Harblar made a Dark TARDIS (v2)

[Harblar]

Hey All!

Been meaning to make a build thread since my kit arrived, but got distracted building it and am just now getting around to uploading the photos and whatnot. hahaha

Anyway, why Dark Tardis? Well, I've already had several people ask me if it was a time machine or something and since it kind of resembles something out of Dr Who (only meaner) I thought, why not. Good name for it!

On to some build photos!

[img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-A1nQ ... C01780.JPG[/img]

I wasn't going to paint the parts originally, but saw how others builds turned out painted, and since all the parts were already masked so nicely I figured what the hell. Always liked the red on black combo.

As you can see I got the base started in this shot. You may also have noticed, 4 steps in and I've already got a mod! I was going to use the power supply that came with the kit, but I just happened to have a brand new OCZ 700 Watt Modular Power Supply sitting in my closet taking up space and in the famous words of Tim Allen, "More Power!!! ARR ARR ARR!!!"

[img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-oSqL ... C01783.JPG[/img]

The PS had two separate 12v rails (cant remember how many amps per rail offhand, but it was plenty) so I split them up between the heating elements and everything else. Had a couple extra wires from the one connector I sued for the second rail, so I just shrink wrapped the ends to protect against any accidental shorts.

[img]https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-U0vD ... C01784.JPG[/img]

Got a Rev 6 Hot plate. Wired it up very similar to the the Rev 5 in the manual and then covered it up in all that fancy Kapton Tape.

[img]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-pPlU ... C01785.JPG[/img]

Here's the LEDs. Could have sworn I soldered them both the same way (long Lead on the positive plate), but for whatever reason the Bed LED won't light. Not a huge deal since a quick glance at the LCD screen will tell me whether or not the bed is hot, but my OCD is kinda nagging me about it. Might have to do some more investigating. The hell of it is I got my bed really level right now and don't really want to touch it and risk screwing that up!

[img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-KPq9 ... C01786.JPG[/img]

All mounted up!

[img]https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-2AJu ... C01787.JPG[/img]

From here on out the detail images get a little sparser. It was hotter than hell out this weekend and the shop doesn't have AC. I was sweating and tired and didn't feel like taking a lot of pictures.
Towers wired and up. Saw someone else mention that the next revision manual should say how much wire to have stick out of either end. Good suggestion ( I ended up having to pull the wire one way or the other in two towers after they were installed myself), but instead of trying to measure it out and be precise with it An easier way would be to say: For the Tower containing the Hot end and fan wiring, pull enough wire through to reach back past the end (bottom) of the tower. For the Extruder motor wires, pull about 6 inches. For the Endstop wires, don't worry about it... they pull easy and safely even with the tower installed.

[img]https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-Qtkj ... C01789.JPG[/img]

This is how I have all my wires routed on the top, more or less. I did a little tweaking after splicing in the extruder, but the end result is none of the wire groups cross or come close to any of the endstop wires and, so far, I haven't seen a hint of any abnormal behavior from them.

[img]https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-XQYY ... C01790.JPG[/img]

At this point I was fairly confident that I'd be spending the next week and a half with the ammeter trying to figure out what wire went where. In reality it only took an hour or so and one or two uses of the meter to get it all hooked up. a roll of scotch tape and sharpie saves a ton of headache down the road. Pull a group of wires and immediately label them. Makes Life Easy!

[img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-BuQm ... C01794.JPG[/img]

Hotend installed and wired up. I've got some better pics of the hot end itself on my iPhone I'll have to upload later. Not to brag, but I did a pretty damn good job of putting it together (at least I think so anyway. time will tell hahaha). It looks very close to the manual and is relatively clean. I bet I only need 2-3 square inches of paper towel to clean up after I was done. The trick I used was to poke a fairly small hole in the nozzle of the RTV tube so I could squeeze it out in a relatively thin bead. I then start applying it just above the resistor on the wire while slowly spinning the resistor and working my way down with the RTV. Basically turning the resistor into a barber pole. I takes a pretty healthy squeeze on the RTV tube, but the end result is worth it. Once it looks like the resistor in the manual, carefully stick it into the Hotend and fill in the gaps. The small hole really helps with maintaining precision.

[img]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-T_jH ... C01795.JPG[/img]

Extruder mounted. (I swear I only mounted it backwards once! haha)

[img]https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-tiR2 ... C01796.JPG[/img]

Getting closer. All I got left is the final wiring...

... Which I don't have any photos of!

[img]https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-GlDO ... C01798.JPG[/img]

Finished! And to my total amazement, nothing blew up or started on fire when I turned on the power!

[img]https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-c-dw ... C01799.JPG[/img]

[img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-I-np ... C01802.JPG[/img]

After installing the software I discovered the hotend wasn't working. Turns out the wires had pulled lose from the rambo while mounting the board. Quick Fix.

