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While the buffers have helped a ton in giving me better consistency, I would really like to move to a large gear extruder for better management. I printed up some new housings based upon the Galileo 2 Extruder and have been doing some fit testing.

So far things look good, but the printer is working so well right now its hard to justify a teardown and install. The design is also still pending some final tweaks, so I may hold off installing for a bit. I have a number of things I would like to swap out now including the main MCU.

I’ve gone through a few revisions of the buffer, but it’s got a few design issues I have not been able to resolve. Part of the problem is loading new filament into it is very tricky, but the path the filament takes is to tight of a u-turn. I’ve gone back to the drawing board and am trying a new idea. Instead of mounting it on the side or rear of the printer, it will be mounted vertically on top.

The new buffer has the extruder above the run-out sensor. The idea is to have the extruder pull filament from the spool, and push it down to the run-out sensor. The “buffer” is now a short length between the extruder and the sensor. The extruder is not rigidly attached to the buffer, and slides along guide rails as the buffer fills. A switch on the extruder rides one of the guide rails, and triggers when the buffer is full.

The buffer extruder is mirrored off of the main extruder in the toolhead, but is tuned to be slightly faster in order to fill the buffer. Ideally, they run at the same rate most of the time.

Unfortunately the plastic guides are not working well. I’m going to pickup a couple 100mm rails with sleds to reduce friction, and keep everything aligned. Here’s a video of it working.

I have tried quite a few different fans for the exhaust port on the top/back of the voron, but so far none of them have been able to produce enough static pressure to actually push air through a real filter media. I’m using somewhat generic round filters i picked up off amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0921DZLPK

So to try and get better pressure, I am trying a blower assembly. The blower https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZFPDLE2 pulls air from the chamber, and blows it down into the filter.

The blower is configured to turn on at a setpoint, based upon the filament being used. For PLA I set it to 35 C. So far it is regulating temps well, and significant air is moving through the filter now.

In order to move my spools further from the printer, and to also solve feed issues to the tool head, I am working on designing a simple buffer that can separate feeding the printer vs feeding the toolhead. I have found there is just too much resistance for the toolhead to handle it on its own. it messes with everything from flow and TAP readings.

The design is to keep the buffer full, and use a contact switch to read once it is full. When the switch releases, run the second extruder to feed into the buffer again.

I took apart my extruder today to see how its going, and it not going well.

So it looks like a bearing was missing on the idler axle here, and it caused some uneven torsion that ended up cutting a notch into it. I ordered up some replacement parts, and found that the original parts I got were really sub par. The new hardware has much better teeth on the filament contact. We’ll see how things go.

I was playing around with vase mode and some simple threads. Came up a nice cheap coin tube.

To get rid of more slop in z homing, I’m going to try the CNC tap.

Install was super simple, but the cable is slightly shorter than I would like. There is no room for routing it properly.

Nice to finally have a screen for direct control.

I’ve been trying to use a run-out sensor from BTT for a month or so, but its just nor working for me. I took it apart and found a few issues with it. The biggest problem was the pinch wheel is smooth metal. On the sense wheel, there was no bearing. It was also made of aluminum on a steel axle, so there was tons of friction and it was jamming.

So, I ground the pinch wheel to give it some texture. Then I modeled up a new sense wheel, and fitted it with ball bearings.

The results so far have been promising.

I have been working on a modular lighting kit for building hexagonal grids. These little bow ties lock them all together. With this design, I can build an unlimited sized array with only three parts.

Here are a few smaller strips printing out and lighting up.