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The printer that I will get to explore using a pi with must first go through an upgrade. The printer works fine but the 300x200 print bed takes a long time to warm up and I always felt like this should have been a 24v printer. And once its running 24v I can use the quiet tmc2100 drivers. Here is the printer and the parts I have for this effort so far..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/101_3.jpg
Because this will be a voltage change I feel I need to do this first before I setup the pi.
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I know I like to show off my printer modifications a lot more than I do the things I print. So I wanted to show that this printer is doing just fine the way it is before I tear it down. So I designed this piece and it took 13 hours to print..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/102_3.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/103_2.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/104_3.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/105_4.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/106_3.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/107_3.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/108_3.jpg
The stand is 160mm tall, 135mm in diameter, and has a 1.5mm wall thickness. And it is strong. The printer is good and this voltage and driver update is about faster warming of the heat bed and doing away with the hum of the stepper motors.
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So I decided to go with a lighter weight extruder solution. The titan extruder with a lightweight stepper motor..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/109_3.jpg
The carriage and layer fan are a really neat compact setup. I have to design a mount for the proximity sensor for z height and a flag for the optical x endstop that will attach to this new carriage somehow. But I really like how it mounts the layer fan on the back side..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/110_3.jpg
Aside from the power supply upgrade I have decided to also change the stepper motors on x and y axes to 0.9 degree or 400 step/rev motors. The tmc2100 drivers are 1/16 micro stepping and I currently have the 1/32 micro stepping drv8825 stepper drivers. So upgrading the steppers is a good way to keep the resolution up. And at 24v I shouldn't have any issues with skipped steps or holding torque vs. what I was running at 12v. Unfortunately all this means that printalicious is due for some re-wiring..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/111_2.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/112_2.jpg
I don't care how ugly this printer might look to some. This started out as nothing. It was a build from scratch. I started with an ebay unassembled frame and started ordering one piece at a time to make a printer. My other printers I have heavily modified for sure, but this printer I created from nothing. It is not perfect but it is pretty cool. It prints pretty good and it will always be my favorite because it was my creation. And here is the new supply voltage..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/113_1.jpg
There is a voltage adjustment pot on the power supply. I will make that 23.4 say 24.0
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I have been trying to get the extruder set up. I drew up and printed a small piece to hold the proximity sensor, then I made a piece to attach the wires to and got to this point..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/114_2.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/117_2.jpg
While the proximity sensor is held firmly in position the other piece kinda pivots a little on the one screw that holds it in place. This and the pursuit of perfection has made me draw up a replacement piece..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...20add%20on.png
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...d%20on%203.png
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...d%20on%205.png
And the part is printing.
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So here are my old and new designs. I am moving from a 2 piece to a 1 piece setup..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/119_2.jpg
I am happy with the results of this piece and feel I need to go no further here. This is the new extruder for Printalicious..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/120_3.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/122_1.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/124_2.jpg
Now it is all down to making a flag to hang off this carriage and trigger the optical x end stop
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I get to spend my sunday afternoon wiring all this up. For this effort I have the best tools anyone could have. A Radio Shack digital Soldering Station and Snap-On Tools flagship scantool the Verus Edge. Among other things this has a 4 channel lab scope and multimeter. With a touchscreen. And a core i7cpu. And it runs windows7. I very much look forward to and enjoy using these tools..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/126_1.jpg
Once the wiring is complete I will use the Verus Edge to verify forward current on all stepper motors then it is on to breaking out the thermal imager for temp verifications.
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And Printalicious is all whole and back together and I even adjusted the voltage pot on the power supply so this beast is running at exactly 24 volts..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/127_1.jpg
And I Think this pretty much brings to a close the lion's share of the printer mods that I wanted to make happen. So I have cleaned up my creation station and rewired power so that all of the printers and the pc are going through the battery backup. This way I will never again have to worry about loosing a print to a power surge regardless of the machine I am using...
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/128_1.jpg
Now I got some fine tuning to do on all machines and we will see how good they can print. And then we will see how fast they can print good.
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That is one super complicated extruder setup !
Impressive looking :-)
Printalicious lol
I like it.
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Ya man. This is the fourth extruder configuration for this printer. When I first built this machine I tried going for the 3 colors with the diamond hotend..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...toWiz/1_55.jpg
That kept jamming so I tried the single e3dv6 hotend still using 1 of my wade extruders..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...toWiz/67_3.jpg
Then I decided to dump the wade extruder and ptfe tubing and go with a mk8 extruder..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...toWiz/77_4.jpg
All in the name of chasing better quality. Or at least wanting a comparison. The name Printalicious came about as I had to name the profile for my homemade printer settings in repetier host. I have 4 printers and they all connect to one pc. The others are named monoprice mini, GEEETech i3, and Tevo Black Widow. Printalicious was the best I could come up with on short notice, lol.
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Here's the real money shot. This right here is why all the mods and continued building. This is what makes my printers better than the rest(potentially). Check out all the steps I get per mm of travel on each axis. And even the extruder..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...resolution.png
320 steps per mm on x and y is outstanding. And it is achieved with a combination of 0.9 degree stepper motors and drv8825 drivers. The rest of you get to have only 160 or 80 steps per mm of travel. 1/2 or 1/4 the resolution. I only bothered with these steppers on x and y. The fine thread lead screws put the z axis into a really high step count and the geared extruders do the same. The titan I am using here is 3:1 gear reduction. which translates to 3 times the amount of steps per mm of filament travel or 3 times finer control.