Which FDM printer?

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by HugoFitz » Wed Mar 02, 2022 8:49 pm

PM Sent sir! :salute:

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by philipy » Wed Mar 02, 2022 9:33 pm

HugoFitz wrote: Wed Mar 02, 2022 9:41 am
I'd second making sure you have enough power!
I get not wanting more plugs, I'm the same.
The good news is that Octoprint will let you know if it's suffering under voltage. Give it a go powering it off the printer but be prepared to use a separate PSU if you get under voltage warning...
At the mo I've been unable to find the wattage of the printer power supply. All I know is that the printer works on 24v and as far as I can see it takes about 7A. The Raspberry Pi seems to need 5v, 3A, so I'll need an appropriate voltage regulator, which isn't a problem, but until I can look at the ratings on the printer power supply unit I won't know how much spare it has. There are loads of units from the same manufacturer in both 12v and 24v flavours, with a pretty amazing range of amperages, so I might be lucky...watch this space. Printer is coming tomorrow, DPD permitting.
Philip

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by philipy » Thu Mar 03, 2022 9:32 am

Back on the subject of power supplies, I just found this statement on the PiHut site:

Note that even though a 2.5A power supply is recommended for a Pi 3B+, that's only required if you attach a bunch of accessories (such as a 7" display!) 1.5A will cover a wide range of usages, as the current draw is around 0.7A max without extras.

So that may be how the YT video piggybacked it from the printer. Printer due at lunchtime today, so then I may be able to speak more definitively
Philip

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by HugoFitz » Thu Mar 03, 2022 1:43 pm

For anyone that is also thinking of setting up Octoprint/Octopi for the first time, I can't recommend this YouTube tutorial by Thomas Sanladerer highly enough.

https://youtu.be/HBd0olxI-No

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by -steves- » Fri Mar 04, 2022 8:30 am

Under powered Pi's is a big thing. I tried it on USB Phone chargers and even an extension lead with USB plugs built in. Most of these top out at 2A, it simply isn't enough, On mine it booted up ok, but it was disconnecting all the time, it was proper painful until I realized what was going on. I now run a separate Pi power block 5V 3A for a Pi 2W. The Pi 2W is more than enough to run Octoprint, camera, time lapse, print, upload etc etc. The only thing with uploading during a print is you can put too much through the wi-fi and cause retires which can can a stutter in the print, but that's usually down to the wi-fi rather than the Pi.

I am not sure about taking power from the printers supply, never tried it, in fact, never even thought about it till I read it on here, might be possible? :dontknow:

If you get totally stuck and want a Pi 2W, I "might" have a new one laying around, it's just a case of finding it.
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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by philipy » Fri Mar 04, 2022 10:28 am

-steves- wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 8:30 am

If you get totally stuck and want a Pi 2W, I "might" have a new one laying around, it's just a case of finding it.
Thanks Steve, but I have acquired a 3B+ from Hugo and I've sorted out my 13a sockets situation so I'm getting a 5.1v 3a Raspberry approved unit from Pi Hut. It is as intended for the 4's so will give me a degree of future proofing, if and when, and it's actually cheaper than the unit intended for the 3's!

The printer arrived yesterday and I've made a start on assembling it, but we have visitors so can only grab a few mins at a time!
Philip

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by HugoFitz » Fri Mar 04, 2022 10:36 am

Just a word of caution re PSU's
The Pi 3B+ is USB Micro, the Pi 4 is USB C
If you get the 5.1V 3A from PiHut make sure you get a C to Micro adapter at the same time :D

https://thepihut.com/products/usb-c-to- ... sb-adapter

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by philipy » Fri Mar 04, 2022 11:08 am

HugoFitz wrote: Fri Mar 04, 2022 10:36 am Just a word of caution re PSU's
The Pi 3B+ is USB Micro, the Pi 4 is USB C
If you get the 5.1V 3A from PiHut make sure you get a C to Micro adapter at the same time :D

https://thepihut.com/products/usb-c-to- ... sb-adapter
Thanks Hugo. I've already got one, thanks, because my laptop only has USB C's and I've had to get all sorts of adapters to plug things in. It's a real pain sometimes!
Philip

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by philipy » Sat Mar 05, 2022 9:15 am

Yesterday I finally managed to get to work on the new printer ( Creality CR-20 Pro) and to begin with it, drove me mad and I came very close to packig it up and sending it back. Assembly was fine, quick and easy, but tryng to zero the z-axis was a complete 'mare. I spent about 2.5 hours following a YT video by "3D Printing Canada" which was really easy to follow, but I did it time and again following each step and checking before moving on to the next, but the zero setting just would not save.
Eventually I went back to a video by Creality themselves, which has the English subtitles mixed up with the Chinese ones and is not exactly easy to follow, which is why I had looked for another one originally.
However by concentrating and following it one step at a time, I managed to set the zero first time. The Canadian video seems to actually have a couple of steps either missing or badly worded.

