Timing belts shouldn't stretch or vary in pitch. Make sure the belts you get are fibreglass-reinforced.by frankvdh - New Zealand RepRap User Group
I think that the biggest issue is reliability. I have a 100x100x100 printer, and at best, half the objects that size print OK first time. Printing a 200x200x200 object with the same reliability would be 1/8 (because it is cubed) of a 100x100x100 object, so only 1 in 16 would print first time. Printing a 1000x1000x1000 would mean that 1 in 2000 things would print first time. Remember that all elsby frankvdh - General
Rather than replacing things based on assumptions, you need a plan to figure out exactly what is faulty. And a replacement/repair process that is known not to introduce new faults. So, first of all.... Don't change any electrical item whilst the power is on. Unless you have enough electrical/electronic knowledge to know it won't damage something else. It may seem a bit tedious and slow to turn tby frankvdh - General
Add to 9... Filament thickness 18. Structure: materials, rigidity, mechanicals 0. Quality: which drives many of the others... design, steppers, structure, wiring, power supply. e.g. Bigger build volume requires more rigid structure, bigger motors, therefore better wiring and power supply.by frankvdh - Developers
Things may stop for a few moments at the M109 because not only does the temperature have to be at the right temperature, it also has to be stable. But when you print something with a skirt, it does print the skirt, which means it must be going past the M109. ??? What do you see in your communication terminal about the time the connection is lost? Just looking at your Gcode... Shouldn't the G21by frankvdh - General
Yeah.... cheap, good, soon --- choose any two. Another question is what you're prepared to spend on the process... Are you happy to throw away a $100 part because an experiment failed? How about a $20 part? How about a year's work? A month's work? If you're not willing to throw those away, how crappy a printer are you prepared to put up with? And what is it you want at the end of the process?by frankvdh - General
Try taking the hotend off the machine and take the nozzle off. Heat it and clean out any filament inside. Let it cool. Can you push filament through now? Are you sure your filament is getting all the way in? Push it in, hold your finger on the spot and pull it out to get an idea of how far in it is going and therefore where the blockage is. My Chinese E3D was flat at the top of the heat break.by frankvdh - Printing
I don't know the MakerFarm... I have a PrintrBot. After many inconsistencies in prints, I went round and squirted hot-glue around every zip-tied thing (bearings & rod ends mainly) to stop the thing from moving. That tightened up my printer and prints considerably.by frankvdh - Printing
I hope it succeeds because I can see an immediate application here. But I wonder about the credibility when they say Quotethe plastic can be removed by solvent [water for PLA because PLA isn't water-soluble. I think also their diagram showing pores is a bit optimistic... I think there will be a significant amount of thermoplastic in the filament, so the pores will be very large. OTOH, if thby frankvdh - General
There's only one reason why good has to be expensive and cheap has to be bad... that no-one has (so far) found a way to do it cheap *and* good. So I applaud @cristian for looking in this direction... I think it's bad engineering to just accept the status quo rather than to innovate and find a better way (or even a just-as-good way) for a lower price. Cheaper is a worthy goal, so long the qualityby frankvdh - General
Hi, Can you clarify? What do you mean by "run in dry mode"? Does it go through the motions for the whole object, but without extruding? Does it actually print the skirt? What happens if the skirt is two or three lines instead of one? And what do you mean by "stops"? Does the printer stop working entirely? Does the head stop moving? Does the extrusion stop? Does the extrusion motor stop movinby frankvdh - General
Does this happen with an off/on of the switch? How about off - 30 seconds - on? Or does it take hours for this to happen? I'd be looking at the Z mechanism to see if there's any play.by frankvdh - Printing
I suspect that surface temperature of the hot-end won't give a very accurate reading of the temperature inside. I've done a couple of experiments, and found that my (cheap Chinese) multimeter reads about 40 degrees lower than what Marlin reports when the sensor is held against the outside of the hotend. The temperature reading varies 10-20 degrees depending on exactly where it is touching the hoby frankvdh - Printing
Google is your friend... e.g. http://filamentcentral.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=125 and this Add one more extruder input for transparent. And some mechanism to thoroughly mix the molten filament. The Diamond hot end can be found on Kickstarter.by frankvdh - General
I like this idea. But why sandwich the heater between two borosilicate glass sheets? I'd have thought it would save about 50% of the electricity if the heating element was between a thermal insulator and one glass sheet. Especially if the insulator was a bit rugged/resilient to protect the glass if it was dropped. Even better would be if the insulator had the same coefficient of expansion asby frankvdh - General
Seems to me that an extra layer or two of tape at the low places, permanently attached to the bed, would solve the flatness problem?by frankvdh - General
Quotetadawson The only thing I see which makes me wonder, is that if it truly were a hardware issue, then why does it stop overheating when the job is terminated? Yeah, I wondered too... my thoughts on that are that maybe (a) when the job terminated, the head perhaps homed and disconnected a short. (b) there was a short between extruder heater and bed heater... when both are turned off when theby frankvdh - RAMPS Electronics
I assume that "delay(blinkDelay); // 968 // wait for a second" does not in fact wait for one second; my guess is that it actually waits for 939ms. But then there's another similar line, which means that the blinkk() function may take either a few microseconds or nearly a minute, depending on the state of pin 4. All the stepper delays would add on to that and it would take a bit under 2 seconds toby frankvdh - Let's design something! (I've got an idea ...)
