Best posts made by snoozer

Hello,

I just start sharing my experience with building a 3D-Printer here from today. My 1st build will be based on the mechanical kit of the Rat Rig V-Core. V-Slot Core-XY design which I have chosen because it looks sturdy and its reasonably priced and above all it is shipped from the EU. I was contemplating buying a China made Core-XY printer and upgrade it with Duet 2 but gave up on that due to quality and shipping concerns. Here the main reasons why my own build and why Core-XY.

• Gather experience with a setup from scratch
• Learn to create my own print profiles in my slicer
• Core-XY could potentially be very accurate and fast
• Duet 2 because well documented, made in the EU 32 bit controller
• Rat Rig V-Core as compromise between high quality and low cost
• My dream choice would have been E3D's prototype or the RailCore II

I have chosen the following main components.

• Duet 2 Ethernet for the reasons mentioned above, eth over WiFi because I know how unreliable WiFi can be and eth gives me the freedom of both worlds if I need to.
• Titan Aero Hotend because its very compact and of good quality, I am to inexperienced so far risk using a cheap clone etc. The final goal would be a Titan Aqua because I want my printer to be enclosed and that seems to be the way to go to get the heat away.
• 0.9 degree 1.33A steppers for X, Y, ZA and ZB. My choice of 0.9 degree is just a gut feeling, I give it a shot and see what happens. They are not very expensive and I can replace them with 1.8 degree easy.
• For the hot bed I intend to use a E3D 230V AC 300x300 bed, that is a rather expensive single piece of the build so to start I will use a 300x300 24V Silicone heater pad which goes under the original V-Core aluminum bed, once I get anything decent working I change that for the E3D bed with Solenoid.

Here a few pics of where I am so far. Thanks to the RRF Config Tool and the extreme well documented Duet controller I had no issues getting started with testing steppers etc....

I have the axis steppers configured with the actual information of the V-Core regarding pulley teeth and lead screw pitch. I went with 50% current as is recommended as lowest setting from what I have read. All moves and does not seem to lose steps yet. That may well change once i have received the mechanical kit and stuff actually starts moving. The hotend is only partially assembled, I need to finish the mounting 1st as it has to go between stepper and heatsink. So for now I only have the heater, heatsink, termistor and fan going. One issue I noticed was a rather high overshoot when heating. It easy goes over by 10 degree but I have not yet looked into that at all. Just got it going to start with.

So that my state of play for now, I have ordered everything from the EU, mostly Rat Rig and Ooznest. E3D to follow for the bed and nozzle-x but they are so sloooooow....... Amazon fulfilled stuff as temporary Print Surface and Ebay EU for end switches and silicone heater.

Next I get my hotend mount ready and adjust extrusion etc and look into the overshoot when heating the hotend initially.

Have Fun!
Jan P.

PS: I am using a Poenix Contact 24V 5A PSU which I had sitting around for now. I have a 24V 20A on order to use with the 24V heated bed once it arrives.

Hello,

I just wanted to introduce myself and say hello to the Duet community. My name is Jan and I am relatively new to 3D printing. I have bought my 1st 3D printer in October 2018. That is a Prusa I3 MK3 kit which works very well. I have chosen that printer because I know myself well enough and I wanted to avoid frustrating shortcomings on Chinese Hardware which would have depleted what little patience I have. So the MK3 has worked without a lot of frustration for me and keeps printing. Since I have some basic understanding now of how things work I just wanted to get my own setup going. I have decided to build a Core-XY printer with the mechanical kit of the Rat Rig V-Core. Looked like a good starting point to avoid the pain of mechanical design (for now) but have the chance to make it mine. Yesterday I have received the Duet 2 Ethernet, Steppers and Titan Aero extruder. Still waiting for the V-Core kit (has 2 weeks lead time). So far I have only done the basic setup to have the motors work on the bench. Hoping to get the hotend up and running as well as the heated bed this week. And then its waiting for the V-Core kit to arrive and put everything into action.

About me, I am living at the South-West coast of Ireland for the last 16 years. Originally I am from Germany but feel home where I am now. I am Network and System Engineer in real life and like tinkering with electronics and all kind of tech stuff in general. Hiking and sailing are the non technical things I love to do.

So that me and why I am here.........

Have FuN!
Jan

PS: Once I have something to show for I post in the related category to give an overview of my machine.

@andornot

Just one more thing to consider maybe, you can always make an Ethernet Duet hook up to some WiFi Access point or client device via the Ethernet cable, with the WiFi version you are stuck with WiFi and have no option to connect in any other way.

Regards
Jan

Hello @ all,

I have recently started to build my own Core-XY printer from the Rat Rig V-Core mechanical kit. There is a different topic in another place on this forum about it. Among a few other things the most pressing decision wise for me is the use of Piezo probe(s). I have thought of alternatives 1st like inductive or IR probes but they all have downsides which rule them out for me. I have been looking around and it seems Precision Piezo from the UK are the go to people to get a working solution. To start with I thought I put one probe in the print head assembly but it may not be the simplest and most room conserving solution for me. I am using a Titan Aero hotend from E3D which rules out the "drilled" type probe due to mounting issues. I would have to put the probe in the mechanical stressed part that holds the entire hotend assembly in place. I am worried I would sacrifice to much mechanical strength and end up with a weak mount. Then I have seen the "Andromeda" type piezos which seem to look ideal for bed mount. Here my actual question to people that have experience with bed mounted piezo probes. I intend to use an Aluminium tooling plate 6 or 8mm strong as print bed and glass or spring steel PEI on top as surface. The bed would be 320x320mm. Would the preload from the weight rule out precise z-probing results ? I understand the trigger comes from the delta between resting and compressed/bend probe, would the delta (or difference) be enough to trigger reliably ? The other question is the movement, on my printer the Z movement is done by the bed. Will the acceleration and decelaration in itself cause issues with false triggering or cause imprecision ? My setup uses a Z max end stop to fast move to a known position with the bad all the way down. From there to home or do bed calibration I would move fast to Z 0 +2-5mm, probe very slow from there.

