Bill A's A8 Printer Build

Whoo hooo Houston we have lift off. Well done Bill. Heck 1.95 seems perfect to me. But i guess the whole thing with these machines is the more accurate one gets it the better the printed item.

Way to go on the perseverance.
 
That's awesome Bill. Once you get some frame braces and tensioners printed. Get yourself some fiberglass reinforced GT2-6mm belts and the tolerances will tighten up. Looking forward to seeing what all you make.
 
That's awesome Bill. Once you get some frame braces and tensioners printed. Get yourself some fiberglass reinforced GT2-6mm belts and the tolerances will tighten up. Looking forward to seeing what all you make.

I have a wad of GT2-6mm belting from when I built my SO2 CNC. I switched out to 9mm on it.

There's a laundry list of things I'll be printing, of course. Got started today on some small items.


Finger/thumb protector for the extruder.

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Mounts for the self-leveling sensor. These mount behind the extruder assembly.

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Filament guide - sits on the top of the printer frame.

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After tweaking the bed yesterday to get the calibration cube printed, I haven't touched anything except raising the Z axis about 0.2mm.

I'm keeping the bed at 50C and cleaning the glass with acetone between prints. Running the extruder at 210C seems to be working just right.

The mini-SD I had in my RPi was 8GB, so I picked up a 32GB and am in the process of preparing it for Octopi.
 
One more item to add to today's printing. An insert for my G0513 17" bandsaw.

The left photo is as it sat on the printer when finished. The old one is getting chewed up a little.

Right photo is mounted in my bandsaw. It fit the hole perfectly, but the blade actually runs a little right of center, so I'll adjust my drawing a tad. I made the slot in the new insert narrower to catch small cutoffs, so that's part of the problem. A replacement insert from Grizzly is $3.75 plus $9.99 minimum shipping. Printing it required about 3 meters of filament. At a cost of about $25 for a 1kg, or 360 meter reel, the cost to print is $0.208 (that's 20 cents).

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Right photo is mounted in my bandsaw. It fit the hole perfectly, but the blade actually runs a little right of center, so I'll adjust my drawing a tad. I made the slot in the new insert narrower to catch small cutoffs, so that's part of the problem. A replacement insert from Grizzly is $3.75 plus $9.99 minimum shipping. Printing it required about 3 meters of filament. At a cost of about $25 for a 1kg, or 360 meter reel, the cost to print is $0.208 (that's 20 cents).

Woot! $13.54 closer to having it paid for! ;)

That looks good, I need to do one for mine now.
 
Had a little problem printing a cooling ring last evening.

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I had printed some smaller items on plain glass with no problem, so I went for it. The glass didn't hang onto the PLA after the higher section was printing.


The solution was simple (especially since I had read about it several times). I took the glass off the printer, spritzed some hair spray on it and started the print again this morning. Got a better result this time.

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On another note, I've got Octopi active on my RPi. I don't have it attached to my printer yet but so far I'm making progress.
 
I find if I do a nice thin layer first, depending on the layer size. So Say .2mm I might do a 50% first layer height, I find things tend to stick better with no gunk.

In fact, I've found that I have trouble removing things from the glass until it cools down, without glue or hairspray or anything.

I just violated my own rule and have a print going where something broke loose.
 
I found that the Octopi would actually crash if I had a usb keyboard plugged into it upon boot. I had a little 5" touchscreen I had planned to use on it, but it really was made to run headless, so I gave up and just started using my desktop browser to work with it. The way my shop connects to the house I wasn't getting a good name resolution for the http://octopi.local address, so finally gave it a reserved address on my router and just connect to it via IP now.

For the bed, I wasn't having good luck with it sticking to the glass, so finally just laid down a layer of glue stick. I haven't applied any since, just use some DNA to wipe the bed down before the next print and it cleans up and re-fills any areas that got pulled away with the last print. I may switch to hairspray as I'm seeing some globs on the lithophanes that show up in the thin areas in light.
 
I found that the Octopi would actually crash if I had a usb keyboard plugged into it upon boot. I had a little 5" touchscreen I had planned to use on it, but it really was made to run headless, so I gave up and just started using my desktop browser to work with it. The way my shop connects to the house I wasn't getting a good name resolution for the http://octopi.local address, so finally gave it a reserved address on my router and just connect to it via IP now.

For the bed, I wasn't having good luck with it sticking to the glass, so finally just laid down a layer of glue stick. I haven't applied any since, just use some DNA to wipe the bed down before the next print and it cleans up and re-fills any areas that got pulled away with the last print. I may switch to hairspray as I'm seeing some globs on the lithophanes that show up in the thin areas in light.


I just setup a pi zero today and enabled vnc on it. It's actually pretty cool to vnc into and run it using the full gui. I wonder if you can do that with the octopi?
 
I find if I do a nice thin layer first, depending on the layer size. So Say .2mm I might do a 50% first layer height, I find things tend to stick better with no gunk. ...

This thread has evolved (or devolved) into a foreign language.

"vnc into" What the.....?


Brent, I'll have to try the thin layer approach. I'm still 'sperimentin' a lot!


Among the many confusing aspects of setting up Octopi on the RPi was the instruction pages and videos by everybody and their cousin, with each one having a different opinion of the "right" way to do it. One instruction talked about 'vnc' had to be on it, etc., etc., ...

I took a deep breath and reminded myself what Brent had said about Octopi being "easy". I went through all of the Octopi setup steps again, rebooted the RPi and was able to TTY into it. With that success, I disconnected the keyboard, mouse and monitor from the pi, attached it to my printer and magic happened!

The steps that worked were to install the Octopi image on the RPi SD card using Win32image, modify the wifi address in the config file, reboot a couple of times and ping it with PuTTY.

Using the browser GUI to attach to Octopi, one question I have is about the file transfer. I can load a gcode file into the GUI, hit "Print" and it works. There is a button labeled "Upload to SD" that is grayed out; when I hover the mouse over it, a message "No file selected" pops up. Should I be able to load gcode onto the printer SD to run jobs?
 
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Using the browser GUI to attach to Octopi, one question I have is about the file transfer. I can load a gcode file into the GUI, hit "Print" and it works. There is a button labeled "Upload to SD" that is grayed out; when I hover the mouse over it, a message "No file selected" pops up. Should I be able to load gcode onto the printer SD to run jobs?

I haven't tried that myself, will check this weekend.
 
Update on the "Upload to SD" that is grayed out; when I hover the mouse over it, a message "No file selected" pops up.

When I "drag and drop" a file from a folder to the browser Octopi GUI, there are two sections to the screen. One is "Upload Locally" - the other says "Upload to SD - SD not Initialized". The SD card in the printer is formatted and empty. Ideas?
 
That is so weird.

I know when i had the stock firmware on my printer, I had uploaded a (1) file to the SD card. It worked but it was so slow, it just didn't seem to be worth even using.

I just tried again, and it is still super slow. It's like the file goes up to the pi, then over to the anet control board. By slow, I mean it takes like 4 minutes to transfer 550kb.

Not sure I'd worry about it not working. Can you see the files on the card on the anet?
 
... Can you see the files on the card on the anet?

No. I pulled the SD from the Anet first thing this morning. It was formatted but had nothing on it. I went through the process again using SD Formatter but no change in the status of the Octopi GUI. I assumed the files get loaded to the RPi when you "Upload Locally" since they appear when you start the browser interface; will have to verify that. I also assume one should be able to upload to the Anet SD to be able to run the printer independent of any other computer interface.
 
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