Show all posts by user
Building an electronic art project? Or a software radio? Think blue LEDs are cool? Are you a circuit bender? Discuss it here.
Re: Recommendations for a first build? - 2 years ago
My usual recommendation for a first-time printer builder is the Prusa i3, especially the extra-rigid versions made of steel. The original design using threaded rod is pretty good, especially if you add suitable bracing. The reason I say this is that it's an amazingly easy machine to understand, which means that it's easy to locate and fix problems. Delta and CoreXY machines are not so easy, evby David J - Reprappers
Re: Changing to mains-powered heatbeds - 2 years ago
That was my concern - I would want some serious insulation between me and mains voltage, especially on something I'd be touching frequently.by David J - General
Re: Changing to mains-powered heatbeds - 2 years ago
Quoteanimoose Have you considered this: ? It's a PCB heater rather than an Al plate, but otherwise looks good. I have bought one, but have yet to set it up. That looks nice! It would be an exact replacement for my existing heater plate, and I see that it has a thermal fuse built-in - nice. I'm a bit nervous about those exposed connections though - I like my mains wiring and connections to be wby David J - General
Re: Changing to mains-powered heatbeds - 2 years ago
Thanks for all the input, everyone. On reflection, I've wondering whether I should just go for a stick-on low-voltage heatpad for simplicity's sake - 12v on one machine, 24v on the other - at around 200W. They are available from aliexpress, plus a small number of UK suppliers (200W/24v may be difficult from the UK). I have an independent MOSFET device on each machine to drive the heatbed whichby David J - General
Re: Wiring PSU to Duet Wifi - 2 years ago
On this subject - anyone know where I can get those crimp ferrules in the UK?by David J - General
Re: Changing to mains-powered heatbeds - 2 years ago
The firmware for my Duet board can autotune the bed's PID, so hopefully that aspect would be covered. The automatically generated values can be modified after generation, and can be 'influenced' during the autotune process (I believe), if they don't work out properly.by David J - General
Re: Changing to mains-powered heatbeds - 2 years ago
Next question is - what sort of wattage should I consider for a 215mm square plate? (200mm square printing area, as on the common PCB printbeds). I don't want to be too extreme, just enough power to get up to around 110C in a reasonable time.by David J - General
Re: Changing to mains-powered heatbeds - 2 years ago
QuoteDjDemonD Beat me to it! After my post I went away and did a search - found this supplier almost immediately. So this is an option... hmmm....by David J - General
Re: Changing to mains-powered heatbeds - 2 years ago
QuoteDjDemonD If you want to go mains, do so I found there were far fewer pitfalls than I expected. My setup has a circular 320mm 700w silicone heater, a SSR 25DA unit which doesn't get hot, its running only about 10% of its rated capacity, a RCD for the printer and a 150 deg C thermal fuse between the silicone and the bed. I have ensured the entire frame and bed are earthed. Heat up time is 3-4by David J - General
Re: Changing to mains-powered heatbeds - 2 years ago
Quotethe_digital_dentist If the existing heater is stuck to the aluminum using adhesive tape, that tape will probably be much older than the tape on the new heater. The old tape will probably let go of the bed before the new tape lets go of the old heater. If the tape fails, the heater may get hot enough to burn itself up (thermal runaway protection in your firmware may help here). If you're gby David J - General
Re: [Poll] Bed mounted on springs ( prusa-style ) ? - 2 years ago
Sounds like you've got it sorted - but FYI the bed on my CoreXY is mounted on springs so that it's easier to level. I use a Duet v0.6 board and use the 3 levelling screws so that the feedback from the bed mapping routine is as good as can be achieved, and the software has to do the minimum amount of correction during a print.by David J - CoreXY Machines
Changing to mains-powered heatbeds - 2 years ago
I'm getting bored with waiting for the heatbed on each of my printers to get up to 100C for printing ABS (20+ minutes) and getting annoyed when the slight draft from the hot-end cooling fan knocks the temperature down as soon as a print starts. Because of this I'm thinking about changing both printers over to 240v heatbeds, but I don't want to cause too much disruption to them in the process. Nby David J - General
Re: (small) Feature request - 2 years ago
Quoteroboprint David, is it possible to add G28 command parameter to support "home only if not already homed" behaviour? Sometimes this can help for those (including me) who forget to home printer before print. I put a homing command in the slicer's startup script that gets added to the beginning of every gcode file I produce - every time I print that file, it homes everything before trying to lby David J - Duet
Re: Different results with ABS when printing parts sliced with Cura and Slic3r - 2 years ago
QuotePDBeal Slice a job in both Cura and Slic3r and then take a look at the starting lines and see if one is starting closer to the bed than the other by looking at the Z values. That's a good thought... I'll try that later.by David J - Printing
Different results with ABS when printing parts sliced with Cura and Slic3r - 2 years ago
Lately I've been having trouble when printing multiple ABS parts on my CoreXY printer - after a number of layers the edges start to peel off and the print has to be abandoned. Not such a rare event, I hear you shout... but when I print the same job on my Prusa i3 I have a struggle to get the parts off the bed at the end of the job, they're so well stuck. Both machines have identical heatbeds anby David J - Printing
Re: E3D-v6 hotend has poor design for printing 3mm PLA using Bowden extruder? - 2 years ago
