Yay! Finishing up in the hardware department. Got the belts on, motors mounted, and wiring with parallel splices installed for X & Y axes. Took off the disastrously bad universal mount I printed the first time (Hatchbox: Not Even Once), and installed the one I reprinted with GizmoDorks PLA (passable, and Amazon delivered it next day). Here’s a helpful tip: superglue the nuts into the tool holder nut traps, so you don’t spend a half hour trying to screw in the tool mount and instead knocking the nuts out over and over.
Now I’m trying to get the laptop talking to Marlin on the RAMPS board, to see if I can make something move!
Okay, I diagnosed why nothing was moving: the power supply shipped in the kit was wired to the RAMPS terminal block with polarity reversed. Thankfully, the RAMPS seemed to handle that well – the power supply sunk its little heart into the RAMPS board, and its voltage dropped to half a volt, but the RAMPS didn’t let the smoke out. I swapped the polarity, and Houston: We. Have. Motion!
Or maybe the manufacturer of the wall wart that chose blue and brown for wire colors screwed up; we can’t rule that guy out. :v)
What color are your wires?
As shipped, it had brown at the edge of the connector (what should have been negative), and blue at the third position (what should have been positive). But the negative electricities were flowing out of the blue wire and the positive electricities were flowing out of the brown one.
Panic!!!! I wonder how many I screwed up and shipped. I check about every third one.
Kitting ain’t easy. I’m pretty impressed with how everything else came out of the box with nothing missing. I love the fact that the stepper drivers were already installed and tuned (well, I assume they were, because I was too lazy to pull the drivers off to find the vref pad :v). I love the fact that the firmware was preloaded, so as soon as I turned it on, a millimeter gcode command moved a millimeter on each axis. Last night was a whole lot of instant gratification, going from a few loose cables to drawing with a sharpie. Getting all those other bits set up correctly would have taken days otherwise.
Honestly, my only regret with ordering the kit from you is that it punctures the illusion that “I just downloaded this guy’s thing from the internet and printed it out!”, because I have to say that with an asterisk “*and ordered a box of parts from that guy and installed them.” :v) But in principle I could have bought by own darn bolts, and that’s what really matters.
Sorry for that, Glad It didn’t fry anything, usually it’s pretty easy to let the magic smoke out of the bottle.
No kidding, especially with polarity reversals. I say this as someone who knows the sound of a 7805 regular dying from reverse polarity so well that I have diagnosed it when described to me over the phone. :v) The RAMPS design definitely doesn’t suck.
Can’t wait to lash on the DW660 and start making a real mess, but I should probably try to catch up on the work that I’ve neglected due to MPCNC Addiction Syndrome.
I built this thing to mount my DW660 using the interchangeable universal mount: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1245848/#files All of the parts fit nicely except the kt_660_spindle_clamp, which I need to complete the bottom clamp ring. That thing has a little gap in it filled with support material (can't see how to build it without support), but it's so skinny that it's really hard to dig any support out of there. Am I building the right part here, or doing it wrong?
<li>I ordered a hot end what the heck, why not?, and also another polulu driver to run the extruder. The driver came with a heatsink. Because I am an idiot, I didn't read "<em>Leave a note when you order if you would like it opened and glued on.</em>" What do you use to glue the heatsink to the driver?</li>
As for the heatsink, you didn’t hear it from me but a tiny tiny tiny drop of super glue smeared over the surface should work fine on the heat sink. I use thermal glue but most people don’t have that in there junk drawers…
Hi John, I’m the person who designed that clamp - well, I mashed together two parts other people had designed. It’s been a while since I did mine, but looking at it, I know I must have used support to print it, and probably spent some time digging/cutting out the support. If you have options for support in your slicer, you should try playing with the support settings to try and get the minimum amount of support possible, so it’ll be easier to remove.
Sorry I don’t have more details. Like I said, I did mine quite a while ago. It does work well when finished though - it’s what I use on my setup.
okay, I’ll see if I can find a friend with some of this “thermal glue” (sorted next to the unicorn horn and eye of newt), and if that fails, I definitely won’t mention your name when I post photos of my blackened driver. :v)
One more question: what’s an appropriate current setting to set the DRV8825 to for the extruder stepper? Thanks!
