Eclips3D

My current 3D printer is an Eclips3D, a CoreXY design. Here's a quick tour.

First a general overview:

I bought almost all of the part from Eclips3D or from the links in the standard bill of materials. The black plastic parts are from the kit. The red, blue, orange and white ones are replacements or additions. I can't quite bring myself to cut the belts to the exact length, so they are tied up to the cooling fan.

On the subject of belts, I was worried at how close the belts came to the flanged bearings in the front corner, and so I changed the innermost ones on each side to F605zz bearings instead of F625zz. They are 2mm smaller in diameter, and this created a little extra clearance. You can't really see the difference, but here's a picture anyway:

Around the back of the extruder, it looks like this:

You might just about be able to see that the E3D hotend has a screw-in thermistor instead of the fiddly standard one. I hear that E3D are about to make something like this standard. The cable support is from an entry on Thingiverse by Theo1001. My wiring is not nearly as nice as his; I've never been much good at making projects look pretty. I found early on that the cable bundle would sometimes flop down in front of the X end switch with bad consequences. This lifts it a little out of the way. The hot end is wrapped with ceramic tape in what Tom Sanladerer would call a Kapton burrito. See a previous posting for details.

The rods for the X carriage are mounted in a variant of the original design, again from Thingiverse. Some of the bolts are 18mm instead of the original 16mm ones, as 16mm is only just long enough. Once I changed to these, the X movement went from a bit grindy to being a lot quieter. They are printed in PETG. All the other printed parts are PLA.

I capped the top and bottom of the uprights: the bottom so it didn't damage my desk, and the top to clean up the appearance.

The one at the back left also has a filament guide. These are my own design.

And here is the spool holder. It supports a full 1kg roll of filament fine.

The print bed is a piece of 3mm mirror glass with PrintBite. I've only just fitted the PrintBite, and so far I am very impressed with its ability to grab the first layer when its hot and release it cleanly when it cools down. Around the back of the bed, I have a height adjuster by cporto. He has a newer and better version.

Turning to the electronics, I have the power supply mounted to the lower frame with a couple of brackets I knocked up, and a separate power switch for the LED strip next to the mains switch.

I originally used a RAMPS+Arduino combo, since the recommended Azteeg board was out of stock. I recently switched over the the Azteeg, using a mount that I designed.

If you have sharp eyes, you can also see a reinforcement on the SD card socket, as it was a bit flimsy and came loose from the board. The board is the Azteeg X5 mini version 3 with the new SD5984 1/32 stepper drivers. After the RAMPS, it is incredibly smooth. The drivers get very hot, even after tuning down the current. And they are pretty.

I had difficulty getting my Windows desktop to talk to the board over USB, so in the end I connected the USB to a Raspberry Pi running Repetier Server. I mostly use the Ethernet connection for uploading new configs via the Smoothieware web interface. I have both the cooling and E3D fans attached to the board, meaning I can turn the annoying E3D fan off when I am not printing. The config for this version of the Azteeg X5 is slightly different from the previous version, with the E3D fan attached to port 0.26.

There is still more tuning to do, but so far the speed and print quality are great. I've reliably printed with layer sizes down to 0.05mm. I might in future change over to the Titan extruder. For now, I'm happy.

Ceramic tape

The Eclips3D has two fans: the usual E3D hot end fan, and a layer cooling fan. I was finding that the layer cooling fan was so powerful that the hot end could not keep up when it was running at 100%. I had prints where the temperature of the hot end dropped from 195C all the way down to 130C due to the fan. One way of dealing with this is to set the maximum rate of the fan to 50% or 70%. Another suggestion, from the Eclips3D forums, is to use ceramic tape to insulate the hot end. Amazon sells small amounts of the tape for a cheap price.

The tape cuts easily with scissors or a scalpel and you can wrap it round the heater block and secure it in place with Kapton tape. In my case I wrapped it around so that it would insulate the block from the cooling fan while leaving the ends of the block free. This is good as there isn't much airflow across the ends, and it gives a smooth surface to stick the Kapton to. It looks like this:

Here is the tape before I attached it:

And on the hot end:

(Sorry for the poor picture quality on this one.)

It seems to work quite well in this arrangement. Here is a graph of the temperature in the incident I described before:

And here is a graph from after:

This shows the hot end coming up at 195C with it well away from the bed. At the 11:00 mark, I turned on the fan 100%, with no difference. At 12:30. I moved the Z position to about 1mm, so the backwash from the bed would have an effect. There is a bit of instability, but it did OK.

Finally here is a print of a thin walled cube with the fan at 100%. The print started at the 37:00 mark.

