So… I don’t even have any of the parts yet, and I’m already thinking of changing stuff…
Has anyone considered making the 4 vertical pieces longer, extending the sides and back, and putting a top on the printer? I wonder if I extended the sides and back an extra 100mm if that’d be enough room for the filament and wires to dance around above the extruder.
I like have fully enclosed printers as they live in the shop with all the woodworking stuff. Plus I use a esp32 to control an enclosure fan to maintain a better internal temperature in the winter. I usually have the exhaust fan on the power supply setup to blow hot air into the enclosure.
Yeah, am also trying to think through a fully considered enclosed setup before building. Was initially looking to put things up top, but then noticed Voron intentionally keep center of mass low by shoving components under the frame. For filament was thinking about side mounting that works better for my space than rear mounted. Filament mount would be decoupled somehow to minimize adding to vibrations. Am still over thinking and procrastinating on making decisions…
Curious to see what you and others are doing with their enclosures, electronics, psu, filament spool holders, etc…
Some pics of finished setups will help figure out high to make the upright extrusion to be able to enclose the top.
I extended the vertical rails and am adding another horizontal rail on the front to allow my electronics to be housed under the machine. I will probably design some skirts like the Voron but may incorporate Ryans logo (with permission) instead of Hex patterns.
Simple solution here if you want it decoupled. I have a separate spool holder/roller thing that it sits on that feeds the filament into the tube. This makes it easy to change spools and keeps the weight off the machine.
But as you said, it is actually a good thing to have weight on the machine if you can keep it low enough. If you could somehow make the bottom face of the machine weigh 1000lbs then you’d be in business.
Spool holders like that are great, until you get to the bottom of a spool and the spring of the tightly bound coils is more than the weight of the spool.
I used to use two spool holders. One held it from the bottom like that, for nearly full spools. The advantage is that it cant unspool when completely full. The other held it on an axle for nearly empty spools.
My spool holder problems went away when I added ptfe tube all the way to the spool holder. I am currently using one that holds it on an axle.
I have a new spool holder I just made, it hangs on the side of the machine. I just need to make a new sleeve for spools with not center tube. Hopefully be done this evening.
I use a spool holder where the spool just sits on 4 bearings. But the current printer has the spool sitting above the printer by quite a bit and the filament pulls down through a hole in the top of the enclosure. Since the spool is above the extruder, it’s constantly pulled down into the machine keeping any spring type issues from happening.
That works for the current printer, but I don’t see that working for this one. Mostly because I think my idea for putting a top on it would be way too close to the print head for the filament to make the needed bends as it moved around. The current printer is a Prusa clone where it prints from the bottom up. Really tall prints do cause the filament to make some interesting bends, but those are the lower 10% of the prints I typically do.
On the electronics front… I have a BL Touch now. I was talking to a friend of mine about the printer build. He had bought one for his Creality printer but had never installed it. So he gave it to me. I may have to put new connectors on the cable, but won’t know until I order the controller.
The extrusions shipped out this morning and say they’ll be delivered tomorrow already. A lot of the rest of the stuff is scheduled to be delivered on Friday. I wasn’t planning on working on the printer this weekend already, but we’ll see what happens.
SKR boards were in stock, so I got that ordered. I also downloaded the firmware, modified config.h, and built it. 54 seconds. Not bad. I think the last time I tried to build Marlin was 6 years ago and that computer took significantly longer.
I’m sitting in that time of a new build where you’re still waiting for parts to come in…
So I took a little time to install a fresh copy of Octoprint on a Pi3 that I had laying on the desk doing nothing. At least one part of the build is done
I forgot the case I have this Pi in has a little fan on it. And boy is that little fan loud.
Side project number 2. I’d like to have an exhaust fan on the enclosure controlled by octoprint. I couldn’t find a plugin I liked, so I’m starting my own.
This will be a long term project and shouldn’t slow down the actual build.
