# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged electronics

24

3D printer controllers have to do a lot of stuff very, very fast. Performing kinematics and dynamics calculations while sending many thousands of precisely-synchronized step pulses per second is really, really hard. The 8bit AVR line of microcontrollers used in older 3D printer controllers is basically a late-1990s era Mr Coffee processor. They are ...

13

The stepper motor itself does not. You may want to inspect the motors for debris or dust. Depending on your configuration you may want to check on parts of your printer that connect to your stepper motor such as shaft couplings, pulleys, lead screws/threaded rods and belts. The stepper motor wires should occasionally be inspected for wear and strain.

12

The four main motor speed limits in a 3d printer are: Firmware step generation frequency limits Firmware motion planner effects Loss of torque and precision due to motor coil inductance and back-EMF effects Mid-band resonance Step generation rate limits will depend on the firmware and controller board used. There is a significant range, particularly when ...

11

Generally, AVR is in fact less powerful than many ARM cores used today. Most printers with AVRs don't have floating-point coprocessors, although a lot of the step and movement control can be done in integer-only math (except for G2/G3). Marlin can interrupt for step handling up to 10000 times per second on AVR, translating to 40000 steps per second. This isn'...

10

No, stepper motors do not require maintenance. They are a brushless kind of motor, so they do not have brushes that need to be replaced.

10

Electrical engineering can be quite complex, but in this case you can save yourself with same simple equations/relations. Using the following formulae: Voltage ($\ U$) equals current ($I$) multiplied by the electrical resistance ($R$) $$U=I \times R$$ and Power ($P$) equals the square of the current multiplied by the electrical resistance  P=I^2 \...

8

No, do not use this fuse. The current rating is too high to be reasonable for your printer. It will "work" in the sense that your printer will get power, but it won't provide anywhere near as much protection as a lower-rated fuse. 10A is a lot of current for mains voltage. Depending on what else you have plugged in, there is a fair chance your home's 15A ...

8

The ampacity question is not completely answerable because CAT6 does not specify wire gauge, so the current limit will depend on the specific gauge you get. CAT6 can be anywhere from 22 AWG to 24 AWG, and depending on who you ask this can be good for as much as 7A or as little as 0.5A. Given that you will have a bunch of wires in a bundle, this may cause ...

8

The most important "safety" advantage when using 24V (compared to 12V) is that to get the same power, you only need half the current. A 192W heated bed would need 16A at 12V, but only 8A at 24V. Since one of the most common safety issues is underrated screw terminals being used for the heated bed (just search for "3d printer fire"; you'll find quite a few ...

8

In the world of (cheap) printers, "MOSFET" has taken on a meaning of its own. For a long time, 3D printers have had MOSFETs on board of their motherboards to switch the heated bed. In the past two years or so, we've seen a surge of (mainly) Chinese printers where the on-board MOSFETs (or, more often, the terminal blocks) weren't rated for the high current ...

8

The "shock" is likely from noise filtering circuitry at the power supply's input. For filtering, every power supply has a small capacitor that connects the live input wire to ground (a so-called "class Y capacitor"). A small amount of current can flow through this capacitor, which can give an annoying, but otherwise harmless shock/tingle. Grounding the power ...

7

I did this for some of the wiring on my printer, and it's working fine so far. The two cautions are: At @tom pointed out, the heater is the high current item, so be careful of the wire gauge, and avoid running the wire where air can't circulate well to cool it. Wire ratings differ greatly depending on whether they're in a bundle (poor air circulation) or ...

7

As 0scar noted, this looks suspiciously like a JST connector, but the left one is not a JST RCY connector and it is neither one of the common JST PH nor JST XH, JST manufacturer pages show. In fact, it's not a wire-to-wire JST connector. The BQ-store claims it is a 2.5 mm JST connector, but JST has some 10 dozen different types of connectors, some three ...

6

Many 3d printer motherboards are based on Arduino/Atmega microcontroller and just add some stepper motor drivers, MOSFETs and such in a single board. That explains why you use the Arduino IDE to update or modify their firmware. Now why you would want to use an Arduino + an Arduino shield board like RAMPS? Well if you're not good at electronics, are happy ...

6

I suggest looking at the maximum amperage draw for all components that could be on at one time, and then find a power supply that can supply at least 20% more current. You would never want to get a supply rated for lower current than your max draw, because then it will affect the torque or your motors, or the temperature to which your heaters can get. ...

