Ezra Harris

Tag: Short Read

  • 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)

  • Configuring Marlin Firmware for My Ender 3

    I got into configuring marlin firmware for my specific printer recently; due to its widely supported amount of boards, I can easily modify the newest version of marlin for my printer. At first, I was going to go with the original Marlin as a base but decided to work with Jyers Marlin, a modified version for the Ender 3 V2, which I don’t have. But I have very similar hardware as in the Ender 3 V2 in my Ender 3, the only difference being a different LCD type and a filament sensor. Thanks to marlin’s extensive documentation on their website, both are extremely easy to configure.

    Once I could change the filament sensor and LCD type (post on that here,) I then ran into a slightly different issue. For some reason, the board that PlatformIO was not set correctly, and I had to change the default environment from STM32F103RET6_creality to STM32F103RE_creality, which fixed that issue. Another issue I had was a setting called FAN_SOFT_PWM, which needed to be enabled, and after some searching in the configuration file, I was able to find it, and enable it. After a couple of minor issues (Platform IO core bug, which was later resolved), I successfully compiled the code in VS Code with PlatformIO.

    I published my fork on Github here: https://github.com/BillyDaBones/Ender-3_Upgraded_Jyers_marlin/releases

    (please note: I am not a programmer, especially with Marlin configuration, use the firmware at your own risk.)

  • 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.

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