My new baby! Her name is W.I.S.P.E.R.

[lightninjay]

Hey there everyone! I assembled my new baby over about 2 days after receiving it on July 8th (impressive to myself considering it was a start/stop ordeal with my girlfriend pulling me away often lol) and had very minimal complications, any complications being due to my own misreadings or "whoopsie!" moments. Below are some photos of her, only one of which while she was still being assembled. I still haven't gotten to print my fan shrouds, I've been having some issues with getting repetier onto my host computer. Things will hopefully be chugging along here soon though!

While I was still assembling it

W.I.S.P.E.R.

See the dangling fan wires? lol

I think I did a pretty good job with the RTV silicone

Look at those beautiful red LED's :)

The only flaw I could find, the two rows of missing pixels :/

By the way, so far W.I.S.P.E.R. can mean one of two things.

1) "White Is Sexy, Possibly Even Retro"
2) "Whimsical Imaginary Shape Printer, Extrudes Recyclables"

Any other acronyms are open to suggestion

[Mac The Knife]

"Why Is She Printing Everything wRong"

[lightninjay]

"Why Is She Printing Everything wRong"

Hahah! That's a bit fore-shadowy, don'tcha think? ;P Still, I appreciate the jest and I don't doubt I will have quite the dickens of a time getting her calibrated. But she will submit >;)

[Mac The Knife]

Getting there is half the fun.

[lightninjay]

I took some photos of my printer in action and a few of the successful prints I've had so far. Currently W.I.S.P.E.R. is out of commission She shut off cold in the middle of a print and an attempt to repower her got the fan on the rambo to spin up, but nothing else. I've been reading some posts in the forums about power supply issues due to overstrain, reckon that may be an issue if the new LCD display that's on its way doesn't fix anyhting.

Here's a picture of some EL wire I slipped down the outer area of the carriage rods, looks pretty cool to me :)

This is a chain link that I modeled from the game "Dishonored" featuring a stealth assassin named Corvo.

One of the Herringbone gear bearings. It spins, but it's a little tight in one area.

If you're a Game of Thrones or Song of Ice and Fire fan you'll know what this is. It's the sigil of the Targaryen house.

[lightninjay]

An update on W.I.S.P.E.R.

She's up and running again! I discovered it was the F3 fuse that had blown (likely because I accidentally shorted the hotend resistors to the hotend by touching them briefly) and I copied a forum member to get her up and running until those dang difficult-to-source nano fuses get here.

(not my picture, just an example. Member "kittka" posted this here)
[img]http://i.imgur.com/ILpZYma.jpg[/img]

[Generic Default]

Ahh that's a good idea with the fuse soldering thing! I wish I would have thought of that about a month ago! I fried the same fuse, probably when two of the fan wires shorted, but I ended up turning a tiny little brass fuse on my CNC lathe. It snaps into the sockets, like some 1800's steampunk stuff merged with cutting edge 3d printer control electronics from 2014.

I hope I still have that fuse...


Nice prints by the way. If you're doing model or artistic stuff that needs to look perfect, I recommend going with the smallest nozzle possible. I'l be doing experimental stuff with nozzles smaller than 0.20mm in the next few days. I could get them down to 0.1mm or less, but then the stepper motor resolution becomes a problem for micro prints.

[Tinyhead]

That EL wiring does indeed look really cool. Nice to see you're doing some complicated prints right off the hop.

[lightninjay]

Here are some updated photos and a status update!

My F3 fuse blowing, I believe has finally been resolved! ... (for now) I'm fairly sure it was a faulty electrical tape job on my part, allowing some of my pointy soldering of fan wires to short against other wires in the nylon flex tube. I resoldered, retaped with a bunch of Kapton, and all seems to be working!

First things first, she really needed a way for people to identify her.

She printed her own name tag! If you click the photo for full res, you may note the tiny dots between her acronym ;)

And I kinda broke my original PEEK fan :/ So I had to make my own fan shroud to fit a Radioshack fan

I made my own model in Autocad by using calipers on the model Geneb has us print in the manual! Isn't reverse-engineering great fun? :)

This shower curtain cut to size, and a little velcro, make for a pretty slick looking enclosure to hold heat in.
Mike B posted this suggestion over in the Tips n Tricks area here

This was a brilliant idea and I can take no credit for it.

