mcbeen.com

So I started with the overhaul in earnest. After thoroughly lubing up the new rail, and getting it mounted, I attached the new CNC tap v2. The design is improved over v1, but the belts are as much of a pain to attach as before. The belt tensioner worked really well, even though the readout is confusing.

After getting the chamber done, I flipped the machine over to find the brackets for both the power supply and CPU had failed. Going to need a new set. I proceeded to transfer the connectors over to the new board, and reroute a lot of the new connections from the past couple years.

Held my breath, and flipped on the power. No smoke. printer powered up and I was able to connect in. No errors. From there I bumped all the steppers and found I had z3 flipped, so I just flipped the direction pin and then confirmed it was moving right. I then lifted the toolhead, and did an end stop check. The TAP probe seems to be working well. I held my breath and homed X, then Y, then Z. All went well, then I did a gantry level and that succeeded as well.

Testing the extruder went fine as well, so I decided to go ahead and attempts a test print. I was sure Z height was going to be off a tad, and I was right. One nice thing about TAP is the extruder has some “give” to it and will float a couple mm on the bed if you screw up. I ended up lifting Z quite I bit compared to the old sensor, but now appears to be giving perfect first layers.

Now that’s all settled, I tossed to ASA in the spool holder and printed up my new brackets for the MP8 and PSU. Printing came out well! Not too bad. Flipped the printer up and installed the new brackets and got everything secured.

The only issue I’m tracking for now is the filament buffer switch is not triggering. I don’t know if its programming or hardware, but I’ll need to track that down. For now the main extruder is working ok by itself. Over all a very successful maint.

I began maintenance on Koth this morning, starting with removing the toolhead. I have a replacement TAP that uses an optical sensor instead of a microswitch. After removing the old TAP, I found its rail was mostly seized with filament debris. The switch was still operable, but barely. Additionally, the X rail on the gantry was gouged, and the carriage was excessive debris in it as well. All of this is strange as things were fine and lubricated recently.

I then took the extruder apart and found some rather severe damage on the rear motor plate. The failed bearing allows the axle to shift against the stepper, drilling a hole in its face.

Its obviously been overheating, and its failed pretty badly. Looking over my config, I had the current set at 1 amp, so I’m going to drop that down and maybe put a sensor on it to track its temp. I also found some damage on the blower housing where the power cable for the heater core runs through.

The screw that hold the housing in place seems to be limiting damage, but I may been to add some insulation here.

On a positive note, the copper brush I use to clean the hotend is working really well. I just need to shift the brush a couple mm to cover the entire face.

So I have ordered up a new X rail that should be here this weekend. I’m unfortunately kind of stuck until then.

Last night I was able to get the new RGB toolhead lights reprogrammed for the 10 neopixels. This afternoon I finally got around to configuring the shutdown relay for the bed and heaters along with testing the new TMC5160T drivers for X/Y. I have had them forever, but have been too busy with other issues and printing. This is a perfect opportunity. Up until now I have operated everything in uart mode for simplicity, but the 2130 and 51260 require SPI for communications.

The Manta board is setup to jumper all the communications pins into the driver rather than just the data/CS/uart pin. I plugged in all the jumpers for X. Then grabbed a generic config for the TMC2130(X) and pasted in before my TMC2209 block.

## Motor1
[tmc5160 stepper_x]
cs_pin: M1_x_uart #CS/uart data pin
spi_software_mosi_pin: M_MOSI
spi_software_miso_pin: M_MISO
spi_software_sclk_pin: M_SCK
#diag1_pin: PF4
run_current: 0.800
stealthchop_threshold: 999999

Commented out the old driver block, and then renamed the new block to be TMC5160. Next I replaced the pins on the section with aliases I had previously configured, then reloaded. Once it came back online, I ran a quick query:

DUMP_TMC STEPPER=stepper_y

The printer dump all the registers and confirmed communications. It looks like I’m good to go. I then followed the same steps for the Y stepper driver and confirmed it as well.

When I first decided to go ahead with this upgrade, I of course looked over the change log for this new revision to get some idea of what I was in for.

V2.0 Upgrade Notes
 Upgraded MCU to ARM Cortex-M7 STM32H723ZET6 550MHz.
 Added interfaces: servo, I2C, 5V detection, TFT expansion ports.
 Changed EXP1+EXP2 to FPC connectors.
 Increased USB output current.
 Added large-capacity energy storage capacitors to the 5V circuit,
especially at the core board 5V input port, to prevent the 5V supply from
breaking due to excessive current during CM4 startup.
 Upgraded 12V power supply for increased capacity and resistance.

There are a couple items that made it worth while to me. The largest being the updated MCU. Butt here was one thing not listed here in the changes that has kind of thrown me for a loop. All of the pin-outs have changes addresses.

My biggest complaint about Klipper and hardware vendors has been the lack of standardization on pin addressing or aliasing.

• Klipper should have a community maintained list of available PIN names for as many functions as possible, all named in a predictable fashion
• ALL hardware vendors should be required to produce an alias file that maps their internal pin addressing to the Klipper standardized PIN names

This accomplishes two important goals.

• All macros and Klipper CFG files now become hardware agnostic.
• Klipper configs can easily be moved from machine to machine without localized readdressing
• Klipper based printers can easily swap out MCUs by simply swapping out an alias file to match.

So frustrating. I had started on this the first time around, but never fully adopted it as I was not familiar with Klipper. Now, I’m building up an alias table for the new board, and will post it once I finish the migration.