[img]https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-EuOY ... C01804.JPG[/img]

As you can see I also built myself a nice little stand out of some used bathroom cabinets I had laying around. Makes a great workspace. Plenty of room for storing tools and filament and nice work area for my laptop!
(and of course, it's on wheels so it's easy to move around)

I had a few issues with my first print (mostly due to the fact that it was 11pm and I'd forgotten to buy any of the Disappearing purple glue sticks! doh!) Anyway, I was able to get a few layers to print before it broke loose from the glass. enough to satisfy my curiosity anyway.

Yesterday morning I went out and got the right stuff and (using the preset abs files for Slic3r I got from SEEME CNC's website) I got this!

[img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-pjmg ... C01806.JPG[/img]

[img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-m4lD ... C01807.JPG[/img]

[img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-VH-u ... C01808.JPG[/img]

[img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-r7-v ... C01810.JPG[/img]

The fit is a little snug, but not bad. The quality of the print came out really well. The first layer seems to be going down really flat.

I installed the fan, only to find out that I can't get the fan to work... Grrrr... Not sure if it's the fan, the wiring to the rambo board, or a software issue. I'm going to check it with the PS I didn't use and seem if that'll spin it. if it's just the fan not working, then I'm going to print the 40 mm shroud and put in a better fan!

Onto part two! This one I designed myself.
(it also took two tries to get right, but I'll get to that in a sec.)

[img]https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-ctKl ... C01811.JPG[/img]

[img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-wByi ... C01812.JPG[/img]

These are knobs for my oven. The original knobs broke several years ago and we've been using a pair of pliers ever since. Well, no more!

Now, the reason I had to print them twice was due to my own fault and a printer/software/physics issue.

First off, I screwed up the Slic3r settings and accidentally had the infill set to 0! *facepalm

Secondly, the model I designed was lower poly count than I wanted and ended up being faceted for a round knob. Blah.

And Third, the dimensions, as printed, were off from what I had designed, so it didn't fit on the post.

[img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-aLTF ... C01813.JPG[/img]

First attempt on the left, second on the right.

[img]https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-FjFY ... C01814.JPG[/img]

[img]https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-oZ7j ... C01816.JPG[/img]

To get to the second print I increase the poly count in the stl (80 MB file! It took a bit to load, slice, and print, but it came out nice!) and scaled it up by 1.062. This made the overall size bigger than planned, but the post hole now fits (all be itvery tight, which I suppose isn't a bad thing)

Well... That's about all I've got for now. I obviously have more calibrations that need to be done to improve the accuracy of the printed objects. I've also got to trouble shoot the PEEK fan.

Which also reminds me... In troubleshooting the fan last night I managed to short the wire while trying to see if it was getting power and blew on of those little rice grain fuses on the rambo board... Anybody know what size replacement i need and where I could source them locally? Radioshack, perhaps?

Thanks! Hope you enjoyed my long winded, pic heavy, build thread. More to come, I'm sure!

[Eaglezsoar]

Very well done! Thanks for the great pictures and I have to say the red highlights look really good.
Excellent Job!

[Harblar]

Well... Think I'm closing in on my two issues.

PEEK fan: the itty bitty red wire with the teeny tiny solder point on the fan board. Yep, you guessed it. Not connected! Solder point was hidden behind the fan chassis, which they were kind enough to glue down. Knew it was a long shot, but I tried to get it apart anyway so I could fix it. Aaaaand, it's broke! Shocking, I know.

So I printed the 40mm fan shroud of repables. Now, either the original Max had a drastically different hotend platform or this model was really horribly designed! Height was right. The clips were right. But there is absolutely no way to install it without interfering with the delta arms... Well, not entirely true, but if you install it, how I'm guessing it was suppose to be, the fan simply won't fit. Not enough height between effector platform and hot end mount. Looks to me that the only way to get a bigger fan in there would be through some kind ducted fan mount. Maybe another project for down the road. In the meantime, amazon to the rescue!

Heat bed LED: got a nice close up look at this today. It is soldered on correctly. Same as the hot end light. Put the ammeter on it and couldn't even get a reading... Hmmm.... My guess now is bad LED, bad resistor, or a an issue with the wire path on the hot bed itself. Might just get another led/resistor this weekend and run it to the Rambo like the hotend led.

That's about it for now. Everything else seems to be working good!

[barry99705]

[img]https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-2AJu ... C01787.JPG[/img]

I'm glad I'm not the only one with funny shapes painted onto the garage floor!

[Harblar]

I'm glad I'm not the only one with funny shapes painted onto the garage floor!

There's actually newspaper under it... Mostly. Hahaha

[Tinyhead]

For first prints, those came out really nice! What layer height were you using? 0.1mm?