(I tried to add this comment to https://www.v1engineering.com/import-extruder/ for others to discover, but comments seem to be closed there; maybe paste the answer onto the product page for the extruder?)
Thanks for designing the part! For now, I realized I could use slic3r’s cut feature to lop off the problematic part and be back to just a clamp. Then I’ll try dialing the support way down and see if I can build it as you designed it, which I think is meant to add on a vacuum shoe.
Hey Jon, if you aren’t planning on using PCFlyer’s vacuum shoe, which is what I made that part for, then you should just use the 660 lower clamp that Ryan designed: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:944952. That’s the part I mashed up with PCFlyer’s.
In the process of splicing longer steppers, and in the process of installing these replacement motor mounts, I’ve had the motors on and off a few times. And every time, without exception, the 16-tooth pulley gears are loose on the shaft. I can’t get them tight; the 1.5mm hex wrench never feels snug. This makes me sad, because once they’re loose, presumably the shaft can turn until the grub screw hits one side or the other of the D flat, adding backlash. Has anyone else had this problem? Is there a secret to getting the grub screws to stick? I’m thinking of finding some other kind of screw to put in there to which I can apply some torque.
I resolved the loose grub screw problem per the photo: my local Ace hardware had M3x6 button head screws; these had 2mm hex heads that were much easier to torque down. (M3x5 would be better, if you can find them.) Home Depot had socket head screws, but the heads were too big and would interfere with the motor mount.
I swapped my roller/motor mount bolts from 5/16" x 2 1/2" to x3", to get some bite into the lock nuts. Jumping up to the next size added way more thread than I really wanted, but as shown, there’s no interference with the middle assembly travel. I turned them around so the bolt ends weren’t sticking out where they’d snag things, but I also like them this direction because the bearings sit on the smooth shoulder, not the threads.
Most of tonight’s time went into cable routing, splicing, and termination. Now I have nice drag chains for Z and X axes, with enough cabling for the motion motors, all the doohickeys on the extruder toolhead, and also for the endstops, should I install them against the designer’s better judgment. :v)
The extruder added a lot of detail work, but that’s not even what I built this for! I also finished the router mount today, so what I should be doing is firing that thing up and making some sawdust! Soon.
So, since it now has a wicked spinning death blade attached to it, my build gets upgraded to viciousness:
How I got this to work:
Downloaded the DXF logo from the shop.Import it into Inkscape.Delete some duplicate curves.Duplicate the curves, and use Path->Inset to ensmallen the curves by half a tool radius. Inset doesn't actually let you control how much it shrinks, which is silly, so I eyeballed it.Run the gcodetools path-to-gcode inkscape extension. I manually frotzed the output a fair bit to get feedrates how I wanted them. I'm now poking around a little at the extension's source code to get it dialed in a little more automatically.
I also fiddled around with feedrates, to see what the steppers are happy with. On X & Y, 8000 seems okay, 9000 starts to chatter a little. On Z, 600 skips, 500 seems okay, but I was testing with no tool installed. Maybe I’ll need more margin there when it’s actually hauling a heavy tool around.
Oh, here’s some great advice: when you’re experimenting with travel limits, if you run the Z axis up too high, the nut and spring falls off the lead screw. And when you’re trying to fumble the nut back onto the leadscrew, lowering the Z won’t help, because the nut won’t thread past the middle Z bearings. (I mean, it made me appreciate the economy of design, but I’ll admit I muttered a little.) That’s okay, because when you get frustrated trying to fit your fingers behind the universal tool mount, you can always get a better angle on it by tipping the machine up one one side wait stop what are you doing why are you sliding the thing all the way down to the end BAM!. Okay so that’s also a bad idea; leave the machine level. So yeah, you should take the tool mount off, even though that means the nut traps are going to fall out. Good thing you superglued the nuts into the nut traps, right? Yes, I’m sure you did. Anyway, my nut and spring are back on now, so you don’t need to worry about me.
