VZBot 330 AWD

[Penatr8tor]

A little update on my Voron TAP crisis...

Yup, All I needed was a little more material on the tip of the tab. I tried gluing a piece of filament onto the first, but that ended up being too much, so I just clipped it off and applied a thin layer of ASA to it with a cheapo 3D pen. Had to file and shape it a bit but it worked out well and proved to me that I can use the 3D pen in the future to possibly do a repair to a print. So, Voron is back up and running and I can print the final parts to complete the VzBoT build. I want to get a couple LED strips and a camera (or maybe two) into the enclosure. On another note... I'm thinking of installing a couple gas struts into the top of the enclosure to make opening the top both easier and to hold it open.

 

[Penatr8tor]

Welp... Going to be a bit of a delay on the VzBoT... Probably have to wait a couple weeks.

Here's the story...

I get everything connected that I need connected to power up and test the printer.

I disconnected 24v and 48v power from the wago's so that only the 2 power supplies are connected and power up the printer. All is good and I get 24v and 48v respectively from the power supplies. 

I power off and reconnect the wago's and power up again, this time powering up the controller, pi and other electronics. Everything looks good, pi lights up, Fly Super 8 Pro board lights up, 5160 boards light up but none of the 4 cooling fans for the driver boards are spinning. I figure... that's normal fans generally need software to activate them. So, I let the printer run with power to everything while I go downstairs and make a cup O coffee. I come back upstairs, and I can smell the destruction... I touch the hub of one of the 5160 cooling fans and Whoa!!! Hot!!! So, I power down the machine and start investigating. After hunting down the pin outs for the 5160 driver boards I determined the four cooling fans had the polarity reversed. Super dumb move on my part, obviously, the fans had really long wires attached so as per usual, I cut them and re-crimped the connectors and somewhere along the way I got the polarity mixed up. I then went ahead and corrected the polarity issue, plugged everything in and gave it another power up test and low and behold... Everything lights up green and fans are spinning as they should. I think, maybe I dodged a bullet here. So, I resume testing. I load Klipper, flash the Super 8 Pro, I get the endstops working, bed heats, hotend heats, hotend fan works, CPAP fan is blowing way more air than anyone could want LOL and I start to test stepper motors. Extruder yup, Z axis yup, X nothing, X1 nothing, Y nothing, Y1 again, nothing. I check wiring, power, etc, etc. and none of the 4 motors for X,Y is responding.

Now I'm waiting on 5160 driver boards from China... Gonna be a couple weeks min before they get here so... I guess things are on hold.

Moral of the story... Sometimes the world reminds you that you're just a flawed human being. 

...and there's one thing that is really bugging me. I found a vendor "Print3D" that had 4 boards in stock, So I bought them Sunday night with express shipping, so I'd have them by this Wednesday. Yesterday afternoon I get an email from the vendor...

"Hello. So my count was messed up. I’m short one. I got more coming this week. I’ll send you three now then one when it comes if that’s ok?

 

Print3d"

Now I understand that it's not easy to run a side business like a lot of these print vendors do but this is what appears to be a strange coincidence... I'm watching Steve Builds and ModBotArmy do a colab VzBoT build Sunday afternoon while I'm testing my printer, and near the end of the stream, Steve is testing steppers and one of his 5160 boards is not responding, aka dead, preventing him from getting his machine running. Steve is like, well I'll have to find a replacement board somewhere. Well, I did a lot of checking on Sunday night and Print3D was the only vendor in the US that had these boards and he had 4 of them. It's probably not what my mind wants to think but I can help thinking... I might have had one of my boards nicked out from under me. I guess I will see what is what on the next VzBoT Collab. live stream, and if there's a shout out and big thank you to Print3D, LOL, I will have my answer. Either way it's all good, just had the wind taken out of my sails. In the meantime... There are plenty of other projects that can be messed with while I wait for my stuff to arrive.

Cheers...

 

[mvdveer]

7 hours ago, Penatr8tor said:

Moral of the story... Sometimes the world reminds you that you're just a flawed human being

I wish it would not. It happens more often than not. Bummer about the 5160 pro's. Just got mine from a local company but still took two weeks to arrive. Good luck only form here onwards!

[claudermilk]

Soo....Steve sniped one of the 5160s from you?  If you tell him he will feel appropriately bad about it.

[Penatr8tor]

8 minutes ago, claudermilk said:

Soo....Steve sniped one of the 5160s from you?  If you tell him he will feel appropriately bad about it.

