Jan Griffioen, auteur op LET OP! /Pay attention please

January 23, 2024July 5, 2024

Geetech A30M first use

In mid-June 2020, I started using the Geeetech A30M desktop 3d printer.
The printer can print 2 colors mixed with 2 filament geared drive units on top of the frame and a fan for each feed to the combined hotend.

A few adjustments are needed on this printer if you really want to work well with it.
First of all, I had a lot of trouble with the standard noise from the 24 Volts fan under the bottom plate, which is supposed to provide cooling for the motherboard. This fan is always running at full power.
I put a controller in between with controls on the left side, through a drilled hole. I secured the controller with 2 tie-wraps through the cooling slots on the left side. The dial just comes through the case and you can hardly see it. Most motherboards I use don’t need a fan for cooling because they are placed freely in the open frame but the A30M has a closed case so a little air circulation is necessary. Plan is to add a thermostat control so the knob is no longer needed. Later. The controller is set to the position that there is a lot of air movement but without the whirring of the fan.

Second modification is the addition of a Geeetech 3d touch on the hotend. The bracket was included with the printer, suitable for both a thick inductive sensor and the 3d touch sensor. What’s nice is that the software (or firmware, if you will) as suitable from the factory for autoleveling. Do pay attention to the correct placement of the connectors, from the front view the brown and black wires should be mounted to the right.

The disadvantage is that the firmware from factory does not really work well with auto leveling. In the middle of the hotbed everything goes fine but with larger prints I noticed that the first layer was printed very differently, so everything kept coming loose. So now I work with manual leveling while automatic leveling is possible.

The hotbed is nice and big with a workable size of 320x320mm. The print height is 420mm.

The price was over 400 Euro, and the delivery was from Germany.

I recommend everyone to secure ALL and especially to include the block hook. My one was really not assembled properly. All threads were OK but all bolts were either too tight or not tight at all. I only found this out during the first test print. I stopped and checked everything. Pay special attention to the rollers of the hotbed. It is difficult to reach them but in my case the adjustment wheels were not set at all and did not rotate. The disadvantage of such a desktop printer is that you hardly have any space under the hotbed.
The vertical V-profiles were not mounted perpendicular to the upper profile. That is difficult to repair because everything is drilled through and bolted. I recommend installing corner stiffeners at the back in the top 2 corners. I have them on order and then they can go right on.

And… what some large printers have and the A30M does not: Additional stabilization rods to the front (or to the back, that is also possible) so that the vertical profiles cannot move. Now when you apply a little force there is about 2mm of play on it, despite the solid mounting to the desktop housing.

January 23, 2024

Flightcase for the Indymill

This is only the lower part of the newly built flightcase for the Indymill. It is 15cm high, 75 cm deep and 80 cm wide, all measured on the inside.

The top of the case is 22 cm high on the inside and it will get perspex windows at the front and top. Wheels will get mounted at the rear so the case can be moved standing upright.

The Indymill will be mounted in rubbers underneath and on the sides of the frame. The connectors to the electronics will be mounted in flightcase shells at the front. When all is positioned correctly and connected, the Indymill will be placed in my garage where I will use it in my large(r) shop.

With the 1.5 Kw spindle I intend to mill aluminium and brass, but mainly aluminium.

1st Job will be to machine ‘flat’ the 8mm aluminium plate I have bought some time ago for the heated bed of my Voron 3d printer. The plate is 310x310mm wide and was not entirely flat when I received it, due to the way it was stamped instead of saw’d. Now, I will be able to get it done right. I will use the boring head from my other mill to get this done. My other mill can only work with smaller objects, not anything as large like the Indymill can handle.

January 23, 2024

Flightcase for the Indymill’s electronics

Just ordered me a new case for the Indymill’s electronics from Thomann.de.

The idea is to get everything mounted in the cases, and use the control case with the lid open. The control case gets connected to the Indymill case with multicables and – connectors. When not used, the cables get disconnected from the Indymill and from the control case and go in the Indymill’s case. The electronics controls will be mounted in the lower part of the control case and the connectors are placed on top of the control panel that gets mounted flush with the top rails of the bottom part of the controller’s flighcase. When closed, everything is neatly stored and can be transported damage-free.

I intend to store the controller case inside the Indymill case, but when moving it around the controller case will be separated from the Indymill case to prevent any possible damage to the mill.

And this is the front I designed for the controller flightcase. Right are the connectors and switches. I can use either the big multiconnector or the standard 4-pol round connectors for increased compatibility with other CNC machines.. The green face is for my Samsung Note10 (8 inch) tablet.

January 23, 2024

Triple mixing hotend for A30M

Next to the penta non-mixing hotend, I recently bought this mixing triple hotend, to experiment with it on the A30M. It is not the same as the Geeetech original triple mixing hotend, however it does have some resemblance.

