v0.2 Smol Printer Build: V0.2-S1r1

[mvdveer]

Well done to you and your daughter - great build

[claudermilk]

It was a lot of fun for both of us. She reports that her schoolmates don't believe her that she built a 3D printer. Apparently there is some kind of competition or fundraiser going on to get a 3D printer for her middle school. She doesn't know what printer but thinks it's about $200-$250. Hmm...Ender? She told me her response was "meh" which threw the other kids off. When they asked why she wasn't impressed she told them it was because there was already two printers at home, and she was building a third. To which they responded with disbelief; I told her to take pictures to show as proof. Which reminds me, I need to share the Photos album of all my source images for this thread. That should put those disbelieving schoolmate in their place.

She is already talking about what mods are first on the todo list. 

[YaaJ]

On 10/3/2023 at 3:58 PM, claudermilk said:

Fin.

Now for tuning, software tweaks , and mods! Oh, and recording a serial video.

She got distracted (and had some more homework to do), so I mostly handled sorting what subtly different bracket went where on the tophat for the panels. She did make sure to record herself doing the peels--she's a pro now.

Are you sure, for the plates ? It seams they are meant to be mounted this way : one on top, one on front.

[EDIT] or swaped, as the logos are symmetrical, making Voron the first one and LDO the 2nd.

Edited October 4, 2023 by YaaJ

[claudermilk]

 That looks better. I'll move mine around. I thought it was odd how the top end was set up.

 

Also, DANG! Vorons serials are processed at warp speed now. The Trident took about 2 weeks. This one took all of 5 hours. Welcome V0.3105.

[YaaJ]

LDO documentation and repos are a mess. Printed everything I found and then played with the puzzles. Took some time before I find what to use. Worse : their 3D models are F360, not STEP.

[claudermilk]

Well, from what I gather F360 is the most commonly used CAD in the community and you can get a free personal license for it. Their docs certainly aren't as Voron (a testament to how much work has gone into Voron's), I've seen worse. I really only had trouble with Picobilical and input shaper.

[YaaJ]

The CAD esperanto is STEP. This is why Voron designs are shared as STEP assemblies ; it was explained by the team in a livestream a couple years ago. Because some in the team use Engineer, others Solidworks, or Catia, Edge, F360, etc. They all speak STEP, and they exchange STEPs. When designs are shared, most of the time the files are STEPs.

Three years ago, they wanted to remove STEP export from the free version. After some backlash, they didn't... Until now... I hate cloud computing.

[Penatr8tor]

If I remember correctly, from the TAP livestream, the Voron lead designer/s use Autodesk Inventor. One can only speculate on why they're saving shared designs in STEP format. My guess would be that they chose STEP because every CAD software can import STEP so, there's no worry that someone can't open a file. And STEP is a very compact format, so you run into less file size limitations and the list goes on. I've been designing on CAD daily for the past ~40 years having started with AutoCAD 1.1 on an IBM PC/AT with an 80286 and amber monochrome display. 

@YaaJ I remember when they wanted to charge everyone for STEP and obviously the community did not agree. Just curious... What CAD are you using?

[YaaJ]

Yes, we are thinking of the same video.

Didn't start CAD with such an early version... It was circa 1990, with a 286, a VGA card and a Hercules one in text mode for commands. Turbo C had a similar feature, coding debugging profiling on one monochrome text CRT, the program running on the second one. Learnt drawing on paper earlier, loved it !!! What version ? Can't remember. 3 ? 4 ? 5 ? Anyway, hated it. And this stupid LISP ! (Lots of stupid insipid parentheses IIRC). Quickly switched to GEM Draw, much easier and sufficient for the tiny things that could be made in a small appartment. Really came to CAD when I was able to have a workshop 10 years later. Was more a codehead at this time. Of course, didn't pay for the softwares. 20 years ago, tried Inventor and SW, loved SW instantly (the little mule had to walk for weeks). Followed the wife and the daughter on hollidays, they were going to the beach, I was staying with a laptop, learning parametric modeling. A bit shy when it comes to CAD softwares, for obvious reasons... STEP has an advantage : being text, it can be "defaced" ;  can remove some signatures. Not sure it is enough...

Can't get rid of Windows because of 2 softwares : SW and VS (the heavy one, not Code ; addicted since Visual C++ 1.0 beta, that came for free from MS soon after NT 3.1 beta 2). No Linux equivalent. FreeCAD is ununderstable with its workshops unfortunately. Its on the HDD, because it's a companion for KiCad.

[claudermilk]

Mods!

Let there be light! Rainbow on a Matchstick in the very nice Maple Leaf Makers mounts. I'm not super thrilled with the wire routing, I'll have to come up with something to clean that up. Probably a 1515 version of the channel cover if the wires & cover can all fit. I've stolen my Trident klipper-led-effects definitions and tweaked them for the V0.2; ditched all the ones not applicable (Tap probing, z-tilt, mesh, etc) and altered colors. Because the standby now uses breathe effect from cyan to purple. Of course.

Also added the nice little handles to make carrying it around easier. I shifted them towards the back so it balances nicely.

[claudermilk]

Another mod! After struggling with my push-the-envelope project using the Revo 0.15 nozzle, I've come to the conclusion the stock MiniSB simply doesn't have enough cooling for the task. Running the PLA as cold as I dare, the fans at full blast, and speeds at a compromise between too fast and hovering over the molten plastic I could still see overhangs flexing up. My not-very-expert assessment is it's not getting cooled fast enough to set in place before the nozzle moves along and is causing nasty surface artifacts ruining the desired result.