Anyway, without changing anything from the defaults on either the printer or Cura, I tried printing a small item from my collection of stl's and 10 minutes later I had a perfect print!
I then tried something a bit larger and two hours later I had a 2nd good print.
Soooo... gritting my teeth and crossing my fingers... middle of the evening, I set it to print the wagon body that I was trying to do when the old printer gave up the ghost.

9&1/2 hours later ( Well, 1st thing this morning), THIS is what was sitting on the printer bed: :D
wagon body.jpg
wagon body.jpg (105.06 KiB) Viewed 4550 times
I am amazed at the quality of this print straight off the bed and just using the default settings and as you can see it needs minimal cleaning up and the surfaces are brilliantly smooth. One small point which has really impressed me is the tiny hole in each of the strapping ends. I drew it but but never expected it to print ( it wouldn't have done before) being only 0.75mm diameter, but all 4 have a clean hole through.
The only slight negative is a small 'elephants foot' effect, which is something I've never had to contend with before, but I'll sort out in future.

I want to have a bit more familiarisation time and then I'll have a go at the Raspberry Pi/Octoprint.
Philip

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by ge_rik » Sat Mar 05, 2022 9:44 am

Wow! That is impressive. I thought for a moment that it was a print from a resin printer.

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by philipy » Tue Mar 08, 2022 7:28 pm

Veering away from the original subject, but still related, I thought it might be useful to record my trials and tribulations for anyone else who might embark on the same journey.

Ok, so the printer I bought in the end is the Creality CR-20 Pro. The main reason for choosing this one over the many others from the same manufacturer was simply it's physical size - it fits in the limited space I have available and most, if not all, of the others are larger. Also, this model is fitted with a BLTouch automatic bed leveller as standard.
First thing was to set the Z-height. The provided instructions are limited and not easy to understand, with English and Chinese bits mixed together, so I looked on Youtube. The video I found from an apparently knowledgeable source, turned out to be not correct after I had spent several hours going round in circles. So, I went back to the official instructions and going very slowly I managed to get the Z set properly at the first attempt. :dontknow:
A couple of trial prints later and I tried a proper model, the result being the wagon body in the post above.

So the next job was to set the BLTouch. There were no instructions provided but going to the Creality site I found some. Like the Z-set ones it had Chinese and English mixed together and was not easy to follow. It started off very much like the Z-set and therein was a problem of my own making. I'm not sure exactly what I did but somewhere along the way I think I got confused and did something wrong and then saved it without realising. So the print nozzle was several mm above the bed and I went through the setup procedure more times than I can remember but I couldn't get the nozzle closer than about 2.5mm. After taking the dog for a walk, watching Tv and sleeping on it (No, not the tv, nor the dog!) I realised that it might be a problem with the BLT, so I went back to the English/Chines instructions for it and carefully followed them again, and after saving it, everything worked perfectly! As an aside, I found a YT video for this procedure as well, from the same Canadian source, and this also had a major error in it.
At this point, the levelling only works on demand, rather than automatically, but a bit of searching found a very simple gcode instruction to amend the Cura start code, it simply needs "G29" adding in to the Cura settings and saving and now it levels at the start of every print.

Next issue to be faced was changing the filament. My old Qidi had the extruder mounted directly on top of the head and changing filament was simply a case of selecting "load filament", waiting for the nozzle to heat and pushing the end of the new filament into the extruder until it was gripped and taken in. This new m/c has the extruder mounted on the side frame and connected to the heated nozzle assembly via a Bowden tube which is about 8 inches long. The only sensible way to change filament seems to be to cut the old filament just before the extruder, heat the nozzle, then manually hold the extruder open and use the new filament to push the old filament all the way down the tube and out of the nozzle.
I have seen references to heating the filament to melting temp and then pulling it backwards out of the system, but then I've seen comments about this leading to blockages from cooled filament that sticks in the tube.

