Nice! This is really impressive for a first prototype print. I’ve been printing for over a year, designing small brackets and such for maybe 6 months, and most of my designs are just one solid piece. Something with moving parts is awesome!
Can we ask what the project this is for is, or for a link to this model?
Stealthburner ended up fixing your clog issues entirely?
More or less. You can check my post history, made a lot of fuss about it here trying to get it squared away, in part it was caused by some magically reoccurring issue where my printer boards were reporting incorrect hotend temps (sometimes off by as much as 70°C). But even after fixing that side of things my old setup kept clogging; kept diagnosing back and forth between extruder and hotend, decided why not build a stealthburner and replace both, if that doesn’t fix the problem then I’m part way done with building a voron.
Now I’m building the voron anyways, haha
I found this instruction of assembly pretty entertaining. “Break it and try again without breaking it”.
Actually have the SB already on the current printer. It was having extrusion issues for the better part of 3 months and I built it as a last ditch effort to save the printer from the closet. After building that I realized how much I loved the voron designs and once the printer started acting up again I made the decision to just start piece mailing a 2.4
I suppose it could be a power issue based on that. That’s the same article I linked in the OP; my klippy.log shows that it loses connection with the MCU, then a few lines later I get the EOF error.
Printer is finishing the third 4 hour print with klipperscreen device unplugged. Really leaning towards this route, I’ll try swapping my nice power supply in when I get home and see if that helps.
Pi is not OC’ed, but I did just realize that it’s running on a power supply that came in a cheap starter kit and not the nicer one I’d ordered, so maybe that’s an issue. You would think the Pi would report under voltage if that were the case though, no? When Klipper errors out, the pi doesn’t shut off or report any issues.
I will say that I’ve completed two 4 hour long prints with all external USB devices disconnected, and when I tried a duplicate of one of the completed prints with the klipperscreen device (on a new nice cable) and my webcam (connected but not enabled via crowsnest) it failed after 3 hours.
It’s all good. I think there might be some sort of import fee specific to this type of item, most of the Chinese vendors have them for $30-50 with $100+ shipping.
There is a listing on Amazon that’s around $85 after one of those coupon things, with free shipping. Seems to be the best deal I can find.
Just as a heads up, in case you ever wanted to order these (or anyone else is viewing this post and is looking to source extrusions), the price for the frame is around $20, the cost for shipping to the US is around $110.
No other printer to test with, no. Coincidentally, the parts I am trying to print are for a voron 2.4, because I’m absolutely tired of dealing with all the issues I’ve had with this one (see post history).
It did not :( the print ran for 53 minutes before the error kicked in.
Interestingly, and this has happened several times now, the print ran perfectly fine until I checked on it. I know it sounds crazy, but I’d say that 75% of the errors occur right after checking the status of the print. Knowing this, I started the print via Klipperscreen, then turned the Klipperscreen device off. I verified the print started via mainsail on my main computer, then closed the tab and let the print run. After ~50 minutes, I used my phone to load mainsail and verify the print was still running; it was. 2 minutes later, I refresh the mainsail screen on my phone and the print has failed.
I will say that prints have failed both with a mainsail page constantly loaded, as well as with no mainsail or klipper interface loaded, so it can’t be caused entirely by that. However, since the problem started happening more consistently, it’s a pretty good chance that when it does fail, it’s within a minute of loading one of those interfaces.
I’d never heard of the blocking the 5v trick before. If the current test fails I might give that a go.
Power brick for the pi is good. It isn’t the official one, but a highly reviewed one, and I never get voltage warnings like I did on the old one.
To be honest sounds like you’ve got a gremlin jumping from one piece of equipment to another
You must have seen my other posts.
I haven’t tried with the camera unplugged, but I have tried with it disabled in crowsnest, no change. It did fail not too long ago with no filament loaded, so that excludes an extruder issue.
The Klipper install is relatively new so I don’t want to go that route just yet. I bought a new cable, but when I went to install it, realized that I had a nice Anker cable being used for my klipperscreen device and a random Chinese cable for the printer board (the Anker cable was longer so I blindly used it for the klipperscreen device). I swapped the Anker cable over to the printer, and changed it to a USB 3.0 port instead of the 2.0 it was on, and have the test print running now. We’ll see how this goes, I guess!
