Ezra Harris

Category: Technology

Posts that are tech related

  • Upgrades for my Ender-3

    I finally got around to fixing and upgrading my Ender-3. I’ve had my Ender3 for almost 2 years now and have occasionally been upgrading when needed. Last year I made my best upgrade to the “silent board” TMC2208 stepper drivers. Which significantly silenced the noise of the printer when printing. As well as a BL touch which helps with bed leveling. (Read more about that process here)

    I hadn’t upgraded it much further than adding an Octoprint device (wireless control software for controlling and printing and a bunch of other features.) But I wanted to spend a bit more time working on the firmware and hardware because of several issues/features. One was a heating issue if I printed twice before it cooled down. Another major one was I needed to modify the firmware for PID Bed tuning (basically calibrating the temperature for my printer to know what the sweet spot is for keeping stable temperatures). I wanted to add “fast probing,” which made the bed leveling process much faster before it started printing, which I learned about thanks to Crosslink’s blog post.

    I moved my printer upstairs and closer to my desk for easy access and quick printing. As well as using an old laptop, I had to lie around for the Octoprint server and the laptop screen as a sort of 3D printer screen monitor. Which displays the webpage, where I can use the touchscreen to control and view information about the printer. Thanks to a nifty program called Ubuntu Frame, Ubuntu Frame uses the screen in “Kiosk mode,” which runs a website in a stripped-down version of chromium at bootup. Thanks to UI customizer, an Octoprint plugin, I could customize the home screen to look sleeker and in Dark mode, which made it easier for the eyes to see and navigate.

    (What’s dark mode? Click the icon below to see)

    I was also able to successfully program Marlin firmware for my printer with the features mentioned earlier. And ran the PID tuning. Another upgrade I wanted to make was to switch to Direct Drive. I had a direct drive setup from another project printer that I wasn’t using, and since in the future I wanted to run flexible plastics that would better run with Direct Drive, I decided I might as well install it at the same time.

    Took a couple of beauty shots with my brother Simeon’s camera while it was printing, and here’s the result:

  • Upgrading My 3D Printer Motherboard

    Recently I bought a new 3D printer motherboard; this motherboard is used to compute and control the motors, heaters, and fans for the average 3D printer. I purchased this motherboard to learn how to program a printer from scratch. A significant upgrade from this motherboard is swappable TMC drivers. TMC drivers are basically what provide and control the right amount of voltage that supplies the stepper motors.

    Calculating Vref is essential because if the motor does not get the right amount of voltage or too little, it can mess up the stepping. Either skipping (which will affect print quality) too quickly or not turning as much as it should. Or even overheating.

    I was able to calibrate the right amount of Vref (Voltage) for each stepper by using a formula that All3DP had on their site; with the right Vref, you can turn a small screw on the actual TMC drivers and check the voltage by using a Multimeter (more info here). In my case, I purchased a bundle that comes with the board and the TMC drivers. There are different types of TMC drivers, which came with TMC2209 “Silent Drivers” (super informational video on how silent drivers work here)

    Bigtreetech SKR 1.4 Turbo

    I used an old PrintrBot Simple Metal with most of its original parts for my first test on this board. I was able to calculate the right Vref, thanks to the help from my brother, Nicholas. Printrbot went bankrupt in 2018 and hasn’t fully released a new printer. Although Brook Drumm (the owner) has tried to start another project in 2020 with PlyBot. Luckily there’s a lot of documentation on the Printrbot and its motors, heater, and hotbed. As well as complete .step files on BrookDrumm.com, I was able to design and 3D print using Fusion360, a simple board adapter that screwed into the original frame and fit the new board.

    PrintrBot Simple Metal

    I had an issue with the board with an external screen that I bought called a BTT Mini 12864, a small cheap LCD screen with an SD card slot. I found it most helpful since the board would be less accessible to put an SD card into. But it took a while for me to get the card slot working in Marlin (the 3D printer’s Firmware). After a lot of googling and messing around with the code, I found my main issue, I had to enable the SD card to be set to LCD instead of Onboard SD. I can now use my external screen with an SD card which makes it easier to put print files onto the printer and start printing.

    3d printer screen
    3D Printed Screen Case

    Links:

    Amazon Bigtreetech LCD screen

    Amazon, Bigtreetech SKR 1.4 Turbo

    Printrbot

    Previous post about Printrbot

  • The Benefits of Plastic

    Plastics (or synthetic polymers) were first introduced back in the 19th century when they were trying to find an alternative to Ivory; ivory is also used in billiard balls (or pool balls in the US) Ivory was more commonly made using Elephant tusks, and was used in the making of small sculpted works of art, mini statues and other uses. Such as this Catholic depiction of Mary holding baby Jesus:

    (credit: Wikipedia)

    In 1907 an inventor Leo Baekeland came up with an utterly artificial type of plastic called Bakelite; bakelite’s main attributes were that it was a good insulator of heat and strong. Later, bakelite aided with the production of electronics due to its ease of production and cheapness. Bakelite inspired others to create different types of polymers.

    Today plastic is used in almost every type of profession. It’s used in computers, wires, safety equipment, tubes, ETC.

    Although some say a downside to plastic is its environmental effects, plastic has a lot better attributes than other materials (glass, wood, etc.), like its lightness and strength. And if we were to replace plastic, we could need more resources for the alternatives, which would result in more storage for those substitutes, thus more storage on trucks and space on freight ships, planes, etc.

    Even if the US and Europe decided to stop using plastic entirely, it wouldn’t even stop 1% of ocean pollution. Over time more and more plastics are invented for specific cases, and over time it may get better for the environment.

  • My Project Printer: A Year in the Making

    For the past almost year, I have been working on a project printer that I bought; the original frame and parts were from a CR-10 S5 (with a 500x500x500 build size) the first couple of test prints worked, but they were not optimal with many issues, elephants foot, layer line issues, and a couple other minor issues, some of the problems I was able to fix by tweaking hardware.

    But most of my issues I could fix by changing my slicer settings; I currently use PrusaSlicer v2.5.0; I used to use Cura slicer; I swapped slicers because of the easier-to-use interface and the number of features built into the base program. Overall I prefer it for its interface and configurability, which makes it easier to swap machine settings from my Ender3 to my project printer. As well as built-in support for Octoprint.

    After an army of calibration cubes and Benchy’s, I could finally tune my prints to the best of my ability. I use a .6 nozzle, and I figured the best results are with a .3 layer height and about 70 mm/s (it can depend on a print-by-print basis) for PLA. I also have changed many more settings, which you can find here:

    https://github.com/BillyDaBones/Project-Covenant-3D-Printer

    The main issue I ran into was warping on the print bed when printing thinner models, and the way I solved it was by having both a higher bed temperature and a short 1-minute pause before printing after the bed had heated.

    I have previous short posts and status updates on the printer projects at my Instagram (here)

Privacy Policy