3D Printer yet?

[KaneTW]

Got a rental Raise3D Pro2 Plus a few weeks back and overall I'm just incredibly disappointed with it. Print quality is ok as long as it's level, but there's no autoleveling and the bed gets out of level way too easily. Combine with a fair bunch of bad mechanical design and I expected better from this. Looking for another printer at this point, but at least I'm only out a few hundred bucks.

[mnementh]

Well, considering it's a highly-rated $4K machine with dual extruder, might be worth spending some time figuring out what its major malfunction is.

I've never had the opportunity to play with any of their hardware (certainly out of my price range), but I've got to think it has to have something over the $700 E5 at that price, and not just the shiny plastic box and dual head. 

mnem
 

[Zucca]

You may want to go ahead an connect the +5V if for some reason in the future you have the board out and want to burn new firmware.

As far as the Rasberry Pi, I don't care either for the Pi powering the printer when using OctoPrint.
I see the the same thing with the Pi powering my Creality CR-10.
I was considering building an adapter or a USB cable to block the 5V from the Pi.
Then you have a choice when doing any maintenance in the future.

Well, if the board is out I have my TTi PSU which can spit out 24V. I left the 5V disconnected and done!
USB works perfectly when there is 24V applied on the board, just flashed the last Marlin pulled from GITHUB on it.

[mnementh]

Well, whaddayaknow. Supposedly my CR6-SE has finally shipped; they posted the latest list on Friday and my number's on it. Still no confirmation/tracking eMail, still no word on when our add-ons will ever ship.

mnem
*back to the real world*

[KaneTW]

Well, considering it's a highly-rated $4K machine with dual extruder, might be worth spending some time figuring out what its major malfunction is.

I've never had the opportunity to play with any of their hardware (certainly out of my price range), but I've got to think it has to have something over the $700 E5 at that price, and not just the shiny plastic box and dual head. 

mnem
 

I spent a lot of time on it and while the issues are fixable, a lot of it is just an inability to meet the spec without constant maintenance, combined with unhelpful support. I'm sure other people had a better experience, but either their QA is shot or I just have higher standards.

Could be the fault of my local reseller, but they're a representative of the company and I would certainly not want to work with them considering how they brushed off ANY issues I raised.

[mnementh]

So are you saying poor design, or rental machine that's tore up from the floor up...? 

mnem
 

[Zucca]

https://all3dp.com/2/creality-ender-3-abs-tips-tricks-to-get-great-abs-prints/#tip-1-fix-that-fan

Why the board fan is connected in parallel with the part cooling fan near the hotend? Even on my Ender 5 it's like this.
To me no sense, temped to connect that fan to the always 12V output.

 

[xrunner]

https://all3dp.com/2/creality-ender-3-abs-tips-tricks-to-get-great-abs-prints/#tip-1-fix-that-fan

Why the board fan is connected in parallel with the part cooling fan near the hotend? Even on my Ender 5 it's like this.
To me no sense, temped to connect that fan to the always 12V output.

 

Well ... because if it weren't, the hobbyist would have one less item to improve upon and they would be less proud of their machine and the knowledge they gained from doing the improvement.

 

[KaneTW]

So are you saying poor design, or rental machine that's tore up from the floor up...? 

mnem
 

Other users report the same issues. Machine is in as-new shape and it's basically "rent for 3 months to test it, then you can buy."

[mnementh]

Uggh. Sounds like you've already done the deep dive and found it's just a bad design. 

Only you can decide if it's worth the hassle of ironing out all the bugs yourself. I gave up on my Tevo Tarantulas years ago; but only after fighting tooth & claw to make them a decent machine & failing.

mnem
 

[mnementh]

https://all3dp.com/2/creality-ender-3-abs-tips-tricks-to-get-great-abs-prints/#tip-1-fix-that-fan

Why the board fan is connected in parallel with the part cooling fan near the hotend? Even on my Ender 5 it's like this.
To me no sense, temped to connect that fan to the always 12V output.

 

Well ... because if it weren't, the hobbyist would have one less item to improve upon and they would be less proud of their machine and the knowledge they gained from doing the improvement.

