How to get better air flow to RAMBo

[ericpudding]

Ive recently getting consistent print shifting for longer prints. I tightened the belts and adjusted the carriages and still have the shifts. I think the culprit now is that the RAMBo board is getting too hot so it shuts down a little to save itself. And after touching the board and noticing that it is indeed very hot I think this is causing all my problems. I had the same problem with a Ramps printer and after adjusting the placement of the fan, it fixed the problem. I do have an extra fan to cool the board better but was wondering if anyone had a good setup already. My concern is that since the board is enclosed in the bottom and with the acrylic that it doesnt get good air flow to it. I took the acrylic off for now but still not much improvement.

Will adding another fan fix this problem? And could I just solder the wires in the same place the existing fan is connected to? I was also thinking about facing the fan to the front of the board somehow. Any ideas or thoughts?

[teoman]

The chips dump their heat to the back of the pcb.

Some have istalled little aluminium heatsinks to the back.

[Eaglezsoar]

Teoman's suggestion of small heat sinks on the BACK of the Rambo where each driver is located should help to keep your board cooler.
If you can find the CFM specs of the fan you are using, you could find another fan with a higher CFM output.

[Jimustanguitar]

Heatsinks can only be as cool as the air around them, so I designed some vented side panels to promote air exchange. http://repables.com/r/495/
[img]http://repables.com/images/gallery/9f39 ... 146b95.jpg[/img]

I've also been working on some ducts to actively pull air through the slotted vents in the back of the machine. That's a work in process still, so I don't have "production ready" files yet.
[img]http://i.imgur.com/A8r8UIp.png[/img]

[ericpudding]

Where would be a good place to connect extra fans to? If I connect them to the same place the existing fan for the back of the Rambo board would it just give less power to each fan thats connected there?

[Jimustanguitar]

You've got 12 volts all over inside of the base unit, so there're multiple right answers. You can connect fans directly to the yellow wires fro the ATX supply, you can wire them into the power input terminal of the Rambo, you can solder onto the Rambo and get a connection point that way, etc. I've even connected a cooling can to the PID output from my heated bed (although that was janky and I wouldn't recommend it unless you're in a bind).

You can also hook them up along with your existing fans. Before I hooked my Rambo fan up to the 12v supply directly, I had it connected the same way as my PEEK fan so that it was pretty much running whenever the machine was printing.

[bot]

I use something like this: http://www.amazon.ca/Power-Male-Cable-A ... B00JR6N6AY to hook up additional fans. In fact, I have none hooked to the Rambo fan pins, except the PEEK and layer fans in their usual spots.

[ericpudding]

Heatsinks can only be as cool as the air around them, so I designed some vented side panels to promote air exchange. http://repables.com/r/495/
[img]http://repables.com/images/gallery/9f39 ... 146b95.jpg[/img]

I've also been working on some ducts to actively pull air through the slotted vents in the back of the machine. That's a work in process still, so I don't have "production ready" files yet.
[img]http://i.imgur.com/A8r8UIp.png[/img]

I like the idea of adding vents to the machine. I have acess to a laser cutter at school. Do you know what kind of wood the rostock max v2's are made out of? I need to input the type of wood into the laser cutting software

[Eaglezsoar]

The Rostock panels are made from melamine coated MDF.
Menards is one source but not an exact match.

[Jimustanguitar]

It's 1/4" melamine. If you can get adhesive masking paper (sign shops use it a lot) that will keep the char and suet off of the plastic surface during cutting.