I have also acquired a 2nd hand Raspberry Pi 3B+ ( Thanks Hugo) so that I can use Octoprint to control the printer from the comfort of the sofa! We have previously discussed the power supply and in the end I bowed to wisdom and bought the official Raspberry Pi power unit. However, before it arrived I took the bottom off the printer to see which main board was fitted and had a look at the power supply whilst I was there. It is a 24V 14.6A unit and as far as I can see the printer itself takes about 7A, so there is plenty of spare capacity to lend 2.5A to the Raspberry! Oh well!

While I was waiting, I tried using a 5V 2A camera charger but the Raspberry didn't want to know and wouldn't connect to my home network. The correct item arrived this morning and it connected as soon as I plugged everything together. A quick test print showed that everything was working as expected. However it got very confusing when I couldn't get it to print anything else. I tried to reset things by switching the Raspberry off and an error message appeared on the printer LCD screen saying I need to reset. I flicked the printer switch and heard the printer fans start up..Huh? Then I realised that that the error message was generated by the Raspberry not the printer, and the reason it had printed one file but not any others, was that I had left the SD card in the printer and it was printing from that location and not the uploads!

So now it's hopefully settling down, the various test prints have all been fine. There will no doubt be a lot of fiddling to do, but the basic system is now doing what I want. I do want to fit a filament run out detector and probably a camera, in due course.
Philip

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by -steves- » Tue Mar 08, 2022 7:47 pm

The .camera is very easy, just plug it in and it works :thumbup:

Filament sensor not so easy as it must plug into the Pi and not the printer. Search for Bigtree smart filament sensor and then with Pi and you get the wiring pin outs too. :thumbup:
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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by philipy » Tue Mar 08, 2022 9:17 pm

Thanks Steve. Yes the camera look easy easy enough. I wasn't sure I needed it, but I'm printing a case for the Pi this evening and although I can see in theory on Octoprint that everything is Ok, I keep wanting to go and check, so I think the camera is moving up my 'to do' list.
I've looked at the Bigtree, but I've had too much stuff going round in my head this past few days, to make sense of something else. It's def.on my wants list though.
Philip

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by Lonsdaler » Sat Mar 12, 2022 6:46 pm

Well done for persevering, and not sleeping on the TV or dog :lol:
It is quite surprising how inaccurate, or just plain wrong, some instructional videos on UTube are. I've been setting up a new pc which decided it would no longer talk to my network hard (NAS) drive. I found a solution that I could understand on UTube, only to discover halfway through that there was a quite important chunk of information missing in the explanation. Fortunately I managed to work out the missing information. There are also many videos on reviving or repairing LiPo batteries which verge on being downright dangerous!
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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by philipy » Sat Mar 12, 2022 8:36 pm

Well, I'm still plodding on and taking 2 steps forward and one backward, but at least it isn't the other way around. :lol:

So, I've been thinking that the Pi seems to run very warm, although perceived wisdom ( I use the term loosely) on t'interweb seems to be that fans are not necessary on this model. Nevertheless, I found an Amazon supplier who sells a small fan and selection of heatsinks to fit the various hot bits for £5.99, and I decided that was a small investment compared to trying to buy a new board which are completely unobtainable atm, so I splashed out. That meant that the case I had printed, which didn't have fan mounts, was useless, so I found a different case on Thingy and printed that last night, put it all together this morning, with the fan powered from 5v outputs on the board.
I also bit the bullet a couple of days ago and got the official Raspberry Pi camera, which works fine from just plugging it in, although I'm less than impressed by the ribbon cable which makes it a bit awkward to position. I tried it last night whilst the Pi case was printing and realised that I had probably made a mistake, by buying the 'normal' daylight camera rather than the IR version, because even late afternoon it's difficult to get enough illumination on the head to be able to see a black print on a black build plate!

I also discovered a bit of a procedural issue, which I have solved, pragmatically, but could have done a better job if I'd been aware before.
Basically there are three things to consider; the printer itself, the Raspberry Pi, and the Octoprint software. As we all know, it is not a good idea to simply pull the plug out of a computer except in emergency, but the Pi doesn't have any other built-in way of switching it off, unless it has been rigged up with a keyboard/mouse and monitor and appropriate software. No problem if using Octoprint though, because after a lot of surfing I discovered there is an on/off switch symbol hiding at the top of the Octoprint screen. That has several options, one of which is "Switch system off", click that and the Pi shuts down... Great! Unfortunately, it does not shut down the printer at the same time, not only that, but it subsequently requires a trip the Pi to switch it back on again at the mains.
Now comes the clever bit ( not my idea), but first a short digression: Back just before Christmas SWMBO was given an Amazon Echo Show5. We have it set up to switch the TV on, and a couple of lights, more as a gimic than anything, but they are controlled by "smart plugs" and we have a spare, unused, one of those. So that is now set up with the printer plugged into it, in the spare bedroom which I use as a workshop, and I only have to say " Alexa... printer on" and she duly says "OK" and switches on the printer power, and "printer off" switches it off again, .
Now the forum post that gave me the idea was powering the Raspberry Pi from the printer's power unit ( that does actually seem to be a pretty common thing to do) so that means that the Pi and the printer are powered on /off at the same time. However having bought a proper power unit for the Pi, I didn't want to go poking in the printers innards unneccessarily so I've just plugged the printer and the Pi into a 2-way adaptor and that is plugged into the smart plug which then switches them both at the same time, simples.