[Harblar]

Just using the default SeeMe CNC ABS Profile. .35 First layer and then .2 after that. Didn't really mess with the infill settings too much. On the knobs I did go to 40% infill and honycomb with a solid layer ever 20. (wanted to be sure the central shaft wouldn't break loose.) I'm going to try a bigger print at .1mm today while I'm working and see what happens. Haven't had a chance to calibrate the extruder or rerun the auto temp calibration again (was waiting on a working PEEK fan). Been printing the SeeME CNC Black ABS set @ 228/90 on the bed, but it's been running closer to 235/90. Overall it seems to be liking that temp, so I haven't tried too hard to get it back closer to 228 yet.

[Harblar]

Well... Fans and fuses finally showed up on Monday, but yesterday I went and pulled the trigger on a couple of E3d v6 hotends and another Ezstruder (not to be that guy SeeMe CNC, but $19 dollars for shipping $60 worth of parts that would easily fit in a $5 usps flat rate box. Wtf is that about? The whole Rostock and a spool of filament only ran me $50!).

I've not done a ton of prints yet, but it's become pretty clear already that most of my planned prints are going to need a fair amount of support structure. Dual extruders running dissolvable filament for the supports seems like the only way to go.

I've been reading up on how to go about hooking things up when they get here and needless to say, it isn't as straight forward as it should be. For one thing, I've noticed that labels on the Rambo say different things than what is hooked to them. Peek fan hooked to HEAT 1 instead of FAN 0, etc...
I read that this was done during the initial build to accommodate a short wire and then never got changed or corrected before getting to the end user. I totally understand why. It's the only way to keep it universal across the user base so a corrected firmware doesn't mess everyone up. That being said, dual extruders need firmware settings manually changed anyway (and would with each new firmware release) so would it be possible to make the changes to get this wired right? I would think so and my OCD would be satisfied then.

Anyway, my plan is to take lots of pics and then write up a detailed how to post covering parts to install through full calibration. Hopefully I can get it together and working good enough to prove useful to others looking to go this route. Stay tuned! Hahaha

[Eaglezsoar]

I just wanted to thank you for your detailed writeup and I certainly look forward to more.
This has been an invaluable build because of its level of detail and perfectly focused pictures.
Thanks for sharing this with everyone on the forum.

[guanu]

I've been reading up on how to go about hooking things up when they get here and needless to say, it isn't as straight forward as it should be. For one thing, I've noticed that labels on the Rambo say different things than what is hooked to them. Peek fan hooked to HEAT 1 instead of FAN 0, etc...
I read that this was done during the initial build to accommodate a short wire and then never got changed or corrected before getting to the end user. I totally understand why. It's the only way to keep it universal across the user base so a corrected firmware doesn't mess everyone up.

actually peek fan goes to heat 1 because in the firmware whenever the hotend gets turned on or is over 40c, we power heat 1 to run the peek fan, as it should be ran anytime the hotend is heating or hot so heat doesnt soak up and cause a plug.. the layer fan goes to fan 0 because that is used for pla and not used for abs, so it can be turned on and off via gcode. So no matter what material is being used, peek fan should be on always, and we use heat 1 instead of direct power, so when the machine is on and idle at room temp, the fan isnt always spinning.

Guanu

[Harblar]

I just wanted to thank you for your detailed writeup and I certainly look forward to more.
This has been an invaluable build because of its level of detail and perfectly focused pictures.
Thanks for sharing this with everyone on the forum.

.

Thanks! I was planning on taking a lot more, but the heat that weekend was making me impatient!

I'm planning on doing a much more detailed write up for the dual extruder install. I've even got some plans for a couple of custom STL's that should prove useful in the process.

actually peek fan goes to heat 1 because in the firmware whenever the hotend gets turned on or is over 40c, we power heat 1 to run the peek fan, as it should be ran anytime the hotend is heating or hot so heat doesnt soak up and cause a plug.. the layer fan goes to fan 0 because that is used for pla and not used for abs, so it can be turned on and off via gcode. So no matter what material is being used, peek fan should be on always, and we use heat 1 instead of direct power, so when the machine is on and idle at room temp, the fan isnt always spinning.

Guanu

Gotcha! I understand why and when the PEEK Fan needs to be operating, I just figured that the Gcode could be altered to make the FAN 0 pins work the same as the HEAT 1 pins are currently programmed to do. It seems like that would make it a little more straight forward for the install of dual extruders. The Gcode has to be altered anyway for the dual extruders to work (to the best of my knowledge, which I admit is pretty limited by comparison ) so, what's a little more recoding to get the wires in the correct slots. Maybe I'm missing something else (I probably am). So, where would the new hotend/thermistor go? The dual extruder mount I printed only has room for one 30mm fan for the two hot ends. I is this ok, or should I modify it for two? If I need two, where does the second fan connect? If not, does the PEEK Fan just run off from the primary hotend or does it read temps from both hotends individually and turn on accordingly?

I just want to make sure I get this down as good as I can so I can make up a bullet proof tutorial for others looking to go the same route as me.