Mosquito hot end...yes or no?
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Cheers again mate, appreciated!
I'm pretty familiar with printing ABS in enclosures. It was the first printing I did actually, with UP Plus's fitted with these little locally made enclosures that actually worked quite well. Best heat I ever got into them (or the enclosed Zortrax M200's I got after that) was just on 50degC in the heat of the Australian summer.
These were just passively heated by the bed and hot end, with the fan's mixing it up, but it worked quite well for medium size ABS prints. Even PLA in freezing cold overnight prints in winter certainly benefited from have the enclosure at 24-26degC.
For this machine I'll most likely start or even stick with the same passively heated approach, but I hope to control an exhaust fan via the Duet board and a PT100/1000 mounted in the cabinet somewhere. I've designed a filter/fan housing that uses cheap generic charcoal face mask cartridges, and will allow me to run a light corrugated hose to an exhaust point outside my workshop.
So for now my plan/budget is for a "warm, naturally aspirated" enclosure, but controlled through my board so I can possibly include cabinet temps in my print profiles. I will most certainly allow for upgrading to water cooling at a later date however. Of course if they actually release a water cooled version before I've bought my extruder/hot end......
It's a lot of fun procrastinating during the lead up to building in this case. I have no choice at the moment, as if I don't clean up the garage, finish a current home reno and a couple of other projects, the minister for finance (and war) will include a curtailing of the budget allocation in the minutes of the next financial meeting. It's all political sometimes.
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@arhi According to my contact at Slice Engineering, the small change to the V2 mosquito heat break has nothing to do with heat creep. It is merely to add extra support to the top of the very thin wall tube, because they had a small number of users who managed to damage the ends of those tubes.
Edit. That's kind of born out by the fact that the V2 simply has a longer copper part above the finned copper heat sink. If heat creep was an issue, then they would have made the heat sink fins larger in diameter or added more of them.
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@deckingman said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
@arhi According to my contact at Slice Engineering, the small change to the V2 mosquito heat break has nothing to do with heat creep. It is merely to add extra support to the top of the very thin wall tube, because they had a small number of users who managed to damage the ends of those tubes.
Well whatever they do they will have users break it, we all know that
... didn't you manage to break some of those tubes too 
.. iirc you broke the distancers not the feed tube right?That's kind of born out by the fact that the V2 simply has a longer copper part above the finned copper heat sink. If heat creep was an issue, then they would have made the heat sink fins larger in diameter or added more of them.
they didn't (weirdly) explain why they did it so I assumed what I assumed and looking at the way it is now it is collecting more heat from that thin tube. As I mentioned V1 works like a charm but this upgrade is a welcome one
..With regards to those fins, few things are unclear to me there. From what I learn on mechanics unversity (was too long ago and I switched to electronics so ..) copper has better heat conducting properties than aluminium so but aluminium has better heat transfer properties so if I understand properly aluminium heat sink would pull more heat from the steel tube and release more heat to the air, the only thing where copper is better is having the whole heatsink at same temp... and making everything heavier .. it would be awesome if they shown some tests they made with heatsink made out of alu vs copper and how temp inside the steel tube changes depending on that material..
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@arhi I had 6 Mosquito heat breaks screwed into a single, big hot block but without the side plates that normally surround the heat breaks, and without the top plate that normally supports the top of the tubes. That's why the tubes bent when I stupidly dropped the partial assembly.
As for the heat sinks on the tubes, if the filament is moving forward as in a normal print, one can print PLA all day long without any heat sink at all. The reason for the heat sink is to dissipate any heat that conducts up through the filament itself when printing for example voroni vases with lots of retractions and very short moves.
In an ideal world, the heat break itself should be a low conductor, but the tube above the heat break should be a good conductor so as to dissipate heat to the surrounding air. What we need is a composite tube with Copper butt welded onto Titanium or some such.
As an aside, it is the lower most fins of a heat break that dissipate most of the heat. That's why the Diamond 5 colour is so much worse than the 3 colour for heat creep. Because in order to get 5 heat breaks in the same diameter circle, the lowermost fins are smaller.
It would be simplicity itself for Slice Engineering to make those fins bigger so my take on it is that they don't consider it to be necessary. They do have some very expensive thermal imaging equipment, so I guess they know what works.
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@deckingman said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
dropped the partial assembly.
As for the heat sinks on the tubes, if the filament is moving forward as in a normal print, one can print PLA all day long without any heat sink at all.
