To test the PLA material I never printed with until now I printed some planetary gears.
This is a customized version of Emmet's Gear Bearing on Thingiverse. The tolerance is set to 0.3 in the customizer. I'll print another one with 0.1 as these are even a bit too loose...
Printed in PLA, extruder @ 200°C, heatbed @ 65°C, layer height 200µm, (still no cooling, I really need to connect my PLA extruder fan to my electronics!)
Upgraded my Prusa i3 with a Panelolu 2 display/controller.
The display has an SD-card slot so no need to keep a computer running while printing. You can print G-code right off the sd-card. Saves on power consumption as well!
While printing you can also monitor and change the temperatures for the heatbed & extruder and change the power to the extra extruder fan (needed for PLA).
Because of the 'adapter board' you can plug the LCD into the Sanguinololu without soldering or adding components.
You do need to add an LCD library called Lincomatic to the Arduino IDE and flash updated Marlin firmware to the ATmega 1284P chip. The T3P3 Marlin fork can be found on GitHub.
Full Panelolu2 installation instructions are available at Think3dPrint3d 's blog. When the instructions say: "Don't use Arduino 1.x", then don't! Marlin was originally designed for Arduino 0.23 and does not work on 1.x, trust me...
I've spent days configuring and calibrating the printer to print with ABS and I'm very happy with the print quality. I have a spool with Blue PLA lying around that I want to try next. For that I'm going to install the Panelolu2 display and I need to make changes to my Marlin firmware. As I don't want to mess up anything i'm going to take a backup of my Marlin firmware and Slic3r configuration and share it here with you.
Marlin Configuration.h
for a Prusa i3 (without Panelolu2 upgrade)
Slic3er settings for ABS
I'm only listing the relevant settings that are not 'defaults' in Slic3r. To access all these settings you need to switch from Simple to Expert mode in your Slic3r preferences.
Wiring done for all three axis and the extruder stepper motors. Also the connections to both thermistors and the extruder heater and heatbed are ok. Still need to connect the fans to the ATX power source. (I connected the extruder fan to a free header on the Sanguinololu but I read this is a bad idea)
Setting the Vref to match my stepper-motor-driver configuration. My calculations don't match my measurements (calculated 2.24Volts and measured max 0.74Volts so my sense resistor value must be way off). But hey, the motors are working fine after some manual tweaking while listening to the motors' sound. I'll check what went wrong with the calculations later to fine tune the driver current...
This video shows the X & Z axis move during a test with Pronterface (the Z-axis moves really slow, this is normal).
Another milestone in the building process: To test the extruder I heated up the hotend gradually to 290°C and meanwhile extruded some blue PLA using Pronterface.
Open issues that need to be looked at:
Z-axis & Extruder inversion
The Z axis goes UP while going to the home position in Pronterface. Also the exdruder retracts while it's supposed to extrude and vice versa. So I need to reverse my stepper wiring from ABCD to DCBA or change the inversion setting in Configuration.h in the Marlin firmware and upload it to the Sanguinololu again.
Whoooops, I think I might have fried the Sanguinololu board :/
While fine tuning the driver current for the Y-axis i made a short circuit with my multimeter. Now my Y-axis won't move properly. Just when everything was going so good. Stupid me!
