Ezra Harris

Author: ezradharris

  • First Successful Print On My New Printer!

    Yesterday I finally got a successful print-off on my new printer, the cr-10 s5, after many weeks of troubleshooting and learning how this printer works. I realized that the problem was that I had made these mistakes which led to clicking on the extruder motor. I got a print to successfully finish and not have any issues.

    • I didn’t disable retraction / lower the settings since the Bondtech DDX combined with the SE mosquito head didn’t need retraction or barely needed it.
    • Set the temperatures too hot for my specific hotend, I set them to be 220-240, but I needed to lower it to 200 at least with PLA.
    • Used PLA with this hotend. In general, PLA isn’t bad for this hotend, but I needed to change a lot of settings to get it not to clog due to the hotend being longer than the stock Creality hotend I’m used to.
    • The extruder fan was not properly connected to the mainboard more about that here: https://blog.ezraharris.com/extruder-and-blower-fan-issues-on-my-new-3d-printer/

    Mostly my mistakes had to do with the settings I had put into Cura not taking into account the DDX configuration or the new hotend that I hadn’t dealt with before.

  • Reversed Fan Wiring For my Creality 3D Printer

    When I purchased my 3d printer, I bought it from a previous owner who was in the middle of upgrading the hotend and the extruder configuration and had not thoroughly tested it. After looking at the fan configuration, I noticed that the extruder fan had not been on when the printer turned on. Instead, the part cooling fan was constantly on, which was odd since my smaller printer, the ender-3 has the extruder fan on all of the time and the par cooling fan only when needed during prints. This became an issue for the performance of my prints.

    I asked about this in a 3D printing discord community I am in, and I got a response saying this was not normal for my printer and the wires must have been mixed up when hooking it up to the motherboard. This was an issue. The previous owner installed a power kill switch to the extruder motor and fans and had rerouted the power to it. If I wanted to swap the fan plugs, it wouldn’t be as easy as unplugging the cable and plugging it into the correct connector again. So I checked the voltages of the fans instead to see if it would be as easy as cutting and swapping the connectors from the extruder, and luckily yes, they were the same amount of voltage and amps. So I felt somewhat safe cutting and resoldering the connectors.

    As that was my first experience ever soldering anything together, I was nervous. Still, luckily, after applying (admittedly too much solder) to the wires, I wrapped it in electrical tape, and it worked! After about half an hour, I had both fans working, including changing the speeds.

    for reference photo of a blower fan (aka a part cooling fan):

    image from pinshape.com fan on left being the part cooling fan

  • Customizing my 3D Printer Boot Screen

    When working on my printer yesterday, I had to change the firmware to accommodate the new bl touch, and I wanted to update my Marlin version to a newer one. Marlin is the flavor of code that a lot of 3d printer firmware runs on. So I used firmware from TH3D Studio for my specific printer (the cr-10 s5.). They gave straightforward and clear instructions on how to flash it onto the motherboard.

    For flashing it, I use a program called Visual Studio Code combined with a plugin called PlatformIO, which uses the USB port to flash onto another machine like the Arduino or, in my case, the 3d printer board.

    When configuring the settings in the code, I noticed a file called “bootscreen.h,” so I was curious and clicked on it. Commented out were instructions if I wanted to set up my own custom boot screen. Naturally, I clicked on the link for the guide and fell down an exciting rabbit hole of people customizing their own boot screen. You grab the image you want (about 128×64 pixels) and change it to black and white, then use marlin’s official converter to convert the image into code. Which then you can copy and paste into the bootscreen.h configuration file. When following the steps, I tried to think up what photo or logo I wanted to put on my bootscreen. I then got a very random notification of something I was following, which at this time was the Elon Musk buying Twitter, and I thought I might as well put an image of Elon musk on my boot screen for no reason at all other than to be humorous. This was the image I chose since it was black and white and easier to tell when less detailed on the cheap 3D printer screen:

    Elon musk (not mine)

    Here is what the final result looks like on my printer: (taken from my Instagram)

  • PEI Sheet Arrived! CR-10 S5 Printer

    When working on my new printer (CR-10 S5), I ordered a PEI sheet since I heard that was the best sheet for 3d printing since it had the smoothness of glass and the grip for 3d prints. I had found one on Amazon for about $90, which was the right size for my printer, which was 20×20 inches. I also got a cut piece of glass from lowes which cost about $14, including the cost for cutting in-store.

    When it arrived, I had two options: mount it on top of the glass, put clips to clip it under pressure, or buy transfer tape to apply it to the glass. Since I didn’t have the suitable tape for the glass bed, I used clips, but unfortunately, I only had one clip that was big enough to hold the sheet and glass together. I looked it up and found a similar question on Reddit from someone wondering what kind of alternatives could you replace instead of using clips for the hotbed. A user recommended that you use blue painter’s tape since it is heat resistant, which made sense since many people used painter’s tape before using bed surfaces was popular since it was heat resistant. The material was textured to grip the filament. Most other tapes have a softening point when heated up and don’t stick.

    I ended up using painter’s tape for holding the PEI sheet to the glass bed, and so far, it’s working great, which is an excellent alternative for not having to go out and buy more clips.

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