Trident 300 Upgrade to Tridex

[mvdveer]

Decided to do what was originally intended with this machine - build a Tridex.

The opportunity arose from a faulty extruder after two years of reliable use. I had to rebuild the extruder which meant to toolhead had to come of. Thanks to some encouragement from members of this forum, I bit the bullet and started the tridex build.

As I have mentioned, I am not concerned about the loss in build volume at this point in time.

Decided on the Xol Toolhead with orbiter 2 extruder and orbitool USB board. 

Removed the old toolhead - Stealthburner, motor drives and front idlers.

 

Lets get printing

 

[mvdveer]

EXTRUDERS

Got the two new extruders assembled:

• Orbiter 2
• Orbital O2S toolboard
• Orbiter 2 filament runout sensor
• Strain relief for USB cable

    

These will feed a Rapido Ace UHF hotend

[mvdveer]

DRIVE MOTOR ASSEMBLY:

Assembled the A and B drive motors and assembled to the frame

LDO Nema14 motors (LDO-35STH48-1684AH (VRN))

   

    

[mvdveer]

FRONT IDLERS

Assembled the front idlers. Getting the bearings in is just as fidly as the original Trident standard front idlers but got there in the end.

    

 

XY- JOINTS:

Mounted the XY joints and routed the Y - Belts

b.      

 

X-AXIS:

Had to replace the Huawin carriage as it had a bit of play on it. Fitted two LDO carriages to the X-Axis: 

   

BELTS:

A bit tricky to feed through the front idlers but otherwise similar to Trident Belt routing

   

X-CARRIAGE:

Connected the belts to the modified X-Carriage in order to use the XOL toolhead. (Got the stl from the Tridex-17 repo and adjusted it in fusion for 6mm belts.

    

 

Only issue  - Belts are angled from the XY -joint to the X-Carriage. (Not parallel to the X-Axis) - Arrrgh!

This will definitely affect print quality!

Back to the drawing board - get that thinking cap on.  May need to find a way to mount the XOL on the standard Voron Carriage.........

 

 

[Repman]

7 hours ago, mvdveer said:

May need to find a way to mount the XOL on the standard Voron Carriage.........

The carriage looks very "bulky". A lot of plastic between the LDO carriages and the Xol-mounting end. Perhaps a CNC carriage could help (CNC-TAB?).

[mvdveer]

8 hours ago, Repman said:

The carriage looks very "bulky". A lot of plastic between the LDO carriages and the Xol-mounting end. Perhaps a CNC carriage could help (CNC-TAB?).

No they won't work as you need a pass through for the belts to the other toolhead. For the left toolhead the belt passthrough needs to be for the top belt and for the right toolhead, this needs to be at the bottom. SO left toolhead connects the bottom belts, right toolhead the top belts.

See the printed X-Carriages as an example: ( these are draft printed for testing purposes)

[mvdveer]

XOL TOOLHEADS:

Well, what would you know, the Xol Rapido UHF toolhead fits the Tridex X-carriage from the repo. (Some minor mods needed)

Unfortunately, I now need to figure out how to modify the XOL in order for the toolheads to home of each other. 

This is the Stealthburner setup:

Lets open the CAD and see where this leads

[Repman]

I´m on the way to rebuild my LoX-Toolhead (Dragon HF with Bondtech LXG-lite V2), but not for double extruder.

I just measured the distance between the center of the nozzle to the outer side of the toolhead: It is about 42 mm. This means the distance between the nozzles of the two toolheads is more than 80 mm (as your picture above also shows). This is what you are loosing of your printable area.

From my point of view you need to redesign your printhead for a 300 mm setup or use a slimmer one. Perhaps:
1. A smaler size of the head like this (https://www.printables.com/model/215276-bondtech-lgx-lite-dragon-he-voron-zero/files):

or a complete redesign like this:

Here the total distance between the nozzles is 40 mm.

But for this setup you need a mirrors orbiter (should be easy achievable), but a cooling, which is AFAIK not standard available. Perhaps the cold-end cooled from the side (25 mm Fan) and the part cooling fans 90° turned (one from behind and one from the front). 
We are tinkerer, right?

