglights - Printing
Re: VFA (vertical fine artefacts) - 2 months ago
Assuming that this is not resonance, the first question is if there is any noise from the idler - or for that matter, from the drive gear. My first printer, a Prusa Mendel, did show a 2.5mm pattern effect on T2.5 belt, but it turned out to be a substandard stepper motor - the pitch similarity was coincidental. If it does turn out that it is caused by a poor tooth form on the idler, you could tryby leadinglights - Printing
Re: Thoughts on a piezo touch sensor - 2 months ago
Just an addendum to that last: It seems that the first use of three sensors in the effector was Moriquendi back in April 2016. Mikeby leadinglights - Tech-Talk
How variable does air cooling need to be? - 2 months ago
Can I pick some brains about the need for variable cooling? Previously I have rarely needed cooling, even when printing PLA. When I needed some cooling I delivered this from a diaphragm air pump, through a 6mm I.D. silicone tube to an air ring similar to a Berd Air Ring. Where there has been a need for more air I have used a bank of four 25mm fans in addition to the above arrangement. The optionby leadinglights - General
Re: Thoughts on a piezo touch sensor - 2 months ago
I have always been impressed with the Smart Effector as it is the most elegant print head-mounted nozzle contact sensor that I have seen. The reason I don't use a Smart Effector is that my hobby isn't 3D printing, it is finding new ideas and chasing them as far as they go. Having a 3D printer gives me both a tool to chase ideas and a source of interesting ideas. I did try my own version of the Sby leadinglights - Tech-Talk
Thoughts on a piezo touch sensor - 2 months ago
On the rebuild of my delta printer, I have been trying to come up with an accurate, reliable, and practical way of doing bed leveling. The latest attempt has largely been a failure but has at least been accurate and perhaps may be of interest. I am looking for new ideas for a piezo touch sensor and would be interested in any thoughts. My investigations of underbed sensors have convinced me thatby leadinglights - Tech-Talk
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 2 months ago
The last few days have been largely successful. I have done the basic delta calibration and the enhanced delta calibration and am happy with the results of those as it approximately halves the constructional errors. The results of the pressure advance were beyond my expectations and show that Miranda's Bowden tube is not a significant problem. Frustrating problems at the moment are that the maby leadinglights - General
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 2 months ago
@jazzboy. Welcome to the club, you will enjoy it if your pleasure at success is greater than your pain when things go wrong. I will put up a picture of Miranda when I have the time to wipe off the evidence of blood, sweat, toil, and tears. I got my new TMC2225 stepper driver modules yesterday, but only after cursing the supplier for only posting them on the day they were supposed to be deliveredby leadinglights - General
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 3 months ago
Hopefully, my new TMC2225 drivers will be in the post today as I am champing at the bit to get on to calibration. Shown above is the creeping gap alluded to before. Bed mesh will initially be a bit difficult as my setup is far from typical. The setting of the Z height is done with a single under-bed sensor. Probing with the nozzle directly over the sensor measures not only the Z height but alby leadinglights - General
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 3 months ago
@DragonFire. I was not sure what to expect from the SD card entry on the LCD display. I had amalgamated a number of Printer.cfg files that seemed to apply, but had (have) not yet understood quite a lot of detail such as which SD card? What is a virtual SD card? Why do so many people have to burn a Klipper image onto an SD card? and many etceteras. When I saw the SD card entry come up on my 4X20 Lby leadinglights - General
Re: rotary encoder - 3 months ago
It sounds a bit like a problem that I had where the pullup resistors were not enabled. In my case it was for a back button but it gave a similar effect As I don't use Marlin any longer I can't check in which file you would need to enable the pullups. Edit: You could also try putting a description of the problem ins the Marlin subforum Mike.by leadinglights - General
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 3 months ago
@DragonFire. I am a bit concerned whether the Pi 2B has the mojo to do the accelerometer bit so that is why I gave myself the option of the accelerometer having its own Raspberry Pi Pico @rq3. I have a deep distrust of any smartphones: Being a compulsive early adopter I then found them to be untrustworthy and deceitful. Being one who holds a grudge, I think it will be some years before I tradeby leadinglights - General
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 3 months ago
This stage of the rebuild of Miranda is perhaps not the most entertaining but perhaps I can add some interest with pictures of Miranda's bottom. The last few days have been trying to cram the additional things into the available space. In this 3D printer, I planned out carefully where I would put the controller but did not allow space for controllers larger than the Mega 2560/RAMPS combination.by leadinglights - General
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 3 months ago
I will try out, or at least look closely, at the idea of sending the 5V directly to the GPIO pins. On this immediate project though, I will keep to the micro USB connector - it is only a Pi 2B, which is not quite as demanding as Pi 3 & 4. I am looking at the alternatives to the Raspberry Pi, both because there is little sign of the supply improving, but also because options such as the Rock pby leadinglights - General
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 3 months ago
Power supplies are next. I have already replaced the previous 12V 150W power supply with a shiny new Meanwell 24V 250W unit. As mentioned before, this means that the Arduino can no longer be fed from the RAMPS board and several 12V fans would have to be replaced with 24V units. The better option was to fit little buck converters to supply 12V for the fans and 9V for the barrel connector on the Arby leadinglights - General
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 3 months ago
I found that a temporary failure of the USB connection would cause the Pi to assign a new ttyACMx number to the port - thus losing any connection. Sineos on pointed me to a solution on The solution was to put a rule in /etc/udev/rules.d/33-custom.rules. The new rule is: KERNEL=="ttyACM[0-9]*", SUBSYSTEM=="tty", ATTRS{idVendor}=="2341", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0042", SYMLINK="ttyP3D" The values fby leadinglights - General
Re: CNC vs 3D Print - 3 months ago
A medium-scale way of doing the bearing carrier is to make up a jig that could be fitted in a lathe chuck so that each of the bearing mounting surfaces and internal threads could be cut before turning the block 120ยบ to turn the next position. Old-fashioned (pre-CNC) machinists would make 100 of these before breakfast. Nice to see that your project is ongoing. Mikeby leadinglights - Tech-Talk
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 3 months ago
The problem was at least partly flashing the controller properly. Following a lot of videos and blogs failed to get it to communicaite, but the clues in the previously mentioned cries of frustration led to the following:- Plug the MEGA2560 into the Pi with a USB cable and, using a PuTTy terminal to the Pi, type dmesg | tail This will get something like:- [email protected]:~ $ dmesg | tail [ 18.092by leadinglights - General
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 3 months ago
Everything does seem to take longer than expected - I was startled to realize that it is nearly 10 years since my delta first drew breath - or printed plastic. The Raspberry Pi 2B is mostly because I have a few but also because I have found it difficult to guarantee a 5V supply to Pi 3 and 4 models. I am looking at alternatives and may even have something (Beaglebone Black) that I can repurpose.by leadinglights - General
Re: A rebuildlog for a Delta printer - 3 months ago
I guess that a buildlog or even a rebuildlog belongs elsewhere, such as Machines Organized by Style - Delta Machines. I think I will leave this in General as I think most readers are overcome by apathy halfway through the index page. Progress in the last 24 hours has been sporadic and I have found that the documentation for installing Klipper is less helpful than following the agonized cries ofby leadinglights - General