Welcome to the SeeMeCNC Community

i have been using by Rostock Max v2 for a few moths now with preety good success mostly. I have learned a few things along the way as more than 1 print has ended up in the trash.

I realize the print head will not last forever and will fail at some point.

i am looking at suggestions for replacement options. Next go around I want to have a more interchangeable system. I do not want to be soldering the tiny thermister wires again. the hot end wiring i want to change to a connector type instead of soldering the wires.

Hopefully i won't have to do this for awhile, but better to be prepared.

E3D is a very popular option. Also, the prometheus hot end has some notoriety in these forums. And I would be remiss not to mention that the legend that is hackney prefers the kraken. J-head is also a worthy offering.
But choose wisely, for as the true hottend will bring you many prints, the false one will take them from you.

I also recommend the prometheus, it is all metal with no PTFE inside of it and can handle the high temperature exotic filaments.
Reviews seem to recommend it also.

If you want plug and play, and don't mind being essentially locked to a 8-bit arduino board for the near future, the PT100 with E3D seems like a brilliant choice. No thermistor. 2 pin connector to an amplifier, which has a 3 pin connector for your 5V, signal, and signal ground that will take a connector such as off a fan from a computer. Very physically resilient package, and very high temperature capacity (the sensor has an output table up to 1100C, nearly twice the melting point of aluminum) Both Marlin and Repetier 92 support them, and there's no need for any RTV. Best of all, it's easy to design and make new blocks for things to accommodate it if you have access to mills. All it takes is the room for a 1/8th IN hole, and a set screw to lock it in, and you can add one to anything. Admittedly, that requires starting from scratch with most blocks, but the majority of the design, and the nozzle can be carried over.

"legend"! Ha ha!

I love water cooling and think it is the difference between 100% success with PLA and 99% success. The Kraken is water cooled and that's how I got addicted. I don't really use the Kraken for multiple extrusion. I gave up after months of having nozzles drag across prints. That's the flaw with multi nozzle extrusion. The new Cyclops eliminates this by running 2 filaments through a single nozzle (but it is currently air cooled). I use the Kraken with pre-loaded colors and just set the "working nozzle" to Z=0 to print. That alone saves me a lot of time.

However, on my other printers I run E3D V5 and V6 hot ends with air cooling. I've not had an issue with any of these after a year+ of service. I recommend the V6 to anyone needing a solid dependable and proven hot end. I know they are working on a water cooled jacket for it too. I've modified a few with a water cooled jacket and run a V5 water cooled with the big Volcano heater block. That's a beast and can print HUGE filament diameters.

I don't have experience with the prometheus. I'd try one and do a comparison but I'm too cheap to buy one right now! I think they look fugly too but that's a personal opinion. I don't think I've heard of any Prometheus users who print as much as I do so I don't know what its overall reliability is. Brian at Trick Laser carries them now and he's a good knowledgable guy who wouldn't carry junk. Part of my reluctance with Prometheus is the way the young man who started the company communicated here on the forum. It really made me question if he knew what he was doing. I give him credit for sticking with it and successfully manufacturing and marketing the hot end though - I know how much work and perseverance that takes.

cheers,
Michael

Thank you for all the great suggestions. I will investigate these as my heir to the stock hot end.

mhackney wrote:"legend"! Ha ha!

I love water cooling and think it is the difference between 100% success with PLA and 99% success. The Kraken is water cooled and that's how I got addicted. I don't really use the Kraken for multiple extrusion. I gave up after months of having nozzles drag across prints. That's the flaw with multi nozzle extrusion. The new Cyclops eliminates this by running 2 filaments through a single nozzle (but it is currently air cooled). I use the Kraken with pre-loaded colors and just set the "working nozzle" to Z=0 to print. That alone saves me a lot of time.

However, on my other printers I run E3D V5 and V6 hot ends with air cooling. I've not had an issue with any of these after a year+ of service. I recommend the V6 to anyone needing a solid dependable and proven hot end. I know they are working on a water cooled jacket for it too. I've modified a few with a water cooled jacket and run a V5 water cooled with the big Volcano heater block. That's a beast and can print HUGE filament diameters.

