So, this step is optional, and whether or not you want to be able to control all your fans on your printer or not. To do this we will install the RAMPS 1.4 RRD Fan Extender – read on! On this printer, we have hooked up a hotend cooling fan (NOT the part cooling fan) which … Read more
Controlling and monitoring your 3D printer can be done with your PC via the USB connection, using a dedicated Linux box and web connection over LAN/WiFi such as Octoprint or Astrobox, or with a dedicated LCD Control panel (and SD card slot).
The RAMPS board is going to get very cramps, very quickly. It’s well designed and thought out in terms of layout, but as you add more and more connections to it, it’s going to get hidden beneath a nest of wires, connections, crimps and fans – say goodbye to your lovely clean clear red board!
Printing and assembly of the main hotend assembly – the hotend mount, cooling fan ducts and all hardware needed and connecting wiring.
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.
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.