When I first built Kosh, canbus was still in its first weeks of release, and getting it going was a challenge since very few had gone down this route. Klipper/canboot was still being loaded raw in DFU mode making updates difficult. This time things are far easier with help from Esoterical and Butter Pocket Prints.

I did run into one snag though. Since I’m upgrading to a CB2 and Manta Mp8, I went ahead and pulled down the latest linux image from BTT that’s based upon linux 6.1. Everything went really well until I tried to bring up canbus on netplan. I was able to get netplan to see the interface, but nmcli just refused to bind or configure it. The linux distro has legacy networking disabled, and I didn’t like the idea of shutting down netplan and reverting. So instead I pulled an older linux4 version that worked perfectly.

Katapult loaded without issue, and chain-loaded Klipper with canbus enabled.

Relevant info:

• Mainboard flashing info
  • Instructions for mainboard
• Toolhead flashing info
  • instructions for toolhead

The basic idea is this:

1. Load Katapult (bootloader/flash tool)
2. Load Canbus enabled Klipper using Katapult

Command history:

service klipper stop
cd ~/katapult/
make menuconfig
make
lsusb
sudo dfu-util -R -a 0 -s 0x08000000:force:mass-erase:leave -D ~/katapult/out/katapult.bin -d 0483:df11
~/klippy-env/bin/python ~/klipper/scripts/canbus_query.py can0
python3 ~/katapult/scripts/flashtool.py -i can0 -q
cd ~/klipper
make menuconfig
make clean
make
python3 ~/katapult/scripts/flashtool.py -i can0 -q
python3 ~/katapult/scripts/flashtool.py -i can0 -f ~/klipper/out/klipper.bin -u 0ac8f7c0c631
python3 ~/katapult/scripts/flashtool.py -i can0 -q
~/klippy-env/bin/python ~/klipper/scripts/canbus_query.py can0
service klipper start

From the beginning, I have mounted a cleaning brush along the back edge of the build plate for head cleaning. It’s pure copper to prevent head damage, and its been very good at keeping buildup off the nozzles. Unfortunately, since this is a TAP based voron, this has caused issues. In order to reach the cleaning head, the kinematics have to be fully initialized. The problem is I need to clean the nozzle before I can properly level the gantry and home the z axis. The dirty nozzle throws off the leveling calculations randomly, but is generally good enough. I can then scrub the nozzle, and get a perfect calibration. It just takes two cycles and slows things down.

With moving the brush to be mounted on the gantry, I no longer need to level the gantry. I can just home x and Y, then manually move the nozzle over to the brush for scrubbing. Once scrubbed, I can level Z. At least that’s the plan. We’ll see how this goes once installed.

IT took so long to get Kosh stable, that once it was working well, I was resistant to making any changes. I’ve built up quite a list of upgrades and fixes over the past 18 months

• Upgraded CNC-TAP using optical switch rather than mechanical switch. Carriage also has slight redesign for better rigidity.
• Multiple extruders. Galileo2, LGX Clockwork2. Not sure which way I will go on this. I may end up just upgrading CW2
• new mainboard MCU with faster processor to fix timing issues with canbus under load
• new CPU for faster services, better efficiency
• new TSMC2160 drivers for x/y axis
• aluminum endcaps for gantry for better belt tensioning
• cpap fresh air supply for part cooling
• filament sensors before and after extruder on toolhead
• filament cutter
• ECAS 4 fitting for top on the toolhead
• RGBW light kit for toolhead for better part lighting
• Power relay for AC – automatic shutdown module

I’m starting with building up a new toolhead I can swap in as soon as all my parts arrive. I’ve decided to stick with Clockwork2 since its the reference for filamatrix. Filamatrix is a modified stealthburner toolhead for working with the BoxTurtle AMS system.

I’ve printed up the parts in ASA and ABS and spent the past couple days fitting everything and making sure all my hardware is mounted cleanly.

For the CPAP adaptor, I have been looking to see if there was a way to redirect a portion of the cool air to the MCU as its been getting a little bit warmer than I would like. Things are awfully tight in that area though. Gearing, motor, and filament cutter have all gone in well. So far I’m not seeing any jamming along the filament path. Driving the extruder is still smooth.

The wiring harness for the filament sensors is done as well, and I’m going to try and wire them into the bltouch connector. It has dual ground and signal pins which should be perfect.

I tested out the LED strand finally today. I have been waiting a long time to get this in. It’s an alternate version of the lighting string from fystetc. The wiring is attached with connectors and de-straining which makes it more resistant to vibration. It includes 8 leds in the logo for better animations and feedback along with RGBW leds on the tool head leds for far brighter and cleaner lighting. Very excited to get these programmed in.

My Voron has been an excellent printer, but there have been a couple of problems that were not blocking, but were annoying. One of them was chamber temp control. Most of the time I’m just printing PLA, where it doesn’t matter since my default config keeps the chamber below 35C. When ever I want to print with ABS and ASA I “have” to manually set temps on the printer. The printer is configured to look for the parameter in PRINT_START, but it hasn’t been working I have been looking into it for a long time, but finally found the cause this evening. The printer config in Prusa Slicer was missing chamber temps from its call of print start. Prusa Slicer->Printer->General->Start G-Code

print_start EXTRUDER=[first_layer_temperature] BED=[first_layer_bed_temperature] CHAMBER_TEMP=[chamber_temperature] CHAMBER_MIN_TEMP=[chamber_minimal_temperature]