The pi is an 8gb Pi 4, maybe 3 months old. Usage never goes above ~15% for both cpu and mem during prints. Should be rock solid. This replaced my Pi 3 which was dropping USB connection with 3 webcams and klipperscreen running. (Currently only running one webcam.)
I’m heading to the store now for a new USB cable, but I’m wondering if it might be something to do with my extruder motor? Since starting the OP, I’ve run the same test print 4 times, first 2 ran for ~45 minutes with no filament, 3rd one with filament errored in 5 minutes, I’m currently running test 4 and it’s gone 25 minutes without filament.
I wouldn’t say it’s “crazy difficult” to set up, but it is definitely a little involved. There will be a ton of documentation on setting it up for an ender printer so that shouldn’t be an issue, but it’s more work than simply “install it and go”.
The way your current set up works, is your pi/ octoprint is sending a file to your printers motherboard, the printers motherboard is processing the file and executing all of the commands. The pi isn’t doing any real work besides letting you interact with the printer’s motherboard.
In simple terms, the way Klipper works is by replacing the firmware on your printers board with a program that can talk to both Linux and the hardware of your printer (stepper motors, heat cartridges, fans, etc), using the pi to run all of the processing and such, then passing those commands to the printer’s board (which is now essentially a zombie that does nothing but what Klipper tells it to do).
Doing the main computation on a strong computer like a pi rather than the weaker CPU on a printer motherboard opens a plethora of options, one of the most popular being something called “input shaping” which is very relevant to your question. What that does is tests the vibration resonance of your printer and modifies stepper commands to counteract them, allowing you to print at significantly higher (read: sometimes 3x or more than stock) speeds without much if any noticeable decrease in quality.
Not only stuff like this, but there are innumerable QOL improvements over Marlin. Object exclusion for when one part out of a multi-part print fails, custom macros for anything you could want your printer to do, graphic bed level mesh… I honestly don’t know how I used my printer for so long without all of these things that seem like no brainers.
Long story short, it’ll probably take more than an hour or two to get set up, but as soon as you get it going you’ll be wondering why you didn’t do it day 1. If you’re at all serious about getting the most potential out of your printer, it’s an inevitability; the stock firmware is far too limiting in what you can do, and makes any kind of advanced tuning or tinkering either impossible or way harder than it needs to be.
Sorry to dump this wall of text on you! If you decide to give it a go, pick a weekend and hit the forums, shoot me a message if you get stuck on anything and I’ll help you best I can!
It’s so much fun to know your limits, and really useful when you’re prototyping parts.
I like modeling things like little tool holders to fit inside the railings on my printer, so sometimes need to print a couple of them to get the size just right. When doing these tests usually I print 0.6 nozzle, 0.3 layer height at 300m/s and 3000m/s^2 accel. Parts usually don’t come out super pretty, but more often than not I end up using the final “test print” rather than reprinting it at more reasonable speeds because I just need it to work, not look nice.
Have you heard of Klipper? If you’re running that it’s very easy to set up towers to find your max print speed and acceleration. It’s a bit of a rabbit hole so lemme know if you’ve got any questions
This is usually going to be the case when painting over black, unless you’re using really fancy paints. It’s usually better to paint it white first before your color of choice
If I’m not mistaken those are prices per extrusion? There’s multiple lengths that are needed, I don’t think one part number is representative of the entire frame, but I could be reading it wrong. I looked at this same page when I saw your comment this morning
Edit: sorry, I was indeed looking at the site wrong. That’s actually incredibly useful information, thank you so much for this link! The cheapest place I’d seen so far I was looking at ~$150 for the full set.
That’s super cool, I’d never seen this project before. I like it, but the required build volume is slightly outside my printer’s capabilities, and the final build volume of 160x160 is a little too small for my use case. Maybe if they build a scalable version like the voron 2.4 it would be a contender
They’re the most expensive part I need to source. I already have a majority of the other parts in the form of my current printer, really I only need a few more lead screws, stepper motors, and maybe a new controller if I can’t figure out how to get the one I have working with that many steppers. The extrusions make up ~2/3 the expenses of this conversion, hence the question haha
Fantastic! My first thought was either a miniature display table or maybe a small parts case-and-table combo.