I don't think Steve would do that. I just don't get that kind of vibe from him or ModBot or any of the build streamers really. I think what happened was timing thing stemming from a combo of me screwing up my boards and Steve having a bad one and the only US vendor to have any in stock having to make a judgement call. I'm sure Steve called Print3D and said, Hey... one of the 5160 boards is dead, can you send me one out. And Print3d had to make a decision, process my order and tell Steve sorry or take one from my order, which by the way was complete and I already paid the night before. In the end Print3D decided that it was more noble to lie to me and tell me Sorry, I made a Booboo so that he could reap the benefit of having Steve build one of the kits he's selling. So, that's how I feel inside. I understand why he did it and most businesspeople would agree that while it's basically a sh!tty move and overall, just bad form... from his perspective he was doing what benefits his business and I understand, we all have to survive.

So, this time around, I'm the fall guy. I might mention something in chat, but probably not. And FWIW, I have no beef with any of those people, the vendor or Steve or anyone. My issue with the 5160 boards is my own doing. Had I paid attention and not messed up, I wouldn't even be talking about this. Am I pissed at myself, Heck Yeah, I am. Am I pissed because I wasn't able to recover from screwing up, Heck Yeah, I am. Is it Steve or the vendors fault? No... 

So there ya have it, I'll have to wait a week and that is fine. I will survive, just as I have survived everything up to this point.

p.s. It still stings tho... 

[Penatr8tor]

@claudermilk

I think the vendor and Steve owe me a free spool of Polymaker Filament at a minimum TBH. Hahahahaha 

 

[claudermilk]

Come on, you KNEW my tongue was firmly planted in cheek there. 

No, Steve wouldn't do that. After all the chatting on his stream, and having met him at OCMF last year, I think if he had any knowledge of the situation, he would have made sure YOU got the driver and not him. I agree, it was just an unfortunate timing and/or inventory count error issue. One of those stuff happens situations and no malice on anyone's part. Honestly, I haven't gotten that vibe off anyone in this community.

[Penatr8tor]

On 9/14/2023 at 8:04 AM, claudermilk said:

Come on, you KNEW my tongue was firmly planted in cheek there. 

Of course @claudermilk, I knew you were just kidding.

I wanted to clarify, for the record, that it was more of a bad luck timing thing as opposed to any malice on anyone's part. I don't want to point the finger and I'm also not going to accuse based on speculation. As I said, maybe that's the way things went down, maybe not. Currently I have 3 of 4 driver boards, the vendor said to me that he'd be "getting more this week and I'll overnight the odd one out to ya". Well, that was last week and not a peep from the vendor so... Who knows, I probably just got the old typical human response when something goes sideways... promise the moon to get the person off your back and do damage control until the part arrives or I give up.

The only silver lining for me on this issue was that before I even ordered parts from Print3D... I had already ordered a set of 4 from Mellow / Aliexpress. Those 4 have already cleared customs and is enroute to my local post office for delivery. I'd bet 10 bucks that the China ones arrive before the Print3D part.

And to close this out... Yeah, I'm sad I had a setback but it's only a week or two and I had plenty of fun adding lighting and a camera to the build before I got it officially printing. I also built the RSCS cooling fans and got those mounted to the side panels along with a couple other things so stay tuned for those items.

[Penatr8tor]

Just wanted to give you all a quick update.

Everything is resolved regarding the electronics, and I even ended up with a few spares just in case. More times than not you get extras for just in case scenarios and having the spares on hand guarantees that the parts you're running will never break.  It must be a Karma thing.

Here's a few picture of my progress.

Rear electronics panel, very close to being done. Just a couple fans, camera, lights etc. left to connect.

 

This is how I handled the heated bed and bed thermistor. I found a WAGO mount and VHB'd it to the deck then ran out the back thru the TPU grommet.

 

Here are the two lights I added. They're 12v LED driving lights. I'm thinking these are the very same lights that annoy the crap out of me when I see them in my rear-view mirror LOL. The cool part is I configured 2 of the fan ports for 12v and plugged them in. Using [multi_pin] in my printer.cfg I combined the two pins together and I can control both with one on off switch in Mainsail. I did the same thing for the RSCS fans as well with the exception of having a slider to control speed.

 

And here we go. Very, very close to being done. Gonna get some rest tonight and in the morning... I'll move it into my office for the final dial in and 1st print. I mean everything is done except for connect a couple cables and attaching the front doors. Top cap just needs to be set on top.

So what do you think? I think she's a real beauty. I love the blue/black color scheme.