I don't have experience with the prometheus. I'd try one and do a comparison but I'm too cheap to buy one right now! I think they look fugly too but that's a personal opinion. I don't think I've heard of any Prometheus users who print as much as I do so I don't know what its overall reliability is. Brian at Trick Laser carries them now and he's a good knowledgable guy who wouldn't carry junk. Part of my reluctance with Prometheus is the way the young man who started the company communicated here on the forum. It really made me question if he knew what he was doing. I give him credit for sticking with it and successfully manufacturing and marketing the hot end though - I know how much work and perseverance that takes.

cheers,
Michael

Your shop and printers are working great now, don't tempt fate!

Xenocrates wrote:If you want plug and play, and don't mind being essentially locked to a 8-bit arduino board for the near future, the PT100 with E3D seems like a brilliant choice. No thermistor. 2 pin connector to an amplifier, which has a 3 pin connector for your 5V, signal, and signal ground that will take a connector such as off a fan from a computer. Very physically resilient package, and very high temperature capacity (the sensor has an output table up to 1100C, nearly twice the melting point of aluminum) Both Marlin and Repetier 92 support them, and there's no need for any RTV. Best of all, it's easy to design and make new blocks for things to accommodate it if you have access to mills. All it takes is the room for a 1/8th IN hole, and a set screw to lock it in, and you can add one to anything. Admittedly, that requires starting from scratch with most blocks, but the majority of the design, and the nozzle can be carried over.

Does the PT100 require an interface card or does it plug directly into the thermistor input on the controller board?

It requires a small daughter-board, which then plugs into the AI pins on the rambo. It does not go in a thermistor slot, but it is rather simple. Supply 5V to the daughter-board, connect what was your thermistor wiring to it's signal and sig-ground pins, then plug the PT100 into it. Change the pins the temp reading is looking for, and it's pretty darned easy to deal with.

Now, there is a slight issue with PT100's from my perspective. They as yet are only really supported by Rambo/Ramps boards. Smoothie's apparently won't accept lookup tables or the beta values of a PT100 without serious re-writing. They aren't interested in it either, since they have this nice branded thermocouple board that has a matched PCB color. Duet's, well, I can't find any mapping of extra Analogue inputs, and you can't use a thermistor port thanks to the pull-up circuitry that most all of them use. Azteeg boards seem to be in the same spot as smoothies, software wise. The Smoothie V2 doesn't appear to have any plans for PT100 support. the new board from Ultimachine is thoroughly under wraps. There's only one option for an upgrade that looks practical, and that's too the Replicape rev B with BBB and the as yet forth-coming A0 revision of the Reach. I do plan on beta testing for that, since I got in contact with Elias about it, and beta boards are looking like a sometime before the middle of next year thing. It's not exactly cheap unfortunately, but you do get about the best controller hardware available, unless the FPGA on Smoothie V2 pro is very fast, and it also has 1/256 microstepping, and an inductive sensor port, for better probing system support, and two PRU's to handle step generation that are each about as fast as the Smoothie V2's main SoC.

And if you don't need a PT100, well, the BBB+ replicape are actually cheaper than a Rambo. I like that, in all honesty.

Thanks for your well written explanation Xenocrates .

I figure since the question was asked, a complete answer, and a fairly complete answer to possible other questions that go along with it is the best way to ensure that people don't go and do something like order a PT100 for a smoothie, and then complain when they can't get it working at all, or when they attach a PT100 straight to the thermistor socket and blow something on the rambo or something, or attach the daughterboard again straight to the thermistor socket, and it's always ~30 degrees off.

Also note that to use it, once again you need either Marlin, or the 92. release of Repetier, unless you want to create a custom thermistor table (I did it, it's not hard, but it is annoying). If you grok arduino code far better than I do, or even code at all, there is a nice breakout board for 3 and 4 wire PT100s as well, which uses a 15bit SPI bus to connect to arduinos. Much more accurate than a 2 wire PT100, but it raises costs even more, and does require some serious modification of the controller code, as I don't think either is currently designed to pull temp data off SPI.