Obviously, this hotend requires 3 extruders via bowden tubes. The extruders I have are all Chinese clones of the 1:3 geared bondtech extruders.

The 3 extruders will be placed on the top horizontal aluminium frame, right where they are originally placed. In fact, I am rebuilding the machine like the A30M from Geeetech that has a mixing triple hotend. But- mine will have the Duet2wifi motherboard instead.

Soon as I install this, I will upload pictures and the config files (and all tool files like tfree, etcetera for the three tools as well).

January 23, 2024

CNC pendant for Duet2wifi and Indymill

On the Duet support site a very good description and software for rebuilding a Chinese CNC-pendant for the Duet2wifi is available.

I used this description to program an arduino pro micro, and connect it to the pendant wired, place it inside the pendant and connected the pendant with 4 wires to the Duet. This works very well.

In the process, I developed some schematics that may be useful to you, available in this post:

Needed: an arduino pro micro and a pendant like this:

In the above picture, the coloured wires on the inside of the CNC pendant are shown. These wires need to be soldered to the correct pins of the Arduino pro micro (at the right)

January 23, 2024

Original ID 1965 leather front chairs for my Citroën ID20 convertible (1970)

2021-June 6th.

Original ID20 chairs for the convertible are very hard to find, especially lately.

Fortunately, I have a complete set on stock with the front chairs side handle to fold the back forward, both left and right in the original brown leather version.

Also, I have the rear bench and back from the same donor ID (1965). The rear bench don’t fit in my 1970 ID20 convertible but the front chairs will fit nicely. I will get the car tomorrow out of the winter storage and will put the chairs in this week. Then, finally, I can take the temporary Volvo C70 chairs out.

I will post some pictures to show what this looks like, asap!

January 23, 2024

Dometic tropicool TC21FL silenced

Recently I bought us a portable dual power cooler from Tropicool, 21 liters content. BUT- as I started it up, the noise was a bit more than I expected.

I already own a larger ‘VRIJBUITER’ 38 liters portable freezer/cooler with a compressor that I silenced last year.

This 40 liter machine had a 50mm (2 inch) fan to cool the condensor and I completely repositioned some movable parts to get a 120mm (4.8 inch) fan in the machine instead. The 120 mm fan is a silent fan and this resulted in an almost silent and better operating freezer/cooler. But- this machine does not run on the car battery, only on A/C 230 Volts.

So- back to the Dometic machine: This is the machine

At the front lower part a large area shows a fan behind the plastic front. A 12 Volts DC fan is positioned behind this front . The fan is managed by the electronics and only switches on and off. No PWM or similar technique is used. This cooler is not working with a compressor but with a/some Peltier element(s) and cooling/heating radiators, so a big aluminium block needs to be cooled by the fan to get the machine to work (and cool or warm the inside). This machine can either cool -25Deg C or warm +25Deg C the inside. A failsafe mechanism prevents freezing and temperatures above 65 DegC.

The picture below shows the original fan below and the replacement fan above.

The original fan was IMHO rather loud at 53 dBm (at 50cm distance), I presume mainly due to its design.

On the net, I read that most users of this machine are pleased with it and don’t think it makes much noise.

But- I need to operate this in our rented place which can either be an apartment, B&B or hotel room during our visits so I want it to make as little noise as possible. The replacement fan is a ball-bearing super-silent PC fan and runs at 12 Volts.

The replacement was quite easy: Open the lower front by removing all crews around and bottom. Disconnect the fan-connector from the electronics board. Unscrew the old fan. Screw the new fan in place. Connect the new fan to the electronics board, replace the housing part and screw it back in place.

So- the result is that this cooler now actually works a lot more silent, AND a lot better.

I could not get a fixed dBm reading with my portable dB-meter due to the low noise level.

Cooling goes faster than before at about 30% as I measured it in difference in the before- and after situation in cooling to 5 degrees C from room temp of 25 deg C. Another succesfull project!

We’ll see how we like this cooler during our short stay in France this summer, in Granville! C) JG 2021-06-30.

Afterthoughts: To be sure that the cooler is indeed super silent at night, I also put in a DC voltage regulator that can regulate the voltage for the fan between 5 V DC and V max (about 12Volt).

During oiur holiday in France, the machine worked awesome.

In the hotel, we experienced no disturbances from the cooler at all, nore in the car.

And it kept everyrhing cool without too much noise.

January 23, 2024

FLY 407 Motherboard RRF3+ wifi + BTT 2.4 inch TFT + multi-extruder

2021-05-11

I got the Mellow Fly 407 board in today, and it now works awesome!