 

Short version: It's based on a RAMPS 1.4 board, and they already used up the extra Analog/PWM output in that template making the hotend fan so it was FW controlled. By doing this, when the machine isn't working, the only fan running is the one in the PSU. When idling, there's really no NEED for the board fan to be on anyways.

   https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/3d-printer-yet/msg3051586/#msg3051586

Be glad you at least had that; my Diggro came wired with every fan except the parts cooling fan on 100% of the time. Don't you think THAT was annoying AF, I tell you whut...  Enough that I wound up doing the mod above to make the extruder fan temp-controlled.

EDIT: In the case of that article, seems to me you could as easily put it either on all the time for ABS, or possibly parallel with the extruder fan, provided they're both the same voltage. On mine, I replaced the little 40mm screamer with a 80mm Arctic; almost as quiet as Noctua, but ~$6 and Prime-able.

mnem
 

[Zucca]

If found a >40mm screaming eagle 24V in my old fan bin I'll swap it, otherwise I will move on with a 24V always on little annoying bastard.

[KaneTW]

Uggh. Sounds like you've already done the deep dive and found it's just a bad design. 

Only you can decide if it's worth the hassle of ironing out all the bugs yourself. I gave up on my Tevo Tarantulas years ago; but only after fighting tooth & claw to make them a decent machine & failing.

mnem
 

Yeah, I'm just returning it once the 3 months are up. I might take the plunge and just get an industrial 3D printer.

[mnementh]

Oh, I completely misunderstood.

I thought you'd bought it for a few hundred off-lease; not that you had leased it on a trial basis.

Hmmm... maybe this brand is some skeevy rent-to-own scheme (Mark up cheapest possible example product 1000%, then rent-to-own with usurious fees and breach of contract clauses) of some sort, only applied to 3DP instead of cheap AF TVs and furniture. 

mnem
 

[KaneTW]

It's just my local reseller that offers this. It's normally sold regularly.

The contract can hit me at most for consumable parts, and those are pretty cheap. Well, I guess they can try but that'll be a matter for the lawyers in that case.

[tautech]

Defpom has a 2nd 3D printer. 

New Ender-3 V2 build:

[mnementh]

I find this completely resistible. Even watching the video. 

mnem
*toddles off to teach my daughter something*

[mnementh]

https://news.mit.edu/2020/3d-printing-miniature-magnetic-pump-0909

mnem
 

[mnementh]

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:854575#files

mnem
*impairing productivity since nineteen-mumblety-mumble*

[pipe2null]

https://news.mit.edu/2020/3d-printing-miniature-magnetic-pump-0909

mnem
 

"The researchers printed the pump in two ways, using Nylon 12 as the structural material in both. In the first pump, a magnet is press-fitted into the structure of the enclosing piston. With the second monolithic pump, the researchers used Nylon 12 embedded with neodymium magnet (NdFeB) microparticles to create the pump’s magnetic core."

Hmm...  I haven't seen filament with embedded neodymium particles on Amazon yet, but I'd give it a try if it wasn't too expensive.  Heh.

[Zucca]

Calibration weekend, today Extruder estep.

https://teachingtechyt.github.io/calibration.html#esteps

I made a fixture to calibrate from the old t-pipe for the Estep of the extruder:



very very useful.
Mine is 119mm but the length does not matters, what matters is that the length it known.

It turns out my was E93 and it should have been E95.04.

Here my iterations (well it's a very long story):

Set         Error [mm]   
E95.31         -0,45
E95.64         0,2
E96.16         -0,88
E95.64         -0,83
E94.98         0,08
E95.04         0,27
E95.04         0,09
E95.04         0,02

Lesson of today: bowden extruder sucks (not just because the calibration, I touched with my hands how imprecise they are). I need a direct jazz for my ender.

Can you suggest me a good direct extruder for a Ender5? No budget limit. 

Looks like the E3D Hemera is sexy but not available.

PS: Of course not all hotend direct extruder are compatible, 12V and 24V and montage plate. Why life is so difficult?

[mnementh]

      Dwagon comes back to 3DP after a move:

So after moving, my Diggro sat pretty much unused for several weeks while we got things semi-livable in the new place; last week I picked up some Dell AA23300 server PSUs cheap, and after modding them to turn on when NOT shoved up a Dell server's arse, I decided to work on some plastic bits to tone down the screaming fans and tidy the things up, as I want to trade a few of them with a fellow eevBlogger.