Not something I can confirm. Something I read they wrote in a few places, not something I can confirm really. No retractions - no pauses, printing at some decent speed, the small fan blowing trough the heatsink of a mosquito heated the petg 2 cm away from the mosquito so much it lost structural stability and warped. The aluminium frame that's not used as heatsink at all hot so hot (even with fan !!) that it melted the screws out of PETG and released itself. (solved by tapping a 2mm steel plate with 2 M2.5 holes and crewing mosquito into steel plate and steel plate into petg and now it works ok) ... so the hotend does print, and it prints awesome, but I could not confirm all the thermal claims they made nor reproduce all the thermal imagery they shown
They do have some very expensive thermal imaging equipment, so I guess they know what works.
they, for sure, do a lot of testing and make a lot of imagery but they on the other hand do not share what they do and how they came to what conclusions (for obvious reasons
) so we have to take their word that they made the best decisions. That's generally not a problem when everything works 1/1 out of the boks but we had to redo a carriage on omni's machine 2 times to deal with heat issues... it was printing non stop, that's not the problem, but not without a fan -
Why is it that Slice use a thermistor rather than a PT100/PT1000 for their hot ends?
Is there any advantage to using an RTD probe over their standard thermistor with the Duet? What are you all using?
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@Corexy said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
Why is it that Slice use a thermistor rather than a PT100/PT1000 for their hot ends?
Why "slice" use it I can't say, but I for e.g. use NTC on most of my printers because
- I purchased one time a 300 pieces of the NTC a closed source device was using and 300 was a minimum order Semitec allowed me to make so I still have a bunch of them so I use them wherever I need to measure temperatures up to 350C
- precision .. for e.g. 204GT-2 that I have a lot of and use a lot is 10740R at 100C and 186 at 300C so over the "interesting" span it's 10000 ohm difference. Or if we wanna go tight 190-250C for our most used PLA/ABS/PETG/HIPS is 1122 to 383 ohm so still a rather big span. If you compare that to PT100 for the 100-350 it is 138.5R - 229.7R so we'r talking only 91.2R on the whole range, or even worse if we only look at the 190-250 that we wanna be precise in we'r talking span of 22R !!! in noisy envinroment like a 3d printer that's expensive... in order to read PT100 you need amplifier close to the sensor, or you need to run 4 wires (at least 3 but really 4) to the sensor and noone is doing neither, they use either the amp on the board or a super sensitive ADC (expensive) and then they filter out the noise but that kills the resolution big time... so while PT sensor is cool thing to use running a 2 wire sensor trough meters of cable harneses .. just not worth it, nothing you gain really...
- cabling, I myself for higher temperatures like to use thermocouple and not RTD but with thermocouple you need a long cable made from thermocouple material and you need to measure the "cold joint" temperature where you connect that to the copper cabling going to the TC amp. I did experiment a bit with this by making a cold joint integrated with ntc inside the extruder carriage and that works ok as running a thermocouple wires trough the wire harness does not as all the types I tried do not survive bending long even when put inside ptfe tube and trough cable chain. with duet3 toolboard this might be done easier as you can have toolboard per extruder handling all that but not everyone has toolboard (nor they existed tiill few days ago)
So IMHO NTC is way cheaper and easier to use than PTC or TC so I stick with NTC.
Is there any advantage to using an RTD probe over their standard thermistor with the Duet? What are you all using?
What RTD probe? NTC and PTC are both RTD. The probe provided by the Slice engineering IIRC goes up to 500C. Most NTC probes don't go over 180C, very few go up to 250C and just a few (that we use for 3d printing) go above 250C and afaik none of them go over 350C. Since Mosquito is certified to print up to 500C and for some materials you need to go that high your solution is to go either with PTC or TC which is, as I already explaind, complex and expensive and inprecise so Slice found a NTC that will go that high, so it will be "cheap" (as in will work in any of your boards like a normal NTC without any need to upgrade/modify) and will go up to 500C... awesome if you ask me
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@arhi said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
@Corexy said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
Why is it that Slice use a thermistor rather than a PT100/PT1000 for their hot ends?