[mvdveer]

9 hours ago, Repman said:

We are tinkerer, right?

Indeed we are. Thanks for the info, but as I said, I am not concerned about loosing print space or build volume at this stage. I am still tinkering

[mvdveer]

Just a short update. Wasn't happy with the smoothness of the X and Y axis after completing the belts and mounting the toolheads. Found the error - all my doing - lack of attention to detail. Spot the mistake. And this was on both the motor drives

.

Pulled the machine apart again, re-belted and all is good.

[NikosSprocket]

My Rabbit Hole Toolhead has overall width of 84.895 mm, but at full endstops, nozzle to air-pipe 39.92 mm (left side) and nozzle to linear carrier (right side endstop) is 22.681 mm.

This will probably work for the Right toolhead and a mirror version for the Left toolhead.

That gave me an idea; it looks like the Bondtech Indx is going to take a while for full production, so maybe I am thinking maybe try using my toolhead for an Idex Voron 2.4?

I have not researched extensively the Voron Idex practices, but I was wondering how complex and reliable Klipper handles Idex system issues like collisions, calibration, Z-offset etc. Any good readings?

PS. The cables are “exposed” because I am working on the camera position and I have removed the back cover.

 

[mvdveer]

8 hours ago, NikosSprocket said:

but I was wondering how complex and reliable Klipper handles Idex system issues like collisions, calibration, Z-offset etc. Any good readings?

Once I have the build complete I may be able to shed some light on this. Time will tell

[mvdveer]

No matter what, with my very limited Fusion skills, I could not get to mount a X-Stop switch on the XOL toolhead.  One thing I was not going to compromise on was the orbiter extruder. Found a orbiter 2 mount for the stealth burner and for now, went this route.

   

Wired her all up, flashed all the toolboards and flipped the switch - no magic smoke. All the devices showed up.

     

Tweaked the config files, updated to the latest klipper release - which meant refreshing the octopus board with the latest firmware. (was painless)

Thanks to @dalegaard on discord for his advice on the naming convention for multiple beacon probes

Quote

dalegaardadmin — 7:31 pmMonday, 30 March 2026 at 7:31 pm
To specify multiple Beacons, you use [beacon sensor <name>]
If there's a "main" sensor, you can use [beacon] for it, and then [beacon sensor <name>] for the other sensor. You can also use [beacon sensor <name>] for both if you prefer. If you do the latter, and want one of the probes to be the "main" one, i.e. register as probe in the printer(for QGL, ztilt, etc) then you need to specify register_as_probe: True for that probe only.

Restarted and all the mcc's showed up:

On to the startup guide next, then calibration and hopefully a successful print.

Still have to mount the internal spool holders and design a camera mount for a Logitech webcam. Want to mount this on the Tophat.

 

[Repman]

Looks really good with stealthburners beasties. Like it! If it´s running please send a video.

[mvdveer]

8 hours ago, Repman said:

Looks really good with stealthburners beasties. Like it! If it´s running please send a video.

Will do

[mvdveer]

Well, the configuration was a bit of a challenge. The documentation was not really clear which the X-Motor was [stepper_x]  and which the stepper was [dual carriage]. I initially had these switched but soon realised my mistake when doing the stepper buzz commands. 

Successfully homed Y- axis

 

 

Successfully homed X-Axis

 

 

 

 

Now to tune the two beacon probes in order to home Z. Will update again when this is achieved.

[mvdveer]

Just a quick update.

There are a couple of  issues when using beacon sensors with the Tridex, which is not in the documentation. The first being the naming of the sensors and the second is that the Tridex uses [homing_override], which as those that use beacon probes know, does not work with beacon. Instead it relies on homing hooks. The homing hooks replace [homing_override], and belong in [beacon] and are associated with the corresponding macros - [gcode_macro _HOME_PRE_AXIS], [gcode_macro _HOME_POST_AXIS], etc

Thus all the functions relating to the [homing_override] section of Tridex (there is a seperate config file), had to be adapted and used in the homing hooks. Now I am not the best with ninja used for macro creation thus......... I used ChatGPT and after several iterations, finally got the beacon macros performing all the functions the original [homing_override] Tridex macro performs.