Well, the printer just repeatedly      for the better part of a day; eventually I deduce that when the layer fan kicks on, it's just cooling the nozzle too much and causing the filament to cool inside the nozzle; as long as it remains off, while manually feeding the filament the extrusion feels normal with little backpressure. As soon as I turned the layer fan on, extrusion slowed to a crawl with lots of backpressure. Temp shown on the screen does not change appreciably.

I tried raising the hotend temp, but decided there had to be something seriously wrong when 235° barely made it extrude at all, and then only with the layer fan at 60%. I tried lowering the the layer fan so it didn't blow right on the block, but due to the geometry of the CR10 printhead, I simply could not get it low enough to be just a couple mm above the work as the 'fang instructions say to do.

   

I get to thinking... one of the mods I bought for the Diggro at the outset was a MicroSwiss heater block for CR10; I found it on sale, and it comes with a silicone sock that better covers both the block and part of the nozzle. A few quick measurements show that assembled with the original Diggro heat-sink, the overall height is ~4mm less than the CR10 hotend.



Plus, the heat-brake tube is all metal, while the one from the CR10 hotend is bored hollow, allowing the Bowden tube to contact directly with the nozzle. This combined with the Cap tube is probably why I've never had a clog; but it does limit me to PLA.

   

So begins another adventure in 3DP; I get the new hotend built, set the nozzles on the 'fang so they're just 1.5mm above the work, and it seems to work right off the bat... 200° with layer fan off & 220° temps with layer fan on and I've never had a smoother feeling extrusion by hand. No bubbling, no smoking, and the extrusion with layer fan on is like making rods it's so straight.

But of course this joy did not come until after I had a penis fingers event with the new heater cartridge and blew up my mainboard; requiring open-heart surgery and a dragon-sized FET bodged in place.     No, you may not see pics of THAT crime. 

Why the sudden change in extrusion behavior? I had no idea. Hindsight says it may be ambient temp tho; one of many things I plan to try is a big box over the printer as an experiment once I find my monitor cam.

             

1)   After some small amount of misery and self-mutilation (more love nips from a hot MOSFET), I finally wake up to a semi-successful print this morning. Looks a little fuzzy around the edges, but it did at least complete the print. I'm pretty sure that once I dial in the temps, it'll print better than OEM, and not just on square things with PLA. 



2)   For a change, removing the supports did not fight me at all; they pulled out easily and in one piece. I was quite surprised by this, given how deep inside the piece they extend.



C)   Print quality is "Ehhhh..." at best; calling it a successful print is probably pushing it. Most of the fuzzies will go away with a little fire tho...



4)   Okay... make that a lot of fire. And a zip-tie.  But still... good enough for Proof-of-Concept on my muffler tailpiece.



5)   Money shot...? Taking measurements. Qa-plahh!  Okay...



6)   Side By Side with stock unit. Well, it did work as intended; I was able to fit the tailpiece on the PSU, and overall appearance is as intended. A successful print would tidy up the look of the PSU without adding appreciable length with a stock IEC cord; however 90° cords are right out. And left out. They're just... OUT.

TL/DR: Installed, the tailpiece does make a noticeable reduction in the perceived noise level with it sitting on the desktop. The higher-pitched elements are reduced quite a bit; but it is still somewhat distracting in a quiet workspace. While my tailpiece does tidy up the look of the unit (and I do have plans to make a similar front piece) and makes a 3-5dB difference in noise measured at the back of the unit, the single most effective noise abatement attack was to throw the whole thing under my desk. We'll see what difference, if any, adding the frontpiece makes; as muffling the inlet area did make a noticeable and measurable difference with the unit on the desktop.

Details of that adventure can be seen in the TEA thread.



mnem
*back into the suck*

[mnementh]

   More Frustion360   .

mnem
I'm gonna go put ice on my junk now.

[mnementh]

   
And the      continues. First layer is going down beautifully... after that it turns to hairy shit. 

I'm thinking it's a matter of the right combination of hotend temp and layer fan speed with the 'fang... but still haven't found it. Extruder drive starts tick-ticking when the fans kick on, then no flow and horrible layer bonding.

mnem
I'm gonna go put ice cream on my junk now.

[xrunner]

OK I'm expecting a Master Class in 3D printing problem deduction and fix ...