6

Electrical engineer here. There is nothing odd about putting a PCB in an oven. Any surface mount PCB is assembled using a reflow oven which heats all the components, as well as the PCB itself, several degrees for quite some time up to the 'soak' temperature, which is 150 °C. After that, the PCB (and components, still not soldered but held down with ...

6

An 8bit Atmega can provide bare-bones delta performance with Marlin (eg 40mm/s print speed) or pretty good performance with Repetier (due to more optimized algorithms). For a small and simple delta like a bare-bones Mini Kossel, 8bit may be fine. If you want to do high-speed printing or use any of the fancier features, you should go with 32bit. The big ...

6

As pointed out by Ryan Carlyle, not all 3D printing filament is flammable (such as PET and PETG), and the question therefore rather becomes: Can 3D printing be used to make proper electronic cases? And the short answer to that is yes. 3D printing allows to make customized cases of all varieties. Also, since there is huge variety of materials available, you ...

6

It is quite likely not a thermocouple, but a thermistor: A thermocouple would look like a small blob of metal. The tip of your temperature sensor appears to be a glass bead, which is a commonly used way to encase thermistors. Thermocouples are polarized. The fact that the wiring is not "directional" suggests it is a thermistor. Thermocouples are used in ...

5

It depends. Protecting your electronics from being touched by random bits of conductive material which would short and fry them is always a good idea. If it's something that will be visible, then a pleasant printed casing might go well. You might just as well use any other casing though, there's no requirement it be 3D printed. For a very small ...

5

The biggest issue with RAMPS 1.4 (and 1.5) is the power connector is prone to melting/burning, this appears to be fixed on 1.6 with the use of screw terminal blocks. I've used RAMPS 1.4 with both 12v and 24v power supplies and never have had any issues with the fuses or the power connector but mine have only come from Ultimachine or RepRapDiscount. A RAMPS ...

5

The drawback of RAMPS 1.5 and 1.6 are that they use SMD polyfuses which are a little more difficult to replace (for some people) than the large fuses from the RAMPS 1.4. However, the fuses of the RAMPS 1.4 are sticking out, then tend to bend once in a while when you work on the board and could therefore become prone to metal fatigue and break. Adding on top ...

5

I own the Ender 3, and it runs on 24V, as this photo of the power supply shows: From power supply to the board, it uses a 2-wire line connected with a XT60 plug/jack that is common on RC cars: The board itself is a proprietary design and labeled as "V1.1.2". The Voltage in is the lowest input on the left: The Cooling fan (blue-yellow wire), the hotend ...

5

You need to take particular care when using plug adaptors - they are not always made to a high standard, and it is possible that the earth connection is not present. If you suspect that the earth connection won't allow a 13 A fuse to blow, it would be good to destroy the adaptor. A simple cable (without adaptor) will be better, but is unlikely to solve the ...

4

It really looks like either a bad thermistor or bad electrical joints. Are the connections to the thermistor itself crimped, or soldered? Are there connectors near the thermistor that can get heated up by the bed? Electrical connections that are mechanical in nature (such as crimped, or using a connector) can degrade quickly in heated situations, ...

4

A "port" for the AVR microcontroller is a set of eight IO pins that are controlled together at a hardware level. The underlying machine code can write an entire byte to set the status of all 8 pins at once. So in principle, all the step pins on the RAMBO board can be triggered exactly simultaneously. The Arduino IDE hides this behavior from firmwares by ...

4

Take a look at Ryan's answer to my question. I believe the MightBoard is based on the Mega 2560, so it is possible that some of the other components could have been damaged. If you look at the comments below Ryan's answer, we discussed the possibility of the processor itself being damaged. I had attempted this fix on two different MightBoards and they both ...

4

Baud rate is the rate at which information is transferred in a communication channel, given as a number of bits per second (bps). So a baud rate of 250000 is capable of transferring a maximum of 250000 bits per second (31250 bytes/s). When working with serial ports, both ends of the communication line will have to "talk" with the same speed - the ...

4

This is referred to as a Terminal Block Connector. More specifically this is a 2-position pluggable terminal block connector commonly manufactured by Phoenix Contact and others. Newark.com Sale Page: Pluggable Terminal Block, 5.08 mm, 2 Positions, 24 AWG, 12 AWG, 2.5 mm², Screw Larger Picture: 2-Position Terminal Block Connectors

4

An electric shock from a PSU usually means that either the PSU is wired up incorrectly, or the PSU is wired to an ungrounded spot. Often, Adapters are not grounded or sloppily made. Get yourself a cable with the same ampere rating as the one you want to replace which has a UK plug. If this does not solve the grounding problem, you need to check if the ...

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