Ezra Harris

Category: Uncategorized

  • Best 3D Printer Model Sites

    When getting introduced to 3D printing, it was a little challenging to find the right 3D model site where I could find accessible/affordable 3D models. After almost two years of experience with 3D printing, I’ve found my favorite spots to find fun and exciting designs that others have made. Here’s my list:

    1. Yeggi.com is a site for looking on other websites for your desired 3D models. It performs best if you have a specific model or idea in mind that you can search with keywords. For example, suppose you are looking for a particular adapter for a hotend for 3D printer. In that case. It’s easier to find a mod that someone has made with that machine in mind by using keywords like “Hotend adapter for ender-3” or “3D printer adapter for hotend,” and it would display the results from dozens of 3d model sites.
    2. Formerly prusaprinters.com, Printables, is a popular site similar to Thingiverse but has many more features such as Contests, Rewards for posting models, and gaining likes, downloads, etc. Rewards work in a way that you earn “PrusaMeters” every time you make a post and acquire a milestone in likes, downloads, makes, and followers. You can then redeem for rolls of filament (PETG, PLA, ASA, Resin) merch and guides. The contest’s prizes typically include “prusameters,” filament. And with the rare chance of a big contest, a Prusa 3D printer.
    3. Thingiverse is another free popular 3D model site with a pretty extensive database of 3D models and has been around for a long time. I still use this site mainly because of the number of 3D models and the vast number of users it still has. I also like their main page recommendations, which typically have exciting and practical designs that I print when im bored and out of ideas.

    Want to see what else I’ve done with 3D printing? Click here

    What is your favorite 3D model site? Comment below!

  • 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)

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