All that gave me the excuse to ditch the stock tool head and build a Dragon Burner + Galileo2 Standalone extruder. It seemed like a simple swap at the time. I ended up reprinting at least half the parts because the sketchy documentation doesn't make it super clear exactly what files you need to slice and print for your specific configuration. Ultimately, I got all the correct parts printed. The G2SA is stupid simple, 4 printed parts plus the kit components; all the magic is in that sun & planet gear assembly.

I also struggled with wiring up the NeoPixels, but that was more user error that anything else. I tried using 22ga wire which is too thick & stiff. Once I reverted to the last of my 30ga silicone is was easy--the only downside is all the wires are red. Now I need to get them attached to something to drive them. I thought about using the Picobilical filament sensor connections, but I am pretty sure that won't work. I am now thinking I need to just plug straight in to the Pi GPIO. That is a problem for Future Chris, for now I just want to calibrate the new extruder and print some stuff again.

[mvdveer]

6 hours ago, claudermilk said:

All that gave me the excuse to ditch the stock tool head and build a Dragon Burner + Galileo2 Standalone extruder

Ditching the mini stealth burner on the Micron as I am having extruding issues which I am relating to the CW. Build a mini-stealth but as I have a MG9H carriage, the mounts don't fit. Will get a C carriage, but you have helped me make up my mind - THANK YOU! I have printed the parts for the dragon burner (plus many extra, as I did not now what to print) to mount an orbiter extruder. Have to rewire the neopixels as I used a stiff wire and kept breaking the soldering joints. Also cannot for the life of me figure out how to fit the LED carrier for the nozzle led's to the toolhead. As you said - the documentation sucks!

 

BTW: - That machine looks Great!!!

[claudermilk]

OMG, that part! I ended up breaking off both of these tiny little legs, but in the end it didn't matter. The legs are the top, the LEDs point down and towards the back. The legs define the top that pushes up against the bottom of the hot end fan and the angled bottom of the pat sits on top of the little ledge at the inner bottom front of the cowl. It's fiddly as heck to get the thing in there, but once there it stays put. I ended up having to put a small blob of E6000 on the NeoPixel PCB to hold them in place.

I threw the 0.4 nozzle back on and did a quick PA test using Orca's calibration routine (easier than using Ellis' web page). The result was close enough to leave the calibrations alone. I printed a 3/4 size calidragon and it looks good. The horn overhangs look a little rough which concerns me, but the printer is working, so back to the tiny nozzle fight.

With the twin 4010 blowers going, I can feel a lot of air moving, so I hope part cooling is no longer an issue.

[claudermilk]

Quick update on this. I ran a test miniature figure after slicing with Orca beta 2, so using tree supports and scarf joints because why not? It's basically a success. I think I still have some fine-tuning to do, but I'm not seeing the horrible overhang messes I was before. I will put the majority of this down to the improved cooling from the Dragon Burner tool head; two bigger fans with full-depth air channels vs the MiniSB with the smaller fans and airways.

 

This guy is an 18mm scale figure. Revo 0.15 nozzle @ 0.05 layer. You can see the chain mail and pteruges (skirt) details. It's not resin printer quality, but for the intended purpose of this particular test perfectly usable.

I have some detailed terrain I'll print next, then I'll try another 28mm figure. 

[claudermilk]

Well, my hot end fan died right after that last print, so I had to order and install a new one. Got that done, and while I was in there I went ahead and got the NeoPixels for the logo and nozzle wired up. I used a couple of 3-position Wagos to busbar in jumpers for power and ran the signal down the the Pi GPIO12 pin.

At that point, trying to get some life out of them I discovered (via GitHub issue threads) that Klipper currently does not support directly driving NeoPixels from the Pi GPIO pins.  I did some more digging and found some information on the Adafruit and Pihut sites. Using that, I can manually drive the LEDs using Python scripts. No fancy led_effects library bling, but at least I can turn them on and give them colors. So I kludged together a couple of Perl and shell scripts to drive from a macro.

The last hiccup to deal with is it appears I have a bad solder joint in the little (hateful) fiddly bridge jumpers between the nozzle LEDs as only the first one turn on--the other two are inert right now. I don't have the patience to tear it all down again right now, so I'll live with it for a while.

The other "fun" challenge--and part of why I'm out of patience--is I somehow caused the umbilical to frame Picobilocal to come ever so slightly loose. While moving the tool head around to make sure the bed really is level (it wasn't), the case LEDs flashed and Klipper reset. Then I got mcu errors. WTF? Full power down reboot and the printer came back up. But while moving around and getting some heat into the tool head the fan would intermittently turn off. Eventually I found that moving it to the back triggered this, so wiggling wires around revealed the problem. After firmly--and carefully--re-seating the connection all is well. Back to fine-tuning the tiny print calibrations.

[claudermilk]

Another quick update. I had time yesterday to tear the toolhead apart (I'm getting far too much practice at this). So I got it apart enough to swap out to badly-soldered, oversized jumpers between the nozzle LEDs with "proper" 30AWG ones. Much easier to solder in, nice, clean joints now. Once I got it all together, all three LEDs light up! I fiddled with my Python script and I can make each LED the color I want. Now to learn a bit more Python to make it easier to drive at least static LED colors to follow the led-effects library definitions.

[mvdveer]

9 hours ago, claudermilk said:

Much easier to solder in, nice, clean joints now.

Darn! - those things are fiddly - was probably the longest part of the dragonburner build.

[claudermilk]

OMG, yes, they are. Thankfully I have nice tools to get the job done now. Omnifixo, TS-101, and a set of nice locking tweezers.

I futzed around with the scripts, and now I've got the LEDs doing what I want. Now I know a little Python (very little), and how to pass parameters from a Klipper macro to a bash shell script.

Now I can call the Dragon Burner project done, next is to figure out the crazy stringing I'm getting with the tiny 0.15 nozzle. Dried the filament, and trying various retraction settings, so far it's stumping me; lots of fine hairs between parts.