mcbeen.com

Every printer has to have a name, and I have decided to go with Kosh, the Vorlon from Babylon 5. The purple/black scheme isn’t perfect since Koch was more of a green tinted alien, but some of the Vorlons were purple, so I’m going with it. Vorlon is too close to Voron. I’m making a mural for the back of the printer.

I converted the image to an SVG, then imported it into onshape, and extruded the geometry.

As you can see can see above, we have some moderate extrusion issues. printer still needs tuning. I went ahead and ran some test prints to see where I was at.

Lots of flow and under-extrusion issues. Going to need to do some calibration.

Decided to print out some 270 degree hinges that turned out excellent. Also embedded magnets in them to hold the doors when open.

Things are not perfect yet, but the printer is printing, so I decided to go ahead and register for a serial number.

I’ve been working on getting a few things completed, I discovered that led light strips fir perfectly in the extrusions, so I am wiring a 24v string into one of the heater connections on the MP8. As you can see in the second image, it makes an amazing task light with no glare in the camera above the doors.

Camera module. This unfortunately has turned out to be a complete failure as it just almost immediately over heats. Vendor says they are working on a fix.

Sure looks great though. High res, high frame video feed.

the SSR for the bed was getting way hotter than I would like, so I picked up a heatsink that just barely fits. Stays reasonably cool now.

The build plate arrive today and I was able to do my first bed mesh. It did not turn out well.

For some reason, I was getting a really weird spike on the y axis, and I could not figure out why. there was nothing under the bed. Everything seemed to be working properly. Then I went and pressed on the bed, and I found that it was badly warped.

There must have been some kind of manufacturing defect, so I had to send it back for replacement. Not great, as at the moment these large 350mm build plates are hard to get.

And they look great. He printed them all on a Bambulabs x1 and they have come about perfect. Everything looks great.

Getting the gantry fitted and aligned.

Electronics bay is just about done. For power bus distribution, I am using wago connectors instead of screwdown terminal blocks

Attaching belts to the carriage. unfortunately I really screwed up and was not paying attention to the belt width for the Z axis. I accidentally used a 9mm belt on the back left, and cut it too short. Now I have to buy more,and the belts are expensive! As you can see, I went ahead and wired in the limit switches just in case I need them. even if I don’t use them for homing, I would like to have them for triggering an emergency stop. I also went ahead and printed up a tap carriage because why not. This thing is already overly complex on bleeding edge branches. What could go wrong.

Time to hook up the toolhead MCU. Luckily it all went well and is responding to commands from klipper.

The bed is here! My brother did me a solid and bought me a MandalaWorks aluminum bed with magnetic inserts. It’s really amazing, and heavy.

The first attempts and moving the gantry and leveling. Yea i know there is no bed, but I was excited.

This lead to a nice gouge in my pretty aluminum bed that I have to look at now everytime I remove the build plate. I guess that’s better than gouging a plate.

While I wait for the plastic parts, I am working on testing all the electronics and figuring out how klipper installs. On the MP8, there are two SD slots. One for the cm1/rpi, and the second for the MP8. One thing that has not been simplified is getting the firmware to load on the MP8 mcu. Getting the compute module setup with linux is pretty easy as you just load it on the SD card and boot.

After compiling klipper for the MCU, I was able to load it over DFU mode using my desktop, and then was able to discover and address the MCU through the gui. Then came the fun of trying to figure out pinouts on the MP8, that don’t seem to be quite right. But i’m able to spin motors now at least.

Oh yea, one other thing. I decided to go with canbus for the toolhead, but so far its been a bit difficult to get everything to cooperate. Yet another MCU for me to get flashed and communicating. I seem to be having protocol issues, and I’m having trouble making out where the problem could be. I didn’t realize how new this branch of klipper was. Maybe I should switch to a harness. I’m also setting up with sensor-less homing(diag) so I don’t have to wire up limit switches.

For motors, I cheaped out to save some money and bought a set from stepperonline. We’ll see if that becomes an issue. So far they seem fine.