Why "slice" use it I can't say, but I for e.g. use NTC on most of my printers because
- I purchased one time a 300 pieces of the NTC a closed source device was using and 300 was a minimum order Semitec allowed me to make so I still have a bunch of them so I use them wherever I need to measure temperatures up to 350C
- precision .. for e.g. 204GT-2 that I have a lot of and use a lot is 10740R at 100C and 186 at 300C so over the "interesting" span it's 10000 ohm difference. Or if we wanna go tight 190-250C for our most used PLA/ABS/PETG/HIPS is 1122 to 383 ohm so still a rather big span. If you compare that to PT100 for the 100-350 it is 138.5R - 229.7R so we'r talking only 91.2R on the whole range, or even worse if we only look at the 190-250 that we wanna be precise in we'r talking span of 22R !!! in noisy envinroment like a 3d printer that's expensive... in order to read PT100 you need amplifier close to the sensor, or you need to run 4 wires (at least 3 but really 4) to the sensor and noone is doing neither, they use either the amp on the board or a super sensitive ADC (expensive) and then they filter out the noise but that kills the resolution big time... so while PT sensor is cool thing to use running a 2 wire sensor trough meters of cable harneses .. just not worth it, nothing you gain really...
- cabling, I myself for higher temperatures like to use thermocouple and not RTD but with thermocouple you need a long cable made from thermocouple material and you need to measure the "cold joint" temperature where you connect that to the copper cabling going to the TC amp. I did experiment a bit with this by making a cold joint integrated with ntc inside the extruder carriage and that works ok as running a thermocouple wires trough the wire harness does not as all the types I tried do not survive bending long even when put inside ptfe tube and trough cable chain. with duet3 toolboard this might be done easier as you can have toolboard per extruder handling all that but not everyone has toolboard (nor they existed tiill few days ago)
So IMHO NTC is way cheaper and easier to use than PTC or TC so I stick with NTC.
Is there any advantage to using an RTD probe over their standard thermistor with the Duet? What are you all using?
What RTD probe? NTC and PTC are both RTD. The probe provided by the Slice engineering IIRC goes up to 500C. Most NTC probes don't go over 180C, very few go up to 250C and just a few (that we use for 3d printing) go above 250C and afaik none of them go over 350C. Since Mosquito is certified to print up to 500C and for some materials you need to go that high your solution is to go either with PTC or TC which is, as I already explaind, complex and expensive and inprecise so Slice found a NTC that will go that high, so it will be "cheap" (as in will work in any of your boards like a normal NTC without any need to upgrade/modify) and will go up to 500C... awesome if you ask me
OK mate...obviously if I knew heaps about it it wouldn't be asking, so please forgive me for thinking that an RTD was the PT100/PT1000 only. Worse things will happen before we die.
While I appreciate your help, that reply has only dazzled me a bit. Thermocouples are out of the question for me, and I don't need 500degC. 350degC would be new territory for me. I do have a PT100 on my existing printer, and I did use 4 wires with it. It has worked well for 4 years, and seems to be accurate and consistent.
In simple laymans terms I am just asking is there any reason I would buy the PT100/1000 instead of the standard thermistor for the Mosquito? I don't mind soldering up 4 wires, and if the PT1000 is worth it with 2 wires that's fine too. If the obvious solution is to just use the standard thermistor that Slice sells, I'll just do that.
Basically expense aside, which is the best for all round use up to 350degC?
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@arhi Did you reach out to Slice Engineering when you had those problems? If not, why not? If so, what was their response?
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@Corexy said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
OK mate...obviously if I knew heaps about it it wouldn't be asking, so please forgive me for thinking that an RTD was the PT100/PT1000 only. Worse things will happen before we die.
RTD == Resistance Temperature Detector
They come as NTC (negative thermal coefficient) and PTC (positive thermal coefficient). PT100 is PTC.While I appreciate your help, that reply has only dazzled me a bit. Thermocouples are out of the question for me, and I don't need 500degC. 350degC would be new territory for me. I do have a PT100 on my existing printer, and I did use 4 wires with it. It has worked well for 4 years, and seems to be accurate and consistent.
When you have "an amplifier" for PT100 or high precision ADC it works ok. But not all 3d printer boards do. When you have "pt100 input" and you use 4 wires PT100 is more precise than the NTC in general case so in that case it's better to use PT100 as it's more precise.
In simple laymans terms I am just asking is there any reason I would buy the PT100/1000 instead of the standard thermistor for the Mosquito? I don't mind soldering up 4 wires, and if the PT1000 is worth it with 2 wires that's fine too. If the obvious solution is to just use the standard thermistor that Slice sells, I'll just do that.