Well folks, I'm currently struggling with some PLA printing. It seems that the extruder motor gets just hot enough to soften the PLA and let it get chewed up and jammed in the area just after it feeds past the hobbed bolt. I'm going to try running a box fan at the extruder motor/PLA itself to see if that helps at all. The vegetable oil trick (rubbing it on the filament every so often) seemed to work for a little bit, but the print I'm about to attempt is close to 10 hours. Short of designing a small pod that holds a sponge soaked in oil, that allows filament to pass through it, I'm about out of options with this particular brand of PLA and may just have to buy a new roll.

[lightninjay]

Here's my custom PEEK shroud model if anyone needs it for their own radioshack fan

The model should work for any 40mmx40mm fan

NewestPeekFanMod.stl

Here's a more updated file!

(47.15 KiB) Downloaded 548 times

I'm so glad you guys like my 40mm mod

[lightninjay]

The box fan did the trick, but I figured out what the true problem was. I have the Kysan stepper motors which run off different settings than the other set of motors, Wantai, that SeeMeCNC sends out. Turns out my stepper current was running a bit on the high side and after looking through the forums and finding another member (deadnoob) with similar problems, I lowered the values in the firmware as Guanu suggested here and now I'm printing natural PLA perfectly!

I've got a secret build piece that has been taking about a week to finish, but once it's done I'll post it up in the "What are YOU making?" forum for you guys to all look at.

[lightninjay]

So, I've performed a few upgrades to W.I.S.P.E.R. and I must say she is running swell so far

I installed some astrosyn dampers on my tower motors

Here are the Astrosyn dampers I bought from astroboy on the forums.

Here are a few shots of the Trex skull I'm printing, just the top part so far, and it was printed without the dampers installed. The lower of the skull is being layered onto the print bed as I type, with the dampers installed, so we'll see how the quality compares.

It's transparent ABS, and I didn't do anything yet to clean up the outer finish. I think it came out pretty clean.

I'm debating on doing a cold acetone vapor finish to attempt making the outer shell totally clear. What do you guys think?

In this one you can even see the LEDs that I ordered from RamtechRob on the forums. They work great once you make the holes on the effector plate just a little bit wider.

Also, if any of you out there have KYSAN stepper motors and find they are running a bit hot, I changed all my voltages for tower motors down to 100, and the extruder motor to 105 in the firmware. Just doing that brought my motors down to a temperature that is completely comfortable to rest your hand on.

[craftymethod]

Wow man... nice skull!! but how on earth is it sticking so well to the glass plate!

[lightninjay]

Hahah, check out my other thread here.

Member Eaglezsoar asked a similar question, and it really just came down to lots of hairspray, and making sure your nozzle is calibrated a little closer to the bed than normal.

[JohnStack]

Nice Job!

[lightninjay]

Thanks John!

Currently I'm printing an incense burner (shaped like a howling wolf) for my girlfriend.

Pretty interesting method I used to make this model. Autodesk has this program, "123D Catch", that can stitch together a bunch of photos of an object so you can put together a 3D mesh of an environment and then extract what you actually wanted to model from the resulting mesh.

Here's my finished STL if anyone is interested in seeing what it came out like.

wolfmouthv3 (repaired).stl

The file I chose to slice and print first, MAJOR filament fail gave me an excuse to redesign

(425.08 KiB) Downloaded 531 times

EDIT: I fixed up the interior of the model and lowered the face count and it prints a LOT better now.

WolfLowPoly(final) (repaired).stl

This is the better file and the one I ultimately printed.

(105.06 KiB) Downloaded 492 times

Here's 1 of 28 photos I took at 12MP resolution with my phone's camera to make the mesh.

I modeled it, reduced polygons, and cut a hole up the middle and out the mouth. Printing now, let's see how it goes!
Edit: Here's the finished print!

Here's the finished print, scaled and stretched to the height and dimensions I wanted

[geneb]

Make sure you keep an eye on the EULA for that service - they tend to do the whole "what's ours is ours and what's yours is ours" nonsense.

g.