I hooked the Mellow dedicated wifi unit to EXP 1 and EXP2 and to the serial TFT connection, programmed the microSDcard offline on the PC with the files from the proposed Github site and it all went great! (The little added user manual is very good, just follow the directions and it can’t go wrong!)

Burnt the board’s firmware first, then the firmware of the wifi esp module and after setting up the wifi with YAT via USB, I programmed the wifi settings. Then, with the Duet’s WDC PC-remote console via wifi, I uploaded the FLY 407 motherboard with all the latest available firmware: RRF3.4 beta and the latest wifi- and DWC versions.

Then, I removed the serial connection between the TFT connection on the motherboard and the wifi module and plugged in the BTT 2.4 inch TFT at the same serial port. Since there is only 1 tft port available, I use the same serial port as I used for programming the esp wifi module. I already put the RRF3 firmware on the TFT unit.

Well, the results are awesome! On the TFT after connecting you see the extruder step from 0 to 1-2-3-4 and back to 0 so this all works very nice!

I must be honest here: I also tried the Mellow 7 inch screen but this is not yet really working as well to me as the little BTT screen IMHO. The Fly screen is a lot bigger, though, and the Fly 7 inch TFT has great potential. I know that it will also take some getting used to the FLY’s TFT screen layouts. The access to the macro and gcode directory is nice, but since everything is placed differently than the PanelDue screens, it might just take some time to appreciate it more.

January 23, 2024

Reprap CNC with Mellow FLY-CDY-V2 – Duet2wifi clone

To get the Indymill running, at first I chose to use the Duet2wifi and reprap3 as base.

Since I am very familiar with Reprap and with the Duet, I want to try this anyway.

In the end, if it is all installed I need to have software to design and get a file with Gcode and this will be sent to the Duet2wifi controller via wifi, using the Duet’s webinterface that is been developed for CNC in Beta (DWC for CNC).

I currently use Openscad for designing, export as .STL and then make a .nc file for the CNC machine from this with Estlcam.

In Estlcam you can make the machine-specific settings like where the center is, how to set Z=0 et cetera.

The Duet2wifi is my favourite solution because I can if so desired use sensorless homing on any axis. And- because I need to home 2 independant Y axis and I have a lot of experience in making this work I first went for this solution. For my settings with sensorless homing please see THIS POST

When you get a good enclosure for the Duet2wifi, use 24 Volt PSU and good driver cooling blocks, you can push the Amps to over 2 Amp continuously. Works well with my Nema23 steppers. 2.5 Amps is max but we don’t want that, I found that 1.8 Amps works very well and creates enough torque for the Indymill.

After having the Indymill work with sensorless homing I rebuilt all to be used with endstops instead for better stability and compatibility with my other driver board setups. I do want to use the Indymill with several driver setups, and for this setup to be exchangeable, I need the endstops anyhow.

I am currently using reprap boards from Mellow, since they use the raprap firmware that is ported to the STM core that the Mellow boards use.

On top of this, on the esp you can mount the Duet’s DWC software and thus also the DWC CNC software.

I have this currently running on the Indymill with a FLY-CDY V2 board and TMC2209 drivers.

The nice thing about these Chinese boards is, that you can mount any driver you like, and this means that external drivers is also possible.

So, also the external add-on drivers that do closed loop control can be used. < I was thinking to make this my additional project: Try to do sensorless homing on the Y axes with this, use very low power and switch off the Closed loop during homing.. If I can get this to work, you will read all about it!>

For the Duet, a setup is available on the Duet website to use an original pendant handwheel unit and add an arduino Pro micro to make a serial interface for connecting to the Duet! That is a very welcome addition. See this post!

In the next part of this post my current config file with endstops for Duet/reprap/FLY is shown, as this is operaional for the Indymill.

BE AWARE to use the most current DEVELOPMENT firmware versions for a) the board’s initial firmware, b) the DWC firmware and c) the wifi esp program!

; Configuration file for Board: fly_cdyv2 (STMWiFi)
; Firmware: RepRapFirmware for STM32F4 based Boards 3.3beta1_3 (2021-03-08)
; Duet WiFi Server Version: 1.25-01S-D
; DWC from Sidarius, specificlly redesigned for use with CNC 3-axis
; customized by Jan Griffioen sales@jmwg.nl 2021 04 08
; Made for a CNC Cartesian printer with single X,double Y and single Z steppers and a single spindle with external driver.

