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Fuji Team Issue Build

At the same time that I got the Miyata 210 frame, I purchased a Fuji Team Issue frame with a front fork.  The frame and fork were carbon fiber and had been listed as being repaired.  Since the seller was a bike shop with a very good rating, I crossed my fingers and hoped it would be ok.  From the pictures nothing seemed to be wrong with it.  And when I received it, everything was fine.  This is the frame that I intend to use as the basis for a bike that I would ride in the neighborhood with my family.  Here is a picture of the frame from the eBay listing and a picture of a complete 2008 model.

This build is a nod to the Fuji Finest that I liked back in the 70s.  This build turned out pretty well.

While I still intend on adding the toe clips and straps that I have on hand, the build is pretty much completed.  I didn’t do a build using original components.  I mixed and matched components that I thought would work well.  One component that I didn’t go with, was standard drop handlebars.  This was due to the negative effect that bending down while gripping them would have on my lower back.  So I opted to use Wald 870 high rise handlebars which would allow me to sit fairly upright.  I paired up some Dia-Compe DC188 brake levers (with matching handle grips) along side the Wald 870 handlebar.  Topping that off that setup with an IRD Power Ratchet Thumb Shifter set.  I included a number of Campagnolo components in the build.  The front and rear brakes are Campagnolo Centaur Dual Pivot Caliper brakes.  The front and rear derailleurs are Campagnolo Racing T derailleurs.  Both of the wheels were built using Campagnolo hubs with Mavic CXP Pro 15mm rims.  The tires are 700-28c Panarace Gravel Kings.  I used Velo Orange Cable sets for the brakes and derailleurs.  The saddle is a Fuji Velo which is on a generic compression seat tube.  The seat tube along with a 90mm Cirrus Cycles Suspension Stem dampens the bumps a bit.  The bottom bracket is an IRD QB-55 (127.5mm x 68mm) with English Threads.  The crankset is a triple from a Fuji S10S (most likely from the 80s).  I used a pair of MKS Sylvan Touring (Black and Silver) pedals.  To finish off the bike I used a kickstand that attached to the bike using the quick release on the rear wheel.  The frame, saddle, and crankset all say Fuji on them.

I will be exclusively riding around the roads in my neighborhood.  I don’t intended to ride the bike on the open roads.  It is too bad the roads in my neighborhood aren’t paved, but it is what it is.

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My Miyata 210 310 build

I intended to use a Miyata 210 frame that I got from eBay for a bike build/restoration.  My reason behind a Miyata build, was to pay homage to my first bicycle, a Miyata Sunrise Sport.  But things didn’t go well for my intended Miyata 210 build.  I have been using a freight forwarder in the Miami Florida area to send eBay purchases to me in Chile. When I received the frame in early September, I gave it a quick glance. There was some cardboard around front fork for shipping. But things had come up during that time and I did have the time to really look at the frame. So at the end of December I completely took the frame out of the box and remove the cardboard around the front fork.  There was some cardboard between the fork tips to keep them separated.  I also purchased the original wheels for the frame and started to put the wheels on the frame.  I put the rear wheel on and it seemed fine.  I put the front wheel on and something was seriously wrong.  The fork arms were bent!  I looked at the frame and discovered that not only were the fork arms bent, it seems the frame was bent at the head tube too.

  

Looking at the packing box, it didn’t look like there was any damage to it.  But it kind of looked pushed in on one side.  But really not that bad.

The fork was installed in the frame and it was turned so the front of the arms were pointing backwards.  It seems that something fell on the front end of the frame where the fork is, causing the fork arms and head tube to bend.  From the original pictures of frame on eBay, everything looked fine.  Looking at the frame now, you can see areas on the fork and the head tube when the paint cracked from when the fork and head tube were bent.  Since it had been too long since I received the frame, I can’t really do anything about it.  I didn’t spend a lot for the frame, but still.  I did contact the freight forwarder but they said they could not do anything about it since I didn’t have it packed in a wooden crate (according to the fine print).  I did have them add extra bubble wrap, but that wasn’t good enough.  I really don’t know if it was damaged when it arrived in Miami or in Chile.  The freight forwarder doesn’t do a good enough job of noticing if items are damaged.  Their customer service was lacking too.  Plus they didn’t consolidate your packages either.  I have since changed to a new freight forwarder that has good customer service and consolidates packages.  Plus I can get insurance on my items shipped to me here in Chile.  So all around a better company.