QuoteVladimir13 David, i tried all advises from the E3D Wiki without any luck Currently this head seems to be a marketing bullshit for me. Well, I used this hot-end to print the parts for 2 other printers, without problems. I now run 2 printers, and each has a genuine E3Dv6 hot-end. Both work properly, and only cause me problems when I make a mistake, e.g. switching off the power while thereby David J - General
Re: E3D-v6 hotend has poor design for printing 3mm PLA using Bowden extruder? - 2 years ago
I used a genuine E3Dv6 to print 3mm PLA and ABS through a bowden tube for quite a while, very successfully. I didn't use any special tricks - normal Gregs-Wade geared extruder with a standard NEMA17 motor feeding the bowden tube, with 12v power. The only problem I had was getting the retract amount correct, and used to get a lot of stringing, but that was to do with the bowden feed. Apart fromby David J - General
Re: RepRapFirmware 1.18 and Panel Due firmware 1.16 released - 2 years ago
David, A quick check - which version should I download for a Duet v0.6?by David J - Duet
Is there a problem with PLA filament supplies in the UK? - 2 years ago
I have nearly run out of 1.75mm white PLA, so I decided to buy another reel... and what a performance that turned out to be! Looked at my usual supplier, HobbyKing, as their stuff has been cheap and good enough for what I want to do - the UK warehouse has hardly any stock in any colour, and buying from their main Hong Kong warehouse would mean waiting 3 or 4 weeks and paying shipping costs almby David J - General
Re: Question about print quality and electronics.. - 2 years ago
One of the main problems with RAMPS is getting a good board - the quality control in some of the Chinese knock-offs is non-existent. One way around that is to buy one of the better-made RAMPS boards that can be found here and there - there are a small number of makers who do it properly. My Prusa i3 has a RAMPS board and it has served me well, but I tried to buy another for a different machineby David J - General
Re: Dumb mistake - 2 years ago
QuoteDust ah... plugging in any endstop in backwards shorts +5v to gnd This destroys the 5v voltage regulator on ramps board in particular What controller do you have? If its a ramps replace the mega (or if you can solder replace the voltage regulator on the mega) The regulator is on the Arduino board, rather than the RAMPS shield. It's not hard to change, if you're reasonably skilled withby David J - Prusa i3 and variants
Re: PETG not so wonderful? - 2 years ago
QuoteJamesK Not sure. I found one reference to mixtures of MEK and methylene chloride. It might be worth experimenting with an aggressive paint stripper. Some time ago I was given a small pot of MEK to thin some special paint - the caution my friend gave me was "Inflammable is not the word for MEK... explosive is a better word!".by David J - General
Re: PETG not so wonderful? - 2 years ago
I've had some good results in my limited experience, mostly with transparent. It does string, but everything was a lot better when I reduced the speed a LOT, down to 30mm/s. On my CoreXY I generally print PLA and ABS at 100mm/s! My final opinion was that it was less trouble than ABS because it doesn't warp, more durable in the long term than PLA because it doesn't degrade over time (much), butby David J - General
Re: Bed preheat (M190) doesn't send updates via USB serial - 2 years ago
Is there a particular reason why you're using octoprint? The reason I ask is that the Duet Web Server works very well, and ALWAYS talks nicely to the Duet board (I also have a Duet 0.6). Apart from that - I have found that sometimes when I send a command over USB I don't get any data back until the previous command has finished.by David J - Duet
Re: Z- Probing Inductive Sensor - 2 years ago
Is your delta printer tilting the effector plate as it goes round the bed? The reason I ask is that I had a similar problem on my delta - as the probe was separate from the nozzle it would end up a different height on different parts of the bed. This sounds suspiciously like your problem... if so, you might find it easier to use a probing method that uses the nozzle tip itself to find the heighby David J - Repetier
Re: Ramps 1.4 Flaws still a issue? - 2 years ago
QuoteDjDemonD This UK supplier make a "premium" ramps board but whether it really does anything better than a well made standard one I don't know. It's actually made in Spain (LINK) but to give full credit to Ooznest they haven't bumped up the price - it would cost the same if you bought it directly from the maker and paid the postage.by David J - Controllers
Re: Problem with Repetier-Host pause function - 2 years ago
I'll give that a try later... UPDATE: That worked nicely - thanks! My guess is that the M83 command left Repetier-Host with an undefined or unknown extruder position - anyway, it's working now.by David J - Repetier
Re: Problem with Repetier-Host pause function - 2 years ago
Well, I've localised the problem; it's caused by the first 2 lines of the code that relate to the extruder. If I comment them out the extruder restarts at the appropriate speed. My guess is that on restart Repetier-Host has the extruder in absolute mode, so tries to get from '-1' (or perhaps it's lost its extruder count) to whatever value it had stored before the pause command - hence the longby David J - Repetier
Re: Z- Probing Inductive Sensor - 2 years ago
The inductive sensor works by generating a small magnetic field and sensing when something metallic changes that field. I can imagine that it would get confused if it comes down into a strong magnetic field generated by something else.by David J - Repetier
Problem with Repetier-Host pause function [SOLVED - sort-of] - 2 years ago
I thought I'd have a go at setting up 'pause' on repetier-host, following the instructions on the website. I want to be able to change the filament halfway through a print on my Prusa i3 with RAMPS. I put the following code in the pause script for this printer: M83 ; relative extruder moves G1 E-1 F250 ; retract filament 1mm G91by David J - Repetier