New Octoprint box

Well, I finished my new Octoprint box using a RPI2B (had one around), built a case for it, and have it running off the 24V printer power supply. I added two big LED lights to light up the printer bed that I can control from Octoprint. Here are some pictures. I designed the case using Alibre. Oh yes, the printer is a Prusa I3MK3S.


The tan things on the side of the box are the LED lights fastened on with hot glue, and the little light inside is a 24V-5V converter. The little box on top is the camera. I used a custom HAT prototype board to mount the converter and a darlington, and a relay to drive the lights. I had an old flexible tripod that I mounted the whole thing on. That way, I can play around with the best place to put the thing.



Another pict. The gray box in the upper left is an Ethernet switch that drives the Octoprint, plus 2 printers (the laser printer seen above, and a Canon Pro-1000).



A screenshot of the Octoprint control panel showing the camera. I forgot to turn the LED lights on, but they light up the bed fairly well.

Octoprint is great. No more SD cards. I used a RPI2B 1) because I had it, and 2) it doesn't draw much power so I could run the whole thing off the 24V printer power supply.

Brilliant! Thanks for sharing all that!!

Steve J said:

Octoprint is great. No more SD cards. I

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Yeah, I've heard a lot of great things about it! I'm often tempted to give it a try, but just can't get the motivation to jump on that learning curve... at least not yet!

Steve J said:

I added two big LED lights to light up the printer bed that I can control from Octoprint.

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Very cool! Do you have any pics of it from the front? I'd be curious to see what they look like (I've been passionate about LED's since I was 10!)

As per popular request, the front view. I just stuck the LED panels on to see how they would light up the printer bed. I got the panels from a surplus house. The panels run on 12V, so they are wired in series. These are left over from another project. I'll permanently mount them when I find a good place to mount the box. You can see the underside of the RPI. In fact, when I decide to permanently mount the thing, I'll print either the top or bottom with some ears to permanently mount the panels. Right now, I stuck them on with low temperature hot glue.

Very cool, thanks!

I was going to ask where you got them, LOL!

BTW, is that speaker wire? If so, that's also pretty funny since I was JUST using old speaker wire I've had for like 20 years for a solar project.

Yes, that is 18 Gage speaker wire. Unfortunately, it doesn't have polarity markings, so I had to use an ohmmeter to properly wire them. The panels are polarity sensitive. I use a adjustable bench power supply to test everything.

I got the panels here: https://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/ They also have a bunch of electronic stuff, including the relays. Good resource. I have a junkbox full of left over project components and wire. I try to use what I have on hand. The RPI was left over from another project.

The Prusa printer was a kit, and unfortunately, Joe Prusa doesn't understand that tolerances of printed parts aren't uniform, so I had to do some drilling and modification to get the thing together. It prints nice, however. Good thing I have a stash of metric fasteners.

One day, I am going to build a 2' x 2' printer that prints fast. I have my own ideas on how a 3D printer should be built. In the meantime, the Prusa machines works fairly well.

Steve J said:

I got the panels here: https://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/ They also have a bunch of electronic stuff, including the relays. Good resource. I have a junkbox full of left over project components and wire. I try to use what I have on hand. The RPI was left over from another project.

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Very cool, there's a place locally that has a bunch of stuff like that in misc. boxes, etc. I have to avoid it or I come back with a ton of items I don't need. LOL!

Steve J said:

The Prusa printer was a kit, and unfortunately, Joe Prusa doesn't understand that tolerances of printed parts aren't uniform,

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Wow, really!?!? I thought Prusa's value-proposition is the fact that their stuff is supposed to be much higher quality than the other stuff out there?!?

Steve J said:

One day, I am going to build a 2' x 2' printer that prints fast. I have my own ideas on how a 3D printer should be built.

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OOOhhh, that sounds awesome! I have so many tiny prints I do on my CR-10 that if I ever got to the point where I had backlogged prints, a smaller printer would be nice to have on hand.

... of course, as I type this, I have an brand-new Ender 3 sitting in a box next to me that's now 8 months old. LOL!

Perhaps Prusa printers are much higher quality than the Chinese printers, but I wouldn't know. All I know is that I had a bad Einsy board and needed some additional Y rod mounts before the thing would come together. I also had to shim things a bit to get them to align. I don't know the economics of his operation, but I wouldn't have designed the printer the way he did, although it works fine and gives good results. I had to take apart the extruder several times to get the filament out sensor to work. However, good thing I had a stash of metric fasteners. His idea of a movable Y bed and an X axis carriage is interesting, and means simpler moving parts, but I'm not impressed with the implementation. I was considering a Chinese printer, but I don't like the Bowden tube arrangement that they like to use. It's really tough to print flexible filament with Bowden tubes, and changing filament is a pain because you have so much filament in the Bowden tube. I have a Chinese Prusa-style printer (with Bowden-tubes) that I had to redesign to get it to work, but I don't use it much because I couldn't correct the basic design flaws. I also have a Flashforge Creator Clone (Monoprice Maker) that I was using until the Prusa.

I do all the design using Alibre.

Voron printers are not cheap to build but they released a new design last week that looks interesting. A bed slinger that has an enclosure and a semi direct drive. I expect like the rest of the Voron models it will be able to print ABS as well as PLA.

http://vorondesign.com/voron_switchwire

Nifty said:

Very cool! Do you have any pics of it from the front? I'd be curious to see what they look like (I've been passionate about LED's since I was 10!)

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They say you are easliy LED

Redbrickman said:

Voron printers are not cheap to build but they released a new design last week that looks interesting. A bed slinger that has an enclosure and a semi direct drive. I expect like the rest of the Voron models it will be able to print ABS as well as PLA.

http://vorondesign.com/voron_switchwire

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It's still a notched belt drive. You can see the belt in the just underneath the extruder. I hate notched belts because they stretch and needed to be carefully tensioned. The old plotters I helped design used flexible steel cable around a pulley with a spring tensioner. Neat design. 3D printers should use that for the x and y axis, but they don't (don't know why). The motors on the plotter axis were big honken' SloSyn synchronous motors that had an encoder to tell where the carriage was. Then we closed the loop with a PID controller, implemented in the plotter's firmware. Worked nicely and was FAST. Didn't need any futzing, either. Those were the days. 3D printers should be like that, but they aren't.