 

 

[claudermilk]

<Borat voice> Very Nice! </Borat voice>

That's a much better use for those hateful LED driving lights! (yes, they are annoying--especially in a lowered car)

[Penatr8tor]

@claudermilk Yay! I'm not the only one  

So this morning I set off to finish up the VZ330 and get it moved over to do some actual printing.

First up was running the ribbon cable for the display under the chassis. Once again, VHB tape to the rescue.

next up was to connect and route the remaining cables (really just a fan and the display). Then a quick test and... crap, display cable is inverted on the display so take all that crap apart and then back together and... Success!!! Viola! I present the finished rear electronics bay. I have to say, I feel I'm getting better at wire and cable organization.

[Penatr8tor]

And now for the front... I'm literally done but want to move it into my office before printing the first print so, I gotta wait for my buddy to get home to help me move it over. It's not that I can't lift it myself, although it's probably about 80 lbs, it's that I don't want to risk dropping anything.

So here it is, powered on and ready. All panels, fans, lights camera, you name it.

 

[mvdveer]

And a beauty she is. You should be really proud of this build. 

[claudermilk]

Looks great!

[Penatr8tor]

10 hours ago, mvdveer said:

And a beauty she is. You should be really proud of this build. 

Thanks! Still a lot of tweaking and dialing in. The beauty of the printer hides the frustration LOL.

So, I'm going to go on a little rant here. Mostly to document somewhere what I went thru in the hopes that someone might find it useful. I already agreed to help them with their documentation so that the next person that buys a kit isn't getting extra frustration over and above the $1800 US they already spent.

My biggest issue with this build is that the supplied printer.cfg doesn't properly reflect the current state of the hardware supplied with the kit. I say supplied but really most of the software related files etc. is a frikken treasure hunt.  Seems like Mellow is bundling a number of components that the printer.cfg doesn't reference properly and when you find out, it becomes a real challenge to find answers. 

Here's what I've run into so far... 

1. Connect the -V of the 2 power supplies together. Even if this is common knowledge, it's not in the instructions and should be. I had to find this out from a livestream.

2. Not only are the X, X1, Y, Y1 motors inverted from the VZ235 they're also flipped. But here's where it gets really interesting... The instructions only have them flipped so, you wire it up like the instructions, from the top X, X1, Y, Y1, load up the printer.cfg and no matter what combo you use to invert or not invert... you can't get the X and Y to move in the proper direction. After spending hours on Discord, someone with the very same problem as me says, F it, I'm just going to change [Stepper_X] and X1 to Y and Y1 and send it. It worked so that's what I did. Now everything that I wired and labeled on the back panel with regard to the gantry steppers is backwards. This is something that should never have happened, ever. I still get PO'd when I think about it because I really didn't have to go thru this BS, but it is what it is...

3. The lead screws are T-8 high helix pitch and the printer.cfg has the Rotation_distance set to 4. Again... this kind of stuff should not happen. I just fixed this BTW as I just printed a 60mm tall 30x30x30 cube LOL.

4. Extruder... Here we go again... Is there anything in the printer.cfg that's correct? I mean I'm thinking maybe I would have been better off building my own from scratch at this point. The extruder section has is configured for a 10t gear on the motor. Kit comes with 8t gear. Does it say anywhere that the supplied extruder is 50:8? No... Does anyone doing the support on Discord know what comes in the kit? No... At this point it's becoming a real comedy or errors, and it really just boils down to someone making a decision to upgrade or change components in the kit without updating the supporting configuration files. 

5. Hotend... Right now it appears that the hotend gets hotter than reported. I could be totally wrong on this one and it's possible that it's a new device that I'm not yet familiar with. I have a multimeter with a thermistor, and I'll check actual nozzle temp against the reported temp to make sure and adjust if required.

6. Fasteners... I have a metric crap ton of left over fasteners and also some magnets and other stuff. One would think this is awesome bc free screws right... well that wears off really quick after the 3rd order of screws from Amazon. Plenty of really long screws are required but none are supplied.

That's my current list of things to watch out for if someone plans on buying a kit before the documentation and setup files are sorted.

[cjkennedy72]

@Penatr8tor Thanks for the info on the poor instructions. I just got the Mellow AWS CNC motor mounts and Y gantry mounts and am about to start converting my TronXY to a VZBot, so nice to look through this and some of @mvdveer's stuff to look for gotchas.

I am waffling on buying Mellow's bed mounting kit, It is a bit pricey but looks slick! Your pics make me drool over how it looks on the printer. I am also probably going to start out with NEMA-17 steppers since I have plenty on hand... Until I see improvement over the TronXY print failures, I have a good bit invested already and haven't turned the first screw.  