Basically expense aside, which is the best for all round use up to 350degC?
PT100/1000 is more precise if you have PT input on your electronics (for PT100 you need daughterboard for duet boards, and for PT1000 you can hook it up directly to maestro only iirc)
As for "what's the best" I think it makes no difference in real life. Absolute temperature does vary a lot between probes (up to 3%, even 5% on super cheap PRC stuff) but if you go with temp tower to find the best temp for your setup you don't care much about "absolute values", that is one of the reasons you should always use temp tower and not take numbers you read on the box for granted
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@deckingman said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
@arhi Did you reach out to Slice Engineering when you had those problems? If not, why not? If so, what was their response?
No
It is not my device and not my printer so it was not my place to do so. I did advise that Slice be contacted, but since the solution with metal plate worked ...My original is "en route" so I'll do extensive testing with thermal images when it arrives with the SEEK camera (don't have anything better
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@arhi That's really strange about the surrounding mount part getting so hot. With my experimental design, I used a very similar arrangement to hold the great lump of a hot block which had 6 Mosquito heat breaks screwed into it. When heated to 200+ degrees with an 80 watt heater, the surrounding mount was barely above ambient. I'd hazard a guess with my "calibrated finger tip" that it was about 45 to 50 deg C at most.
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@deckingman said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
@arhi That's really strange about the surrounding mount part getting so hot. With my experimental design, I used a very similar arrangement to hold the great lump of a hot block which had 6 Mosquito heat breaks screwed into it. When heated to 200+ degrees with an 80 watt heater, the surrounding mount was barely above ambient. I'd hazard a guess with my "calibrated finger tip" that it was about 45 to 50 deg C at most.
I can talk about exact temperatures only about clone as that is what I measured (the outside black aluminium frame comes up to 100C after 20minutes of printing and settles there, that's with single thin 5V 25mm fan) but I don't see how those are relevant. The original had the same issue on two instances, one of them was solved by using some assembly from bondtech that was made specifically for Mosquito (hard plastic, injection molded, metal inserts.. have not had it in my hands) and the other by 2mm steel plate added between mosquito and petg mount. The temp did not go high enough to pull the plastic screws from petg (and abs too) quickly, it would require few days of printing to get the hotend to fail and drop out. I'm not able to assess the temp at which petg/abs would fail like that, but there's obviously some heat there going trough those tiny tubes.
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@arhi You should tell the guys at Slice Engineering about it because AFAIK, it's not a problem that they are aware of. It's not like they just threw something together and started selling it. They went through numerous design iterations and spent over two years developing the Mosquito before they ever thought about putting them on the market. They have one unit that has been sitting on a test bench and last time I spoke to them, it had been running 24/7 for over 6 months.
Unless someone brings a problem to their attention, they only have their own (albeit extensive) testing to go by. It was customer feedback from a few people who managed to dent the tips of the thin heat break tubes, which led to the design change to give extra support to the those tips.
When I ran my own business, I used to impress upon my customers that if they had any problem with my product or workmanship, I wanted to be the first to hear about it, not the last. Slice Engineering have the same philosophy, as do the Duet guys.
IMO, if you have a problem with a product then it's only fair to point it out to the supplier or manufacturer and give them the opportunity to put it right. If they fail to respond and/or resolve the issue to your satisfaction, then you have the right to complain.
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@deckingman said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
@arhi You should tell the guys at Slice Engineering about it
As I mention, my piece is in the mail and should be here soon and then I can do proper analysis and report anything I find back to them. I cannot force other ppl to do the analysis, they wanted quick solution, we came up to it quickly, they are happy and don't want to change anything. Not everyone feel they should contribute back, I hate that but I have to accept it. The few machines I invested a lot of time consulting and directly fixing, the owner is as closed as possible
.. took me a while to realise that, now he's on his own, still on 8bit marlin .. but he purchased new bmg+mosquito from bondtech with some ddx package for his cr printer with "screw2screw" solution .. that works 1/1 no problems, and he has the other original in the drawer, didn't even let me help him mount it to his wanhao as there's no "screw2screw solution" (ez* company promissed him they will make some solution like that so we'll see)..Anynow, I don't like to leave house too much these days with all this issues and it's hard to debug all that trough phone, I don't feel comfortable reporting to Slice stuff I can't reproduce or retest on my testbed. OTOH the one we solved with the steel plate is owned by a decent human being and a good friend
so I'll see he ping the Slice directly, no need for the broke phones game there. My piece that is supposed to stay here (and not just be here for few weeks for me to test and then pass on) should arrive any day now and I already have a mount idea with few TC sensors to monitor the temperature of different segments during different operations and to reproduce all the problems I have seen on this 3 printers where I help install mosquito. I will for sure shoot all my findings to Slice as I don't know the other way to improve the design IMO, if you have a problem with a product then it's only fair to point it out to the supplier or manufacturer and give them the opportunity to put it right. If they fail to respond and/or resolve the issue to your satisfaction, then you have the right to complain.
