Direct drive and Octoprint
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Direct drive and Octoprint
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Topic: Direct drive and Octoprint (Read 298 times))
scotton
Shooter
Posts: 37
Direct drive and Octoprint
«
on:
December 29, 2022, 10:24:12 PM »
This is two unrelated things: adding a direct drive to an Ender 3 v2 and running Octoprint
Thing 1 - Direct drive
Last night I was getting ready to go to bed and I was an hour into an 8 hour print. If I'm going to leave a print unsupervised, I'll usually wait for the bottom layers to print. Unless the filament breaks, the bottom layers are usually where I get issues.
For some reason, I decided to keep an eye on this print. One hour in, the teflon tube popped out of the extruder. No biggie, hit pause and popped it back in. Five minutes later it pops out again. The third time, I killed the print and went to bed. This morning, I determined that there is no way the tube is going to stay in the extruder, so the tube fitting is probably bad. The tube in the hot end was also a scorched mess. So I decided to drive to Microcenter and get a Capricorn tubing kit. The stock extruder has been acting flaky, so I figured I would pick up a metal extruder while there. Also, one of the hot end fans sounds a little crappy, so I figured I would pick up a couple of new fans.
Armed with my list, I got to Microcenter about half an hour after they opened. Found the Capricorn kit, found the metal extruder, found some spare nozzles. As I was trying to figure out what fans I needed, I saw a lonely little baggie with an Ender 3 Direct Drive kit. It was open box so marked down to $40. This wasn't even on my radar, so I had to do some googling. Turns out, for the less than the price of the Capricorn kit, a metal extruder and 2 hot end fans I could get a new hot end, extruder and remove the need for tubes. Hmm ... ok, I'll bite. I confirmed that the open-box direct drive was returnable and went ahead and picked up the other stuff just in case. Figured, one way or another I would be returning $40 worth of stuff and still have a functioning printer at the end of the day.
No directions in the baggie, so I went to a magical place called Ewetoob and watched a couple of videos. Pretty straightforward install, swap out some motherboard connections, flip the spool holder around, remove the extruder, replace the hotend. Took about 45 minutes, with most of that being the motherboard connections and removing the extruder.
Fired it up, reset the e steps, levelled the bed and started printing. I'm an hour and a half into my first print and so far it looks fine, maybe slightly worse than the stock setup. Only slicer change I made was to change the retraction from 6mm to 1.5 mm. It was at this point that I noticed that it had been printing the same layer for quite a while. And the nozzle was half an inch up in the air. Well, &^^&. Put in a new nozzle and tried extruding some filament, it would spit out about a quarter of an inch and then the extruder would stop. After a few of these bad extrusions, it wouldn't extrude at all. Checked all the connections and it looks like the extruder motor is dead.
So I put the old hot end back on, put in the metal extruder, put in the new tubing and proceeded to make the nicest print I've ever made. So I'll be returning the direct drive. If anyone goes to the Dallas Microcenter and sees a direct drive in a bag, keep walking. I don't see enough upside to switching to the direct drive if just printing PLA and PTEG.
Thing 2 is a little story about me trying to get Octoprint running. I don't want to drop the coin on a Raspberry Pi, so I decided to set it up on an old Android phone. Got the server running on the phone but I had to order an OTG cable to connect it to the printer. A few days later the cable arrived. I have the phone in a car mount screwed to a shelf so its looking over the print bed. As I pulled the cable to connect it to the printer, the phone fell into a tool box and cracked the screen into a million pieces. Octoprint is still running but the screen is no longer usable. Time for plan B - the old laptop.
I won't bore you with the details, but here's a little tip if installing Octoprint on a Windows laptop: Don't use the newest version of Python, use the next older version. 4 hours of installing, uninstalling and reinstalling later, I got Octoprint running on the laptop. Still struggling to get the webcam to stream instead of just showing static images, but it's working.
I don't know if this is a speed issue with the laptop, but it takes forever to send a file to the printer through Octoprint. It's great for remote monitoring the printer but I'll be sticking to the SD card to move files to the printer. I'd rather have a good nanny-cam than a bad nanny.
Last little bonus thingy - the print bed. I've been using the stock Ender bed from the get go. I've been using the rough side, not the glass side. No adhesion issues, but the bed has a high spot in the middle. I decided to flip over to the glass side to see how that works. I've seen all the tips about using blue tape, glue sticks or hairspray for adhesion on the glass bed. I have a roll of blue tape right next to the printer, so I covered the glass bed with tape. The prints stick so good, for the third print I had to remove the tape and use Goo Gone to take the tape off of the print. I decided to try printing to the glass without the tape or anything else. Works great, just as good as the other side of the bed. I always give the bed a quick alcohol wipe between every print, I'm not sure why some people are having adhesion issues on the glass bed.
Anyway, that's what I've been up to.
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scotton
Shooter
Posts: 37
Re: Direct drive and Octoprint
«
Reply #1 on:
January 01, 2023, 05:09:28 PM »
Update on the direct drive. I decided to test the extruder by taking out the nozzle and just hooking up the extruder wiring. It passed 100 mm of filament just fine, so I think it's a clogging issue. I didn't hook up the hot end, just the extruder wires.
When I had it installed originally, I tried three different nozzles (two of them brand new) and it clogged all three of them. Maybe an issue in the block where it isn't heating consistently. Whatever the issue, I'm still returning it, especially now that I know it's not a simple extruder problem.
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WhatUPSbox?
Expert
Posts: 1501
Real Name: Stan
Re: Direct drive and Octoprint
«
Reply #2 on:
January 02, 2023, 02:18:26 PM »
Hey, thanks for the real world write-up. For now I'm sticking with just the Capricorn tubing upgrade.
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N. San Diego County, CA
Airnut
Expert
Posts: 1313
Real Name: Frank
Re: Direct drive and Octoprint
«
Reply #3 on:
January 02, 2023, 03:19:34 PM »
Ya save your money!
I installed a sprite pro direct drive on my ender 3E and after a month of fiddling I found no appreciable benefits of the sprite direct drive even with Tpu. I found that the bowden system prints tpu just fine if you turn off the retraction, slow print speed down to 10mms and back off your z offset a little.The only advantage of the direct drive was increased print speed.
Your milage may very.
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USA. Yorktown va.
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Direct drive and Octoprint