In short:

• Is preloading the piezos an issue (weight of bed)
• Are slow moves of the bed on Z acceptable for z-probe precision or are bed mounted piezos only a think where the bed does NOT move on Z ?
• Should I rather put the probe in the head while I still have the chance.

Any input, thoughts and suggestions are welcome.

Thanks
Jan

Just a quick add on, an impression of the fast non print move speeds I get so far.

https://youtu.be/PBN2l-wafVY

Yes, that has worked for downloading the sys directory content.

wget --ftp-user=admin --ftp-password=PASS -r ftp://IPADDRESS/sys/

That will do for me to make a backup.

Very frustrating day today...... the design above was evidently made around a clone Titan Aero, the original has issues fitting on the mount. I needed longer bolts for the stepper mount and the hotend is shorter apparently, I had to trim some of the part cooling duct off. The belt attachment is for ppl with a LOT of patience but I did get it done in the end. A nice baseline design but I will do that again from scratch and fix the issues I found. So far I can not recommend it for an original E3D Titan Aero. On the positive side, its very compact and gives a few mm more print area.

Jan

Hello,

I am finally getting somewhere. After resolving some of the issues with the Titan Clone Mount I spend some time getting Slic3rPE set-up. My approach to that was basically a mix of the Prusa settings and some input from the a Railcore II300 profile I found online. I can not claim that I would know all the details what each parameter actually does but so far I have a working printer setup and print setup for 0.2mm and 0.1mm layer height. One of the things I struggled with most was priming of the nozzle prior to the actual print. The way Prusa does it did not really work so I have taken that from a Railcore profile. I can run both print profiles at 100% with very nice looks and at 200% for a very fast print. I have speeds set to 60mm/s for perimeters 30mm/s for external perimeters and 80mm/s for infill and support, 20mm/s for the 1st layer. Some distortions are noticeable after sharp corners for example printing a cube. Printing it at 200% speed that obviously gets worse. It is in no way so bad that it would worry me for now but something that shows there is some unwanted vibration. I will look into that once I have my final bed finally on the printer.

Another issue I ran into was heat in the wrong place of the hotend. I had the Titan Aero fan set to 70% to reduce noise. That was not a good idea, on an longer print I started missing steps on the extruder and it finally ground through the filament. The problem was the fan was to slow to provide enough cooling. So my heatbreak was clogged and I had to disassemble the Titan Aero to remove the blockage. This has not happen since I run at 100% fan speed.

I have no good light here to take pictures of prints, I take them with me to the office and post pictures later today or tomorrow.

Have FuN!
Jan

Thanks @Phaedrux and @grizewald for your comments. Re z drive, I will use a single NEMA 23. I have received the V-Core 3 screw upgrade. They originally use it with 3 NEMA 17 and also suggest to drive them independent for bed levelling. I have decided against that. I have received my trust bearings now as well and have started to make up bearing blocks that mount instead of the steppers on the metal mounts. See pic.

So the lead screw goes through the bottom of that prototype black block, next radial bearing and on top of the outer ring rests the thrust bearing which again takes the load from the clamp on belt pulley. So I will have two on the forward side and one centered in the back. All three lead screws then joined by a loop belt plus one idler for tensioning.. I am not yet sure if a triangular belt drive has enough engagement on the teeth of they pulleys, if not I have to add a few idlers that wrap the belt around the pulleys more for better engagement of teeth. I intend to drive the rear single lead screw from a top mounted NEMA 23 or if that is not practical use a very short belt loop to drive the lead screw from a separate pulley and the motor in the base of the printer, not yet sure which I do. When I bought the pulleys I assumed its easy to get 3mm pitch belt but turns out that is not really the case, I have to make a mock up 1st now to see what length I need. Also forgot to order the NEMA 23 and motor mount (silly me).

Re piezo, guess that was kind of clear just I did not cop on to that, it needs a sharp impulse. Now with the glass bed it has never missed. Works very reliable now and wile bed levelling never probes on point more than 2 times, before it could take 4-6 times cause of the flexing nature of the flimsy light aluminium bed with the spring steel sheet. So for now I am all happy with the precision of the piezo. I will try again the other hotend mount with the build in Andromeda piezo.

Oh that sounds bad with the Mosquito, are you working in hot environment ? What you write re cooling issues would suggest issues will come up in an enclosed printer. I would not mind a 40 or 50mm fan as long as they can run silent. Or even a blower could them be a compacter, less noisy option. For an enclosed printer it may even make sense to have some sort of light weight duct with external fan to get cool air from outside the enclosure. Just thinking out loud, not there yet. The Linear Rail version will get the BMG M and Mosquito.

Have Fun.
Jan

PS: Re the termistor on top, that would not to control the heater but to delay the print start till the heat has gone through the materials. I find some way to implement that in the "Start G-code" section of the Slicer. IDK yet how I best implement that practically with a pocket cut in glass or whet ever, I probably have to experiment a bit.

My 2 NEMA 17 can drive Z WELL fast enough to trigger the z-probe. I just don't want to have huge inertia behind it with high speed if I can avoid it and go slower.