Since I couldn’t use the frame or fork anymore, I went to eBay to see if I could find suitable replacements.  I was able to pick up a Miyata 310 frame, but it didn’t have a front fork.  So I picked up a front fork from eBay too.  It wasn’t from a Miyata, but it is new and fully chromed.  So it will be a nice touch.  This frame also happens to be a 1981 model like the 210 frame.  Both serial numbers start with the letter J which is for the year 1981.  After looking at the frame, I determined that it was ok.  Some minor scratches, but it is in good shape without any bends.

I removed all of the parts from the frame including the headset cups.  Next I will have to remove any stickers.  Can’t sandblast the stickers from the frame.  I also need to remove the Miyata head badge from the frame.

By the way, the 1981 Miyata 310 frames have that geometry of 73 degrees by 73 degrees that I mentioned in my last post.  The color of the frame is Burgundy which is one of the 3 colors available for the 310 in 1981. That’s it for now.

 

 

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73 degrees by 73 degrees

A bicycle geometry of 73 degrees by 73 degrees back in the late 60s and early 70s, could be found on racing bicycles of that era.  But that geometry was entirely appropriate for light (or even medium-load) touring bikes too.  The Fuji S10-S was introduced in 1971 in the US market at the start of the 70’s bike boom.  My introduction to Japanese bicycles was earlier that that.  Back in the late 50’s my family owned a few bicycles that were purchased when we lived in Japan.  The bicycles went with us when we moved back to the US, but eventually they were gotten rid of when we moved again.

While this is not a picture of one of the bicycles that my family owned, it does have the same characteristics that I remember.  Namely the brakes with metal rods instead of metal cables, the kickstand that lifted the rear wheel, the big chain guard, and the seat with springs.  If I find one of the pictures of the bikes we had, then I will add it.

The first bicycle that I owned was a Miyata Sunrise Sport.  My brother originally purchased the bike in 1967 when we were living in Japan again.  After a few years the bike basically became mine in the spring of 1969.  Here is a picture of the Miyata Sunrise Sport.  A friend of my father called it a Fussa Cadillac.  Fussa was the city that we lived near in Japan.

I rode that bike around for a number of years and fixed things on it as needed.  In the Fall of 1974 I had a well read copy of the Consumers Reports for Bicycles.  There were quite a few bicycles that I liked.  The Fuji Finest was one them.  It was one of Fuji’s road racer models, second to the Fuji Professional.  It was a ten speed and came in two colors, rainbow blue and white.  The Fuji Finest is a great example of the classic Japanese racing bike in the traditional European style.  In 1974, Fuji was ranked first in the Consumers Reports bicycle test.

The Gitane Interclub was another bicycle that I was interested in.  The Fuji Finest was a bit more expensive than the Gitane Interclub.  The Interclub along with the Gran Sport DeLuxe were the bottom level models that Gitane offered during the early 1970s.  Back in September 1975, I purchased a used Gitane Interclub (24″ model) for $100 from a guy who worked at the Proteus bike shop in College Park Maryland.  I was a freshman at the University of Maryland at the time and I rode that bike around the campus a lot that year.  I still had the Interclub back in 2007 but got rid of it when we moved from Georgia.  Side note:  The Proteus Bike Shop used to have a class on frame building.  I never got to sign up for the class since I couldn’t afford it.  The book they have for frame building is available on line as a pdf.  They long since stopped offering that class.

While this is not a picture of the Gitane Interclub I had, it is just like it.  With the green color and chrome front forks.  Later on I painted the frame purple.  Despite using a spray can, it turned out pretty well.

Earlier this year I was looking for a bike that I could ride around the neighborhood with my children.  I hadn’t really found anything that I liked at the bicycle stores, so I started collecting parts on eBay to build a bicycle for myself.  The first thing that caught my attention was the frame for a Miyata 210.  I was partial to Miyatas since I had fond memories of the Sunrise Sport that I had.  Besides, Miyatas were good bikes and made well.  Unfortunately it needed a bottom bracket and a lot of other things.  It is definitely a project bike.  I went ahead and purchased the frame.  I also purchased the two wheels that were originally on it.  We will see how it goes from here.

 

 

 

 

 

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Building a FreeNAS system

I finally decided to build the new NAS system I have been forever talking about.  I have been almost out of space on my ReadyNAS NV+ V2 for a while now. Going to go with FreeNAS and I am using Brian Moses’ 2019 EconoNAS Build as a guide.  My build won’t be quite an EconoNAS build.  I will call it the HexNAS due to the 5 data drives and the 1 cache drive that it will have.

I am using the same ASUS Prime B450M-A/CSM motherboard that he is using.  I am using 2 sticks of 16GB DDR4 Dram instead of the 2 sticks of 4GB DDR4 Dram he used.  So I have a total of 32GB of system memory with two empty memory slots.  I using an old Cooler Master case that was given to me by my friend Paul.  The case is very similar to the Antec NSK4100 case that Brian used.  My cases has 4 external 5.25” bays, 2 external 3.5” bays, and 5 internal 3.5” bays for a total of 11 drive bays.  So it has the same total number of drive bays just like Brian’s case.