[Penatr8tor]

@cjkennedy72 You're welcome. We're a community and sharing experiences with everyone is what makes this all work. 

Hopefully you'll create a build diary so that we, like the BORG, can add your uniqueness to the collective.  Maybe you already have, I'll need to check.

Good luck and I'll be watching. Glad you like the printer, even tho I biotched a lot... it really is as awesome as everyone says it is. I'm doing the fun part now, Fine tuning.

One last point on the printer that I didn't mention previously is the Goliath Hotend. It has no issue flowing huge amounts of molten plastic however, it's super oozy. I was looking at the end_print gcode and there's like 25mm of retraction at the end of the print to limit the oozing but, it still oozes even with pulling the crap out of the filament. I guess that's just the trade-off, you want flow... you'll need to handle the ooze. BTW, I'm using a 0.6mm Diamondback nozzle so that doesn't help much.

[mvdveer]

On 9/30/2023 at 12:52 AM, Penatr8tor said:

I already agreed to help them with their documentation

AS I said at the start of my build - the documentation is non-existent. Had to flip between the All and printed manuals. (The latter does not mention synchronising steppers for e.g) Most of the help came from the discord group. 

 

On 9/30/2023 at 12:52 AM, Penatr8tor said:

I'm just going to change [Stepper_X] and X1 to Y and Y1 and send it. It worked so that's what I did.

Same here but after days of frustration.

 And I built an EVA v 3 toolhead which I am told on discord it NOT recommended as the v 2.4 was better. 

At the end of the day the frustration was worth the price of helping someone else not going through the same. Would love to see that machine in action.

[Penatr8tor]

13 hours ago, mvdveer said:

Would love to see that machine in action.

Action is coming... I've already printed some PLA stuff at a much more aggressive speed than I do my Vorons and RatRigs. I'll post up a video tonight or early tomorrow. 

SO, the PLA was really oozy and didn't print well at speed. I modified the OrcaSlicer profile and pretty much reduced the speed by around 30% and the accel about 50%. That helped some but, drove me to determine that maybe I'd better switch filaments. I'm now testing with ABS. I printed a CaliCat about 1/2 way thru last night before it lost its 1st layer adhesion. This morning I picked up the pieces and just finished printing the same CaliCat. Material was ABS @250c, Speed was 250mm/s with 5000 accel. 

.At 250c the ABS flows well enough to crank things up a bit, I'm working my way up slowly. I also replicated the RatRig Prime Blob and got pretty darn close, definitely close enough, 

[Penatr8tor]

Welp... Got an error, X endstop already triggered. Turns out my x endstop switch is bad. So, I ordered 10 extra switches from mouser and that means I'll have to wait a few days before I can continue testing and dialing in. And I was getting so close too. Life is full of surprises, some good and some not so much. I also have a strange error going on with the klipperscreen. Touch is not working, and I need to figure out why, probably a cabling issue. Fortunately, I have spares for the more expensive stuff, it's things like little $2 switches that's stopping the show.

 

[Penatr8tor]

OK, So I got the error resolved. Opened things up and fiddled around and low and behold everything's back up and running. I'm viewing this as a temporary solution until I get the new switches in the mail and wire up a new one. At this point I'm happy I'm printing on the ZvBoT again with pretty good results.

@mvdveer As promised my friend... a few videos I've taken during the testing phase. The light blue ABS are from this morning.

Don't forget to Like, Comment and Subscribe. 

[mvdveer]

3 hours ago, Penatr8tor said:

Don't forget to Like, Comment and Subscribe. 

Great printer - looking good. Well done on the build. Looks like the refurbished VZBot of mine will undergo another upgrade - CNC parts - When does it end- Oh I know - Never 

[mvdveer]

7 hours ago, Penatr8tor said:

I also have a strange error going on with the klipperscreen. Touch is not working,

It is a documented error on github. 

https://github.com/KlipperScreen/KlipperScreen/issues/928

Try this to see where the problem lies

https://klipperscreen.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Troubleshooting/#touch-not-working-on-debian-bullseye

[Penatr8tor]

@mvdveer Thank you, I will research and report back.

I printed a couple more test prints today. Sadly my phone wants to blend all the layers together so the image is not as crisp as I would like. Regardless... for having just done a few manual adjustments... it's printing good enough to make useable parts. I'm going to try a different color and see how that prints and maybe even some CF filled Nylon (PA). 

[Penatr8tor]

@mvdveer This was the ticket! Touch is up and working! Thanks for the help!

All I really needed was an "F"