[Mac The Knife]

When I seen that it required uploading your file to them to be processed,,,,, I walked away.

[lightninjay]

Well, this was sort of a trivial model and I only really wanted to do it for this one thing, so I don't really care if they steal it.

Also, is anyone aware of whether or not their offline program requires an upload? I'll check and see. EDIT: After a quick run of their downloaded program, looks like it still has you login and upload files. Bummer :/ But I would like to note, the only thing their program came into contact with was the unrefined mesh that it let me export. What I then did with that file in blender is unbeknownst to Autodesk Inc. and any affiliates.

I am however beginning my undergraduate thesis this semester, and will be looking into developing a laser scanner similar to the one MIT developed here

And I'm also going to be attempting to develop a voice activated interface that can be run on a raspberry pi as the host for the RAMBO.

[geneb]

You might want to take a peek at the Davide scanner system - it's pretty slick.

g.

[Fiddler2070]

Here's my custom PEEK shroud model if anyone needs it for their own radioshack fan

The model should work for any 40mmx40mm fan

MyPeekFanMod.stl

Hey lightning,

do you have the inventor or solidworks file for that fan? I want to try and push more air through it by making the opening on the fan side bigger.

Thanks.

[lightninjay]

I have an Autodesk dwg (I think) but you'll have to wait until I get home from class.

Here's the dwg!

[RocketMagnet]

I've also been experimenting with Peek and Layer Cooling. My initial idea was essentially the same as your Lightning but I was concerned that the types of fan were using don't deal well with any backpressure so I was going down the line of modifying the top adapter plate to mount a 40mm fan.
I knew it was unlikely but hey I've got a 3d printer why not try and see... it's exceptionally close (see below) but ultimately it would require some mods of the fan housing or a fan 8mm depth or less IMO as it will catch at max build area.

Pretty close but no cigar

What did surprise me was how good the printed hot end adaptor plate was (95% solid ABS).. a few printed washers and other than if you lost your peek cooling I can't see any issues.. so haven't even bothered putting my wood one back on... works great and opens up options for alternate 40mm fan mounting solutions like your lightning as you can open up the air feed a bit more by cutting back the adapter plate. So hope you don't mind but I've taken your model as a base to modify in an effort to improve the air flow.

So while I'm fighting with my Modelling skills I've just fitted the standard fan and it works fine but so far I'm on my 3rd.

Normal Fan in first attempt modified adaptor plate

I've got a Squirrel cage air blower system I can desk mount for difficult filaments that are jam prone with any heat creep. It's serious overkill for ABS/PLA however
and a bit nosy even at reduced speeds so not a general filament cooling system. It's 10 or 6mm ID Tygon Tubing, 92mm Sq Cage, modified peek shroud and some tubing anti-kink coil so ~£10 in total ($15). Still I'd not recommend it too highly due to noise.

Black is 6mm White is 10mm I tested

Yeah it's all a bit Heath Robinson but I've had loads of fun just messing around...

[geneb]

What you're doing will have ZERO effect on the printed part. The stock PEEK fan & shroud is perfectly suited for the job it has - to cool the PEEK section of the hot end.

g.

[RocketMagnet]

Yes clearly the stock fan and shroud offer sufficient cooling or the system would suffer from heat creep and at worst your "Peek" would melt.

Sorry I wasn't clear and didn't mention it but the reason I'm using a 40mm Noctua Fan is for reliability as so far my experience with 25mm fans reliability has been very poor. My stock fan lasted a week so tops therefore on this basis it's not suited to the task, loss of cooling due to fan failure is a safety risk IMO. So yeah the design is fine but for me reliability kills it.. unless someone has found some quality 25mm fans, I'm on my 3rd already....

So I got some 40mm Noctua fans which I know are reliable (they don't do a 25mm) .. or as reliable as I can get so I've modified to allow me to use one like a number of other people also have above.. as the 40mm files been downloaded a fair few times...... It's done now and works great BTW though nowhere near as elegant as the stock design but I'm simply interested in it working as reliably as I can make it.