This confirms the dip and recovery for low Z. I will probably still run the fan at a maximum of 70%, except for bridging, so this is a worst (or at least bad) case test.  I have not done PID tuning since attaching the tape and I expect it to be more stable afterwards.

I recommend it if you have this problem. It's cheap, easy to apply, and seems to do a good job. Allegedly you can even touch the hot end when it is hot with this tape on it. Shall I try this? No.

New controller woes and wins

I've been converting my printer (Eclips3D, not the Folger 2020) to use a Smoothieware-compatible board. I settled on the Azteeg X5 Version 3. There's a long story about another board I tried, which I might go into separately. The Azteeg is a nicely-engineered board. Some of the features I like are built-in Ethernet, digital control of the stepper voltages and swappable stepper drivers. I got 1/32 stepper drivers using the new SD5984.

Getting going with this has been a challenging experience.

My previous configuration was a RAMPS board with Marlin, and I connected to it from Repetier Host on a Windows machine. The first problem I had with Smoothieware was that Windows won't maintain a serial connection to it. In Repetier, the connection times out after a few minutes, and the same thing happens using a terminal connection (such as PuTTY). In a posting on the Smoothieware forum, I described the problems in detail. The short summary is:

• it only happens on Windows.
• it happens on both Windows 7 and Windows 10.
• it happens on more than one Windows machine.
• it isn't fixed by making sure Windows keeps the USB hub out of suspend mode.
• it happens with a different Smoothieware-compatible board as well.

The Smoothieware people were not very helpful in solving this problem: the thread went into a discussion of problems with Repetier and putting the blame on Windows. Neither of these holds up well. It's not Repetier, as the problem appears with PuTTY. And it's unconvincing that the problem is a systemic one in Windows, as no other device, from RAMPS, Arduino and other embedded boards up to commercial peripherals has ever shown this problem. My best guess is that it is some interaction between the USB stack on Windows and the implementation on the board, probably in the firmware. The thread ended with no resolution.

Given this unsolved problem, there are a couple of ways forward: either access the printer over its Ethernet interface, or switch to a different computer and continue to use USB. There is actually one other option, and that to switch my computer to Linux. This doesn't really work as I have some unrelated software, notably the Google Drive integration, with no counterpart on Linux.

Repetier Host allows you to connect over telnet to a networked printer. It will establish the connection OK, but printing is simply no good. There is a long delay (from a few hundred milliseconds up) after each command, so the print progresses in tiny steps. This probably means Repetier doesn't implement Telnet at a low enough level, using TCP/IP flow control.  Another thing I noticed is that the manual commands make relative movements: click to move by 10 in the X direction and it will move to position X=10 instead. This didn't happen with RAMPS+Marlin. According to the Smoothieware people, the default is absolute movement, but its puzzling why switching boards should cause Repetier to behave differently, as the configuration is broadly the same. The thread on this was again not very helpful.

Another solution is to use Pronterface. It's weak sauce compared to Repetier: no real-time display as you print, no ability to easily drag the objects around to position them, an ugly and inflexible user interface, and not even a kill print button. I use kill print a lot, when I start a print and the first few layers go wrong, or I realize I sliced it with the wrong settings. In Pronterface, the closest is to disconnect, as far as I can tell. It does have one major advantage: printing over TCP/IP works properly. The Smoothieware people recommend Pronterface over Repetier frequently on the forum. If only it wasn't so weak on features and so amateurish in its presentation.

The alternative to connecting by TCP/IP is to use a second computer which a USB connection to the printer and some suitable server software. I had a Raspberry Pi already on my home network, used very occasionally for backups and as a household web server. The best known printer software for the Pi is OctoPrint. You can drag files to its web interface and print them from it. It has, if you install it correctly, Cura engine built in. Some of the features missing in Pronterface are there, though it lacks good preview and arrangement panes. It connected fine, with just the need to reboot after plugging in the USB cable to the printer, and a test print went fine.

Repetier make a server in addition to Repetier Host and there is a build which runs on the Pi. You can upload files to it in a similar way. This also worked, though with a little bit of to-and-fro to set the printer config. It seemed best to change a few setting at a time, then save them. The display in the server was a little weak: it didn't show the temperature anywhere, and there is no preview. However, it's greatest value is that you can set up Repetier Host to communicate with it with full control of the printing and real-time display of the moves it is making.

Based on a couple of test prints, this set up seems to work well. I get all the things I like about the user interface in Repetier Host, together with something which will actually talk to the printer without losing the connection. I will try it more soon and see how it goes.