Recommended Canbus E3D Toolchanger Cable Management

j.pickens

Hi all,
Just purchased a Duet 3 Mini 5+ with the Canbus Duet 3 ToolBoard for Roto Extruder and the Duet 3 Tool Distribution Board to update my E3D Toolchanger. The demo stuff shown at the RMRRF2024 E3D/Duet3D booths had really nice black cloth looking covers on the Canbus cable lead to the printhead. The kit did not include cable management components, so I plan to use 28" (711mm) X 5mm cable ties as the flex control for the cable. So the cable bundle to the toolhead will consist of the 4 Canbus wires and the PTFE guide tube for the filament.

Two questions:
1: What cable wrap should I get? I like the cloth stuff, but am open to suggestions.
2: Should I run the cable tie inside or outside the cable wrap, like with small cable ties every 100mm or so?

I'm used to the E3D 4mm metal band flex controls with woven plastic cable wrap. Never liked it, and would like to do better with this upgrade.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

dc42

@j-pickens I still use braided black plastic wrap: a thin one to enclose the CAN and power wires, and the original thick one to enclose the steel band, the thin wrap with the cables inside, and the Bowden tube.

I guess you could use silicone CAN and power wires attached directly to the metal band in some way.

It would be nice to do away with the cabling and route it through the pickup head using pogo pins, but unfortunately there is a patent (now owned by Stratasys) on doing that.

j.pickens

@dc42 I'm not using the metal bands. They get kinked, at least in my experience. I'm planning to use long 5mm plastic cable ties.

Anyone know what the clothlike Prusa style cable covers are? Tried searching and Google failed me

gloomyandy

@j-pickens I've found the metal bands to be ok and also use a similar double wrap system to that described by DC42.

One thing I did change on mine was to modify the dock so that the bowden tube is routed alongside the metal band/wiring rather than splitting off as it does in the original. The bowden then goes inside the rear electronics area for a short way before being routed through the back panel back into the main chamber to the spools. This makes for a neater umbilical and also means that the bowden provides more support for the wires etc. From what I remember there was already a suitable hole in the aluminium top plate that I could use. But I did move the positions of the docks slightly which I needed to do because I use a mixture of hemera and hemera-SX direct drive extruders (I have two original hemera ones and two hemera-sx with revo hotends).

dc42

@gloomyandy said in Recommended Canbus E3D Toolchanger Cable Management:

One thing I did change on mine was to modify the dock so that the bowden tube is routed alongside the metal band/wiring rather than splitting off as it does in the original. The bowden then goes inside the rear electronics area for a short way before being routed through the back panel back into the main chamber to the spools.

I've done that too for my Hemera tools.