; General preferences —————————————————————————————————————-
M453 ; CNC Mode
G90 ; send absolute coordinates
M83 ; and relative extruder moves
M550 PDUET_CNC ; set printer name
M551 Preprap ; Machine password
M552 S1 ; WIFI ON

; Network —————————————————————————————————————————-
M586 P0 S1 ; enable HTTP
M586 P1 S0 ; disable FTP
M586 P2 S0 ; disable Telnet
M552 P0.0.0.0 ; IP address (0.0.0.0 = use DHCP)
M554 P192.168.178.1 ; Gateway
M553 P255.255.255.0 ; Netmask
M555 P2 ; Set output to look like Marlin
M575 P1 S1 B57600 ; comms settings S1 for Original PanelDue and Fysetc 7 inch TFT =OK

; Drives —————————————————————————————————————————-
M569 P0 S1 D2 ; physical drive 0 goes forwards using default driver timings
M569 P1 S1 D2 ; physical drive 1 goes forwards using default driver timings
M569 P2 S1 D2 ; physical drive 2 goes forwards using default driver timings
M569 P3 S1 D2 ; physical drive 3 goes forwards using default driver timings
M584 X0 Y1:2 Z3 ; set drive mapping
M350 X16 Y16:16 Z16 I1 ; configure microstepping with interpolation
M92 X640 Y640:640 Z1600 ; set steps per mm
M566 X500 Y500 Z300 ; Set maximum instantaneous speed changes (mm/min)
M203 X2700 Y1400 Z1000 ; Set maximum speeds (mm/min)
M201 X300 Y300 Z150 ; Set accelerations (mm/s^2)
M906 X1800 Y1800 Z1800 I30 ; set motor currents (mA) and motor idle factor in per cent
M84 S100 ; Set idle timeout

; Axis Limits ————————————————————————————————————————-
M208 X0 Y0 Z0 S1 ; set axis minima
M208 X500 Y480 Z100 S0 ; set axis maxima

; Endstops —————————————————————————————————————————-
M574 X1 S1 P”^xmin” ; configure active-high endstop for low end = LEFT on X via pin xmin
M574 Y1 S1 P”^ymin+^ymax” ; configure active-high endstop for low end = REAR on Y1 and Y2 via pin ymin and ymax
M574 Z2 S1 P”^zmax” ; configure active-high endstop for high end = TOP on Z via pin zmax

; Z-Probe ——————————————————————————————————————————
; a probe must be defined here to have a Z=0 DATUM, including the offset (when there is any, If you use the tip of the tool no offset is required. OR, use manual Z-datum setting via a dedicated macro!

; Mesh G29 —————————————————————————————————————-
;M557 X15:215 Y15:195 S20 ; define mesh grid to be called upon by G29 for an authentic Mesh bed levelling IF this is required and possible

; Fans ———————————————————————————————————————————–
M950 F0 C”fan0″ Q500 ; create fan 0 on pin fan0 and set its frequency
M106 P0 S0.5 H-1 ; set fan 0 value. Thermostatic control is turned off

; Tool definition section; —————————————————————————————————————-

M950 R0 C”!e2heat” L25000 ; Create spindle index 0, with PWM pin on heater 2 output and 25000 RPM achieved at full PWM. At this port, add a PWM-> Voltage 1-10V converter!
M563 P1 S”Spindle 1″ R0 ; Create tool 1 with spindle 0 and call it “Spindle 1”

; Miscellaneous —————————————————————————————————————————-
M140 H-1 ; Disable heated bed
M564 S1 H1 ; Disable jog commands when not homed
M98 P”customconfig.g” ; Execute custom config settings

; Epilogue ———————————————————————————————————————————
;M556 S78 X0 Y0 Z0 ; Axis compensation here if needed
;m98 P/sys/leds_show.g ; Neopixels show (max number is 60)
;m98 P/sys/leds_off.g ; Neopixels OFF (max number is 60)
T0 : select first Tool
M501 ; execute config_override.g

January 23, 2024

Indymill increased working space and stability Y-axis

2021 05 13: Yesterday I received the iron plates for my Indymill from Nikodem Bartnik, and it was all very well packed and quickly delivered!

As I always do on any build, I first check the separated axis for best fit and possible improvements. I started with the Y-axis. In the below picture, the left side of the macine is shown, being the left Y-axis. The rest of the machine is not yet attached.

This is how I started with the original design. Ball bearing block (orange) and screw mount (red) are both 3dprinted here.

The Y-axis is somewhat limited in its drive towards the rear of the Indymill CNC machine, due to the bridge plate for the X-axis. This bridge plate is blocked in its movement towards the rear because it hits the bearing block (orange part) that holds the ballscrew in place. By removing a small and unused part of the bridge plate, the movement can get about 6 cm extended towards the rear. The pictures are attached to this post, please see how I made this.

Maximum movement towards the rear (top in the picture) due to a removed piece of the bridge plate

I used the plasma cutter to cut the parts out of the 6mm steel plates and after this was done, I used the lamel grinder to make it smooth. Although I used a guiding rail for cutting, the power was apparantly a bit too much so it is not a very beautiful cut… -) No worries because all still fits very well.