Today I took the opportunity to change out the carriage for the hot end assembly. In my parts bin I had a blue metal carriage that I had gotten from RepRapWorld. The metal carriage holds the four bearings firmly and the bearings are aligned properly. The existing printed carriage seemed to place the bearings a bit out of alignment. The metal carriage seems to move better. Might just be in my head. 🙂
I still haven’t sorted out the heating issues with the 3D printer. I believe it boils down to cheap electronics. The Ramps 1.4 board that came with the pseudo 3D printer kit was suppose to be a well made board. But it seems that it is just another poorly made board from China. I shouldn’t have had these heating issues. So I took to the internet to find a well made Ramps 1.4 board. My search took me to Tindie again. I found one vendor there that had what I was looking for. It was a premium Ramps 1.4 board. While its price of $29 is higher than what you can get from places like banggood.com, it is made with quality components. Your 3D printer will more than likely be running for hours while printing an item for you, so reliability and safety is important.
There actually is another option that I looked at. A lot of these cheap Ramps boards have the same heating issues that I have because the mosfets on the Ramps are cheap. The option is to use external mosfet drivers for your heat bed and hot end.
You can get these mosfets for around $6 from banggood.com. I do have a few on order, but I want to get them for a backup and experiment with them. While they are easy to wire into your 3D printer, you have to figure out where you will put them. You can use another PS to drive your heat bed and the signal from your Ramps board will switch on the power.
The vendor for the premium Ramps board had another product that looked interesting. It was their OVM20 board which combined the functionality of the Ramps 1.4 board and the Arduino Mega board into one board. They made the OVM20’s footprint the same as the Arduino Mega, which means that it can be bolted in place of an existing Ramps 1.4 + Arduino Mega. The added benefit is that it takes up less space. The price of the OVM20 is $37, so it is not that much more than their premium Ramps board.
After thinking about it for a while, I went ahead and ordered an OVM20. I also ordered one of their Mk2b heat beds that I will use in place of the existing MK2b I have. I hope they ship soon since I would like to get printing one day.