So, the procedure is : "Alexa.... printer on", wait a couple of minutes for the Pi to boot up, log in to Octoprint on my laptop.... do whatever printing and watch it on the camera in Octoprint, then close down the system in Octoprint and, on getting the confirmation message, say "Alexa... printer off", all from the comfort of my sofa in front of the TV!

I'm currently working on a housing and mounting system for the camera. There are dozens on Thingy, but none that float my boat :dontknow: I aslo want to create some sort of filament guide, to line the filament up in a straight line into the extruder. At one point yesterday I had a print fail because it was under extruded which I suspect was due to the angle of the filament at the extruder 'in' side causing it to hang up.
Philip

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by Jimmyb » Sun Mar 13, 2022 9:00 am

Philp, just a word of caution, if your 3D printer is anything like a 2D printer, when you power the machine down, it goes though a shut down sequence, usually very short, if you switch the power off the machine does not go through the sequence, and eventually it "could" mess up the printer - how do I know, I used smart sockets including on my printer. Of course if your 3D printer, does not have this shut down cycle all is well :)

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by philipy » Sun Mar 13, 2022 10:56 am

Thanks Jimmy.

The printer itself only has a simple on/off switch which 'appears' to work instantaneously. i.e switch it off and the lights and fans stop immediately, so I'm assuming ( I know...!) that it will make no difference switching off at the mains rather than via the switch.

There is one oddity in the wiring though. The Pi has it's own supply and is connected to the printer via a USB cable and if the Pi is plugged in but the printer is switched off, the LCD display on the printer comes alive and gets some sort of power supply from the Pi via the USB. I've seen various people advcating a slip of tape on the live strip in the USB plug to stop it, and even one guy who said that he cuts the red wire!
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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by -steves- » Sun Mar 13, 2022 1:09 pm

philipy wrote: Sun Mar 13, 2022 10:56 am Thanks Jimmy.

The printer itself only has a simple on/off switch which 'appears' to work instantaneously. i.e switch it off and the lights and fans stop immediately, so I'm assuming ( I know...!) that it will make no difference switching off at the mains rather than via the switch.

There is one oddity in the wiring though. The Pi has it's own supply and is connected to the printer via a USB cable and if the Pi is plugged in but the printer is switched off, the LCD display on the printer comes alive and gets some sort of power supply from the Pi via the USB. I've seen various people advcating a slip of tape on the live strip in the USB plug to stop it, and even one guy who said that he cuts the red wire!
Never cut the red wire!!!!!!!!!!!! :shock: :shock: :shock:

You don't need to do anything other than ensure the Printer switches on first and off last. Try not to let it light up the printer display, it's not a good thing :) If you want to work on the printer, just unplug the USB cable and do what you need to do, then plug the Pi back in and click connect, job done :thumbup:
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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by -steves- » Sun Mar 13, 2022 1:18 pm

I used a smart plug on mine at one point too, but it proved to be more hassle than it's worth for me. I called one Ender 5 and the other Ender 6, unfortunately Alexa is tone deaf at times and kept switching off the wrong printer, very annoying when nearing the end of a 30 hour print! :banghead: I also tried putting an extension lead on the smart plug, but as you have found that powers down the Pi and after a few times of doing that the Pi gets quite arsey! I have ended up with no smart plugs and just plugging the USB cable when I want to switch off the printer, the Pi continues running all the time.
The buck stops here .......

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Re: Which FDM printer?

Post by HugoFitz » Sun Mar 13, 2022 9:15 pm

Funny I've not had problems yet with "yanking " the power on a pi rather than shutting it down... I must have got lucky so far :o

https://www.amazon.co.uk/PortaPow-USB-P ... 0957&psc=1

I've seen people use these to effectively "cut" the +5v and leave D+ D- and 0V in the USB to prevent "back powering" of the printer.

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