My own design in this space Also try searching Thingiverse for "mesostructure" e.g.by frankvdh - General
That looks like an E3D without a heatsink. For the same money, you can get an E3D knockoff *with* a heatsink. And I think that an E3D with a heatsink would perform better than one without, else they wouldn't sell many heatsinks.by frankvdh - General
Yes, you can probably do without the Gcode interpreter, but you still need to control temperature of the head & bed, and generate pulses at the right time for your stepper. You can do this with one Arduino. But you also need a RAMPS board (or an equivalent circuit).by frankvdh - RAMPS Electronics
You need something like the RAMPS board to (a) convert the 5V signals from the Arduino to 12V, and (b) to increase the current from mA supplied by the Arduino output pin to Amps required by the heaters and motors. The RAMPS board could be replaced by some other circuitry. You also need an Arduino (or similar) board to control the temperature, and interpret G-code commands and translate them to sby frankvdh - RAMPS Electronics
Looking at the "Output Bed" graph, it seems that the software is not turning on the heater between B and C, so I'd say the software is working properly, and you have some kind of hardware fault. I had something similar on a PrintrBoard output that was controlling nozzle temperature... it wouldn't turn off, and kept getting hotter and hotter until I pulled the plug. I tracked the problem back to tby frankvdh - RAMPS Electronics
Assuming that the glass is flat to start with, I guess that means that the underlying bed is not level and/or flat, and the clips are therefore twisting the glass. If you just lay the glass on the bed (no clips or anything), is it flat (let's not worry about level just yet)? What about the other way up? If neither way up works, I think you're screwed, sorry. Go get a flat piece of glass. Once yby frankvdh - General
I believe that there is a 9-point "bed-leveling" routine being experimented with in Marlin. Technically speaking, only 3 points are needed to 'level' the bed. These points define the plane of the bed, and, when printing, the location of the printhead is rotated in software to match. Any more than 3 'leveling' points relate to compensating for the bed's lack of flatness (i.e. deviations from theby frankvdh - General
Quoteenif @frankvdh Watch out, your link is not for 13 complete packages, but it's only for one single package that consists of the usual 13 pieces (averaging 2.59$ a piece): Eek! You're right... AliExpress is a bit Wild West, with some risk to the careless. I'll amend my earlier post.by frankvdh - Controllers
Because the object may have cavities which are unreachable by a mechanical device, but are still visible.by frankvdh - Developers
For el-cheapo and quantity, I suggest that you can't beat RAMPS+Mega from aliexpress e.g. $19.20 incl shipping But beware that shipping times can be a month or more, unless you're prepared to pay high shipping fees. But if you buy 10 or more, you would get them cheaper. e.g. 5 * Mega + RAMPS for $15.00 each. Actually, I myself wouldn't buy from this particular seller, just because he hasn'tby frankvdh - Controllers
I use FreeCAD. It's not a mature product, so it has a few bugs (if I do something dumb, it occasionally crashes; if I don't do dumb things or stupidly complicated things, it mostly works fine), the UI is a bit clunky in some ways, and there's a steep learning curve. But it does work very well, there's plenty of online tutorials and examples, it's actively being improved, and of course it's coby frankvdh - General
Maybe obvious, but it's happened to me... Is your filament feeding OK? Nothing jamming up the spool? No tangles in the filament? Is there enough pressure pushing the filament against the extruder gear?by frankvdh - Printing