I had to replace the case’s power switch which was missing its leads and was also bad.  The case didn’t have any fans, so I added 5 Noctua fans to it.  Two of the fans were 120mm and three of the fans were 140mm.  These Noctua fans aren’t their premium quiet fans.  But they are still quiet.

 

I am going to use a hot swap drive cage that will take up three of the external 5.25” bays and allow me to have five 3.5” drives in the same space.  I was thinking about installing a DVD drive in the fourth 5.25” bay.  But since I have used all of the 6 sata connections on the motherboard, I won’t be able to do that.  Not that I really need a DVD drive.  But if I do, then I can see about adding a card with sata connections.  I also added I/O panel with two USB 3.0 ports, SD card slot, and a USB C port to the case.

For the CPU I used an AMD Ryzen 3 3200G instead of the AMD Ryzen 3 2200G used in the EconoNAS Build.  For the power supply I am using a GameMax 650W 80Plus Bronze unit.  For the OS Drives I am also using SanDisk Ultra Fit Usb 3.1 flash drives, but 32GB instead of 16GB.

I had been thinking about using WD Red 4TB drives, but the newer units use SMR.  So with the issue of SMR rearing its ugly head I couldn’t do that.  Even the new WD 6TB Reds were using SMR.  Really need to use a drive using CMR especially since it seems that FreeNAS does not like SMR drives.

FreeNAS/ZFS does not like the new WD RED SMR drives.

Doing some research on the SMR issue, I found this link that with a list of the WD CMR and SMR drives.  List of WD CMR and SMR hard drives.

Here are some links to the SMR issue that I am talking about.

Surreptitiously Swapping SMR into Hard Drives Must end!

List of know SMR Drives.

I went ahead and bought 5 WD 8TB Red drives for the build.  These drives are CMR.  Brian has a few different hard drive options that he lists, but all of them are using 6 drives.  I am also adding a Crucial BX500 1TB SSD for use as a cache for the zfs pool.  I have those two Ultra Fit 32GB flash drives for the boot drives that I already mentioned.  Once the NAS is built and setup, I will look to sign up with get Blackblaze to add cloud storage/back-up to my NAS.  A NAS isn’t really for backup even though I have been using my ReadyNas NV+ V2 as such.

Here is a link that from Brian’s blog for backing up FreeNAS to Backblaze.  And here is a link to an article that Blackblaze wrote on setting up a FreeNAS cloud storage.  Along a similar vein, here is a link for setting up NextCloud on FreeNAS.

So far I have put together the system without the drives for now.  The system starts ok and goes into the bios.  It is working and I have 32GB of memory! Next I will have to download the latest version of FreeNAS which is currently 11.3-U4.  The FreeNAS iso is 752MB.  Now that I have the iso, I need to burn the iso on to a usb flash drive.  Since I am going to use my Win 10 laptop, I am going to use Rufus to create the bootable FreeNAS install flash drive.  Side note, after I did my install of FreeNAS I came across another install video that used a utility called HashTab that adds an extra tab in the Windows properties menu that will let you see the hash of the file.  A handy utility to have when you want to check if the hash of the file you just downloaded matches what it is suppose to be.  It is free for home use, but if you use it at work, then it is $9.99.

Next I will go to the HexNAS system and bootup the FreeNAS install.  I will be installing FreeNAS on the two SanDisk Ultra Fit Usb 3.1 flash drives.  I will be following one of Brian’s blog post on how to do the install onto the two flash drives.

I booted up the HexNAS with the FreeNAS install flash drive.  I tried to install FreeNAS to the two SanDisk Ultra Fit flash drives, but I kept getting an install error when the process started.  The error was installation failure – gmirror: No such device: swap.  I tried it a number of times more but still kept getting the error each time.  The two SanDisk Ultra Fit flash drives are brand new, so hopefully there is nothing wrong with them.  Did a quick look on line but didn’t really find an answer.  Maybe the flash drives need to be formatted.  What I did was use Rufus to install the FreeNAS install iso on to both of the new flash drives.  Booted up the original FreeNAS install usb drive and tried to install FreeNAS on both of the Ultra Fit flash drives and this time the install worked.  I guess it expected a swap partition to exist on the Ultra Fit flash drives. Not sure though.

While the install was suppose to write FreeNAS onto both of my flash drives, it didn’t seem to do that.  Not sure why, but I used a utility called imageUSB on Windows to save the image from the one bootable FreeNAS system on the flash drive to the my computer.  Then I used imageUSB to copy that image to the second flash drive.  You can also use imageUSB to write an image concurrently to multiple USB Flash Drives.

