Have made some updates to my DIY printer. Whether all these updates been successful? Jury is out.
Octoprint
This is cool, and easy, and cheap.
Octoprint is a linux repo for Raspberry Pi (whoopee, finally found a reason for Raspberry Pi v1). Means you can control your printer over wifi/ home network. RaspPi/ Octoprint serves up a website which you access through browser on anything on your home network. It’s as functional as Pronterface, but without the wires and Raspi kudos; so gets my +1.
Not a fan of the name or the logo, so minus half a percent for that 😉
Power for Raspi comes off the ATX supply (5V).
Supports Bonjour as well so you can just type octopi.local as the web address in browser, rather than ip address, To get this working I had to install Bonjour on my (Windows) laptop. If you have iTunes installed, then you probably have (Apple’s) Bonjour installed. I de-iTuned myself a while ago, but you can just install Bonjour standalone, just need to Google a how-to. Coincidentally, Bonjour also has a crap logo.
The Bonjour logo, straight from noughties.
Power Supply
Changed power supply from XBox360 203W power block to an ATX PC supply. This was a pain since I had to reconfigure the printer’s Marlin firmware for the ATX supply (through how this effect anything in Marlin I am not sure). I could not find where my original Marlin setup so had to start again.
To cut a long story short, I ended up hooking both supplies up – the XBox block powers the heat bed, and the ATX supply everything else. Power controlled to both through PS-ON pin on RAMP1.4. Kind of works – a bit more tuning to be done.
New PLA vs Old PLA vs ABS
Changed back to PLA, had been working with ABS but the tree hugger in me kind of likes the idea of PLA. Teething print issues with PLA largely fixed by forking out for a new roll of PLA filament. The half-a-roll I was trying to work with was 3+ years old and it was all nasty and brittle. Moisture? UV? both? Not sure. New roll of filament fixed everything.
I bought the new filament from Diamond Age. I think they make it here in New Zealand. Incidentally, I was trying trace the ‘DNA’ of my Reprap and learnt that Vic Olliver, the guy who set up Diamond Age was involved in the development of the RepRap project.
Self Levelling Bed
Added self-levelling bed function (in new Marlin firmware.) Played around with a couple off of ones but ended up designing my own based very loosely on this one.
Its the thing on the left, next to hot end.
Setting up the self levelling pretty easy. The following videos pretty much all you need to do to set up.
- Setting up auto bed-leveling on the Makerfarm Prusa i3. Part 1 – Hardware Assembly
- Setting up auto bed-leveling on the Makerfarm Prusa i3. Part 2 – Configuring Marlin
- Setting up auto bed-leveling on the Makerfarm Prusa i3. Part 3 – Final setup
BTW ‘Auto bed leveling is a bit of a misnomer. I had thought the the bed is physically made level by adjusting heights of corners. It is not. The auto-leveller works out the plane of your bed and adjust the z-axis as you print so compensate – so the model is printed on the piss. Means your z-axis steppers get real busy, real quick, while printing
Cooling Fan
Added a cooling fan to RAMPS1.4, to cool down the stepper drivers, particularly the ibe – z axis works really hard with the bed leveling going.
Ripped fan out of power supply which I was going to use as power supply for printer. Bought it from some guy at car boot sale…it didn’t work. Metal shroud from case of same supply with paint stripped off.