With the Snap-On thermal imager I can look at all the temps together at once and get the bigger picture of the heat sources in my printer(s)..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/129_1.jpg
Printable View
With the Snap-On thermal imager I can look at all the temps together at once and get the bigger picture of the heat sources in my printer(s)..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/129_1.jpg
Here's hoping everybody else had a good time yesterday. I sure know we did..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...207-4-2017.jpg
Back on the GEEETech i3 printer one last modification I decided needed to happen was a 0.9 degree or 400 step/rev. stepper motor for the mk8 extruder just to get that step count up and I also dropped the nozzle diameter down to .3mm..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/34_16.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/31_17.jpg
If we all remember I swapped in a mks base 1.5 mainboard that has 1/16 micro stepping drivers attached to the board without sockets..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/32_17.jpg
So there are fine thread lead screws on the Z axis and 400 step/rev motors for X, Y, and E..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/33_16.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/35_12.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/36_15.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/37_14.jpg
OK we are at the end of the mission creep here. All the printer modifying is done and what I have is dialed in. It is time to fire up my creation station and get these machines building me something. My goals are ambitiously large projects. So tonight all 3 printers are running together..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...toWiz/1_71.jpg
The GEEETech i3:
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/15_27.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/21_30.jpg
Printalicious:
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/16_24.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/22_27.jpg
and the Tevo Black Widow:
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/19_20.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/13_30.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/20_20.jpg
I am tickled pink at the way my printers are working right now..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/23_28.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/24_28.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/27_19.jpg
And I loaded brown pla into all the printers. No need to make things look all fruity n stuff..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/28_18.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/29_15.jpg
Well I thought I was done building. I sure wanted , ... or thought I wanted to be done building and re working these machines. But here's the thing. At this point I have picked up a lot of experience in 3d printing. Obviously I have made and printed out a lot of parts getting the machines this far, right? So in the beginning I only used a pc connectioin to print from. It was real cool to watch repetier draw out each line real time and show cooling of the filament. But once I got multiple machines up and going it just became an obstacle to have to damn the pc to driving the hours long print. I started exploring other ways to print when I got the monoprice mini printer. At first I printed on that with the micro sd card, and then I tried the wifi thing. I might be a little immature in this claim as I haven't explored octoprint, yet, but so far for me, the best fastest and easiest and most direct and reliable method to 3d printing is a .gco file saved on a sd card. From my experience and with my 3 printers on 1 bench as I try to make things that use all the printers, what works the best and fastest is having the multiple printer configurations saved in repetier host and just slicing the .stl file with the right configuration, put it on an sd card, start the print and forget about it and all the resources of my creation station save that one printer are still readily available to me. I feel that even when I do get octoprint up and going I will find that it has some nice features but still adds to the steps involved to getting a sliced file printed.
It is in this spirit that I have taken notice and a special liking to these mks tft32 3.2" color touchscreens. I put one on the Black Widow printer..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/52_10.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...toWiz/68_2.jpg
And I put one on the GEEETech i3..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/19_17.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/18_20.jpg
It is nice using these printers. It is real nice playing with their touchscreens and printing from sd with the touchscreens. Printalicious is stuck with the lcd12864 display with knob because when I built it I had delusions of a 3 color mixing printer and so I needed a board with 6 stepper drivers and the megatronics v3 seemed to fit that bill. But it is not compatible with the mks touchscreen. So the only way for me to get Printalicious on par with my other 2 printers is to upgrade the controller to an mks compatible part. Like the same mks gen that is in the Black Widow. So there is going to be another round of upgrades in the form of a controller and display swap. Because I can't stand the way this looks..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/127_1.jpg
When I touch a screen I need something to happen. I need to see some kind of a reaction or I want to touch the screen harder.
Right. So my last post was motivation enough for me to go ahead and get those parts ordered. God Bless the open source printers and ebay. These are all cheap upgrades that bring real results. I bought this board from a similar auction: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Control-Moth...UAAOSw9~5ZS5ca
MKS has multiple lines of their boards. There is the Gen and the Base boards. I have a Base board on the GEEETech i3 and it works fantastically. But the integrated stepper drivers with no sockets that are soldered directly to the board are fixed at 1/16 micro stepping and really limit upgrade flexibility. The Gen board will let me use the DRV8825 drivers with 1/32 micro stepping or the tmc2100 drivers that I plan on running now that this printer is 24v. And the touchscreen I ordered was from an auction just like this one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/3D-Printer-K...YAAOSwDtpZbyIM
Parts are in..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/130_1.jpg
Alright so Printalicious is in cue for a heart transplant. Gonna figure out where and how I want to mount everything and print out some parts first.
So I found an enclosure for the touchscreen that someone else designed on thingiverse. I printed it out with the GEEETech i3..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...oWiz/38_17.jpg
The GEEETech printer has a 0.3mm nozzle so it takes longer to print anything on this machine but the end result is nice..
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...utoWiz/132.jpg
http://i1050.photobucket.com/albums/...utoWiz/131.jpg