My gridbot has been chugging along politely for a few years now. It is starting to feel like building 3D printers isn’t my hobby .
Well, yesterday it made a nasty blob. The hemera seems fine, but the BL Touch won’t extend reliably anymore. The mount for it died too. I have my old printer at my dad’s house, so he printed me a new mount. A new BL Touch is going to be delivered tomorrow (I swear I had a spare, but I can’t find it ATM).
So I have been thinking about upgrading some parts. What is a good extruder? Hot end? What about a CAN board? What is a good bed level sensor? Is BL Touch still close to the best, or have we moved on to the IR sensors?
I read issues with Bl touch so I went with Cr Touch, basically same, but the cr touch has a metal probe. Reliability through the builtin klipper test was insane, not at home right now, but I think it was 3 decimal places. I know alot of peeps with high end printers love Klackender. Light and simple. KlackEnder – Simple, fast and cheap! – KevinAkaSam's Sandbox I almost did it at home, but the cr touch was cheap and simple For extruder, I am still using my microswiss direct drive. Works every time. I am considering not doing the direct drive on one printer, to pull the weight back to the side. (I have an ender 3 pro and an ender 3 clone.)
I’ve been really impressed with all of the Bigtreetech products that I’ve bought recently… Extruder, microProbe, even the controller I’m using. I don’t have a lot of experience with them to talk about long term usage, but so far things are going well.
I think the Biqu ‘light’ extruder is supposed to have really fast print speed capabilities.
My Bondtech LGXlite and Slice Mosquito have never let me down. I’ve only ever used an official BL Touch and the Quickdraw for ABL and both started out great but ended up sucking in the end. I went back to the paper method with one printer and the printer with the Quickdraw printer might be next. The Beacon ABL does look pretty rad though.
That beacon ABL looks pretty awesome. I need it for Z endstop too though. I have honestly not remeasured my bed mesh in over 6 months. I don’t have it in my starting gcode.
JJ found this one yesterday. It looks like it can be used for initial homing, full mesh scanning and your accelerometer very near our nozzle…and can be hooked to CAN Bus, $35. https://cartographer3d.com/
Yeah if you run something like an EBB36/42 then it’s supposed to be easy to hook up. I know where the 2 pins are for the can H/L connection but I’m not sure where they are pulling power from. I need to look at it more. Might be the endstop connection or if you are using this then you can get 5v and G from the probe connection
Here is a similar probe. The cartographer is definitely cheaper:
It seems like I would need the cartographer, the U2C, and an EBB. That seems pretty slick. Definitely going to need some more work to make the software function. The cartographer needs to edit klipper by downloading their software into the extras. And all the CAN stuff is a bit more.
I do like the Hemera. I am using the v6 hotend. It hasn’t been too much trouble. Maybe I should do the CAN bus stuff just for fun, and then focus on the bed.
Canbus is amazing once you get it set up. I have it on 3 of the 4 printers I have now. Have the parts on hand to convert the 4th over as well. It can be very cumbersome to set up though. Most of the info out there refers to canboot which has now been renamed katapult. The u2c boards come pre flashed so that’s easy. With using a U2C it’s much easier than using a main board with usb to can bridge. I never could get the octopus pro I have to work. It’s just a paper weight now. But the Manta M8P I put on the V5 works awesome and is a much nicer package with the CB1 on board and no needed U2C.
I used CAN professionally. I wrote the software that used SAE J1939 (which is a stricter protocol on top of CAN) to control some big army trucks. The steering, throttle, brakes, transmission, etc are all controlled by CAN:
So I think I should have some on my printer, right?
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. I hope that was sarcasm!