Btw the problem with mosquito melting the screws from the ABS/PETG mount was reported to the reseller (filastruder) as originally we screwed the M2.5 screws directly into ABS. When that failed I found the M2.5 brass inserts (I use those for G5 remote direct drive) and used those, they melted trought he ABS too. We pinged filastruder and they sent us "special screws" designed to go into plastic and that were supposed to be used to attach Mosquito to plastic. Those we tried both on ABS and PETG and in both cases after a while they melted they way trough
... Filastruder did not answer after we reported that so the solution was to use a steel plate, screw it into ABS on top, tap the M2.5 and screw the mosquito directly into that steel plate and that works awesome... so problem solved, filastruder never replied back.So no complaints here, we solved them problem, Mosquito works awesome as I wrote in this thread multiple times.. everything else is "potential problem" and "how to solve it", if I start naming issues I had with e3dV6 I fear I'd broke the max post size limit on the forum
.. I just assume those (fairly easy to solve) issues I encountered with Mosquito are good info to read before installing one. -
@arhi Curious.
I have two standard Ms mounted (for now) to printed PLA mounts and there is no sign the heat is reaching the mount.
Frederick
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@fcwilt said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
@arhi Curious.
I have two standard Ms mounted (for now) to printed PLA mounts and there is no sign the heat is reaching the mount.
screwed in pla with plastic screws? what are you printing at what temp? (we were printing PLA at 200 and petg at 240). that is sooooo different from my experience
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@arhi said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
@fcwilt said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
@arhi Curious.
I have two standard Ms mounted (for now) to printed PLA mounts and there is no sign the heat is reaching the mount.
screwed in pla with plastic screws? what are you printing at what temp? (we were printing PLA at 200 and petg at 240). that is sooooo different from my experience
Not plastic screws, normal metric metal machine screws. Temps from 190 to 250, depending on filament. Longest print 6.75 hours. Stock fan sucking heat out of M, away from mount.
Frederick
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@fcwilt said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
@arhi said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
@fcwilt said in Mosquito hot end...yes or no?:
@arhi Curious.
I have two standard Ms mounted (for now) to printed PLA mounts and there is no sign the heat is reaching the mount.
screwed in pla with plastic screws? what are you printing at what temp? (we were printing PLA at 200 and petg at 240). that is sooooo different from my experience
Not plastic screws, normal metric metal machine screws. Temps from 190 to 250, depending on filament. Longest print 6.75 hours. Stock fan sucking heat out of M, away from mount.
Frederick
There's something I've been thinking about...having the fan pulling air across the heat break rather than blowing it into it.
I first tried it with a little printed shroud for the standard hot end on my E3 Pro, as the designer recommended it, and it has always performed very nicely with no heat creep or problems at all.
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Hi guys,
I didn't have time to go through the whole thread, I just read parts of it, but since my friend @arhi mentioned my experience, I just wanted to confirm it.
I've been printing a lot of different PLA / PET-G brands with the original Mosquito and it has been performing like a champ - I did not have a single problem with it. Before that I was using an MK11 Microswiss all-metal hotend and it was honestly a pain. When it was working- it was performing ok, but when you want to swap a nozzle for example - that is when the nightmare starts - it was a lottery if it would clog or not and cleaning the whole system was painful.
With Mosquito, swapping nozzles is a breeze and I do it every other day now, to switch between detailed and big prints. I was "expecting" it to fail at some point, since there were some prints that were 24+hour long - but it did not. The only "issue" I've had is that when printing with a 0.8 nozzle with high layers - you have to lower the speed to 30mm/sec if you want to avoid underextrusion, but that is understandable, and you have the MAGNUM version if you want to go faster with bigger nozzles.
Anyway, if you can afford the Mosquito - I would say go for it. I will be upgrading to the V2 mosquito magnum in the following days for sure.
Hope it helps.