The next challenge is to adapt the T0 and T1 (toolhead) macro's to recognise each individual beacon sensor when calibrating. T0 beacon is used for Z-Tilt and Bed mesh but as each hot end's Z-offset needs to be stored to get reliable prints, I need to find a way to do this.

My thinking is to do a a [BEACON_AUTO_CALIBRATE] foe each sensor with a hot bed and nozzle at printing temps in the [PRINT_START] macro, save that as "beacont0hot" and "beacon t1hot" and in the tool change macros ([T0] and [T1] load these values.

But first I need to calibrate the two toolheads

[TitusADuxass]

Those Stealthburners look damn good side by side!

You can always CPAP them if you keep them. I've got CPAP on my v2.4 Stealthburner and it has vastly improved the part cooling.

[mvdveer]

On 4/14/2026 at 9:46 PM, TitusADuxass said:

Those Stealthburners look damn good side by side!

You can always CPAP them if you keep them. I've got CPAP on my v2.4 Stealthburner and it has vastly improved the part cooling.

Still want to put the rapido's on there and then will do CPAP. 

[jack separovic]

On 3/20/2026 at 3:46 PM, mvdveer said:

Decided to do what was originally intended with this machine - build a Tridex.

The opportunity arose from a faulty extruder after two years of reliable use. I had to rebuild the extruder which meant to toolhead had to come of. Thanks to some encouragement from members of this forum, I bit the bullet and started the tridex build.

As I have mentioned, I am not concerned about the loss in build volume at this point in time.

Decided on the Xol Toolhead with orbiter 2 extruder and orbitool USB board. 

Removed the old toolhead - Stealthburner, motor drives and front idlers.

 

Lets get printing

 

[jack separovic]

Yell out if you still want to do x end stops ,guessing they will be mirror one going to + other going to - ,I use solidworks tho 

[mvdveer]

44 minutes ago, jack separovic said:

Yell out if you still want to do x end stops ,guessing they will be mirror one going to + other going to - ,I use solidworks tho 

The left toolhead (T0) homes against the left XY joint and the right toolhead (T1) homes against T0. The XOL cowlings are at too much of an angle to get the end stop mounted. Secondly, if you extend it, then the distance between the two hotends are very large. But thanks for the offer

[mvdveer]

 

UPDATE:

Has been quite a journey but then I do like a challenge. The main issue were:

Taking a Trident 300 and converting it to a Tridex without changing the frame

Wanting to use Orbiter extruders and Rapido hotends

Wanting to use dual Beacon Probes in order to get a perfect first layer on both the hotends

Just could not keep the original bed as the wipers were needed for ooze control as well as cleaning the nozzles at each color change. In the end I cut a 9mm Aluminium plate to size 255 across X and 280 across Y. Mounted a new heater pad and that problem solved

There was no way I could modify the XOL extruders in order to get T1 to home against T0. I just don't have enough Fusion knowledge at this point to do it. This is due to the shape of the Xol cowling. Therefor went with dual Voron repo's in the Stealthburner design. Managed to find a mount that fits the orbiter 2

Dual beacons proved a nightmare despite all the help from the guys on Discord. Just could not get it to work as I wanted - Again my lack of knowledge of ninja needed for the macros may have had  a lot to do with this. Ended up with a single beacon probe on T0. So how to easily determine offsets? 

Nudge came to the rescue, though it was not perfect by all means. (I'll post a video of the first print only using nudge values.) Was not the best quality (PLA used - was old and probably not completely dry either - I seldom print PLA) But the printer was open and used PLA to avoid warping.  Did not have sufficient travel to mound it at the back, so the front of the printer it had to be.

Nudge at work

 

First print:

 (Will upload videos in seperate post - not allowing me to upload more

So I switched to ABS (yes on an open printer for now). In order to get a reliable Z-Offset for ABS and ASA printing, I heated the bed to 110, nozzles to 255 and let it heat soak before doing a nudge.  Got a test print underway which looks reasonable so far.

   

 

 

 

[mvdveer]

First print:

 

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

[mvdveer]

Continued: