Now that we have power to our RAMPS board – lets take care of it a little, and add in some active cooling to the board with a RAMPS Cooling Fan.

Behold the finished power supply cover printed in orange. I would show you the timelapse, but it looked so bad it looked like it was filmed in the Bat Cave!

Not much to show here. But the TL;DR is this post shows a couple of videos and shots of the extruder and mount.

When building a 3D printer, there are lots of options you can go with for a build platform, and whether to have it heated or not. I will not go into all of them, but simply state what I am going to use compared to Toolson’s designs.

Brilliant original design of an Amazon Echo Dot V2 wall mount by halcyon on Thingiverse. I have had a lot of people ask for this to be printed on 3D Hubs and from their feedback I have updated it with some of my amends.

To support the print bed from the y-axis and the bed frame Prusa 3D printers use bolts, washers and nuts on each corner with a spring for tension. Toolson’s edition of the P3Steel does away with these springs and opts for a novel (genius) solution of using silicone dampeners.

For this printer I will be using the standard and simple setup of an Arduino Mega and a RAMPS 1.4 board. The Arduino Mega is the brains of the printer and will process all the g-code instructions from the .gcode files from either an SD card or over USB and tell the printer how to move, heat up, extrude filament etc by signalling all the motors, heaters and sensors on the printer which are connected via the RAMPS board, which in turn is connected to the Arduino Mega via the GPIO pins.

New 3D printing time lapse test using my P3Steel. Still yet to install Octoprint or a webcam, so have been testing with taking time lapse sequences on my old Canon Powershot A570 and a custom firmware from CHDK. This was for my eldest daughter who is in high school for her Geography class.

Now that all the axis are complete, we can install the endstop/limit switches. These are simply a switch which is triggered mechanically by one of the printers moving parts hitting it, be it the hotend, print bed etc.

Following on from the x-axis build – I skimmed over the last part, just “installing with the z-axis rods and threaded M5 screw”. This post helps to expand on this part, installing the x-axis and carriage onto the printer with the installation of the z-axis smooth 8mm rods and the z-axis screw – which for this build is the standard M5 threaded rod. Read on!