I successfully booted FreeNAS from that second flash drive.  Then I needed to make sure both devices were in the boot pool. I watched this youtube video and was able to have the boot pool contain both flash drives, so they are mirrored.

The instructions are for 11.2 but they work with 11.3 with a slight difference in the name “Boot Environments” in 11.2 becoming “Boot” in 11.3.  Here are the steps that I followed.  While in the FreeNAS dashboard, click on System to display the items inside of System.  Then click on Boot which will bring up the Boot Environments window.  From there you will Actions menu on the far right and then choose “Boot Pool Status”.  This will bring up the “Boot Pool Status” window.  You will see your default boot pool and if you click on the > next to name of the boot pool, you will se your boot flash drive in the pool.  Mine is /dev/dap0.  On the line that lists your boot flash drive you will need to click on the three dots on the far right of that line and choose “Attach”.  This will allow us to attach our other flash device to the first flash drive.  Select the second flash drive (da1) and check the box for “use all disk space” and press the “Save” button.  It will take a short while for the attach process to finish.  A popup window will let you know that the “Device Attached”.  Close that window.  You will be back in the “Boot Environments” screen.  Click on the “Actions” menu and choose “Boot Pool Status” again.  You will see that the two devices will both be under a “>mirror” selection which completes the task.  If you want to change the default name of the boot pool, you can do that in the “Boot Environments” window.  On the line that has the name of the boot pool, you will click on the three vertical dots on the far right.  This will bring up a menu with a choice to rename.  I renamed my boot pool to freenas-boot.  I need to put a little label on the flash drives so that I can easily identify them in a time of failure.  To identify the drives, it might be best to use at least the first 6 digits of the serial numbers since the numbers at the end aren’t displayed fully.

I have added the data disks and the ssd disk to the machine.  Next I will create the zfs pool.  The zfs options for the VDev are Stripe, Mirroring, Raid-z1, Raid-z2, and Raid-z3. Raid-z1 similar in concept to Raid-5.  But Raid-z1 use is discouraged. Raid-z2 is similar to Raid-6.  It adds a second set of parity data to the VDev.  You can lose two disks while maintaining data integrity.  It requires a minimum of 4 disks.  It is safer than Raid-z1 but has a greater capacity penalty. Raid-z3 adds a third set of parity data to the VDev.  It requires a minimum of 5 disks, but allows you to lose up to 3 disks per VDev.  A hot spare is a drive that isn’t used for storage, but it will instead immediately replace a failed drive. Having a hot spare in the pool will insure that a resilver/rebuild operation will start immediately.  When you are creating your pool, the ADD SPARE button will add a hot spare to your pool.

I am going to go with a Raid-z2 setup which will allow me to lose two disks while maintaining the integrity of the data.  I will be looking into getting Backblaze for my cloud backup.

Logged on to the FreeNAS machine via the web interface so I can create my zfs pool with the 5 drives and the one ssd for the cache.

It is pretty easy to do. Go to Storage->Pools and select the drives for the Data VDev.  I am using Raid-z2 for the Data VDev.  Add the SSD to the Cache VDev. Give the pool a name. Choose to use Encryption or not Zfs Pool.  The GELI encryption can increase security for data stored in a ZFS pool, but it increases pool management complexity.  If you select encryption you must remember to back up the key!  If you lose the key, then you will lose all the data on the disks with no chance of recovery!  I am not going to chose encryption.  Anything that is really important I will encrypt before I put it on the FreeNAS.  I also heard that in the next major FreeNAS version, TrueNAS core, they will likely have new encryption features like per dataset encryption which should make it possible to encrypt data with having to destroy/rebuild the pool.

Update: July 2022, TrueNAS has been out for a while and I did upgrade to it when it came out.  I still haven’t looked into the dataset encryption.  I will put that in another blog post one day.

It didn’t take long to build my pool with the 5 data disks and the 1 cache disk.  Next I will configure users, permissions, and Access Control Lists (ACL) for the users that will access the FreeNAS share that I will be creating.  The first user I will create will be my user.  While creating my user, I will create a group for all the other future users that will be accessing the FreeNAS.  I created the group while adding my user.  In the FreeNAS web interface menu, the path will be Accounts->Users and then click on the Add on the right side.  My username and password will be the same as it is for my Windows 10 laptop.

Now I have to create some shares.  The first thing I need to do is add a few datasets to my ZFS pool.  Go to Storage->Pools on the menu and then on the line that lists your Pool, click on the three dots on the far right to bring up the options for the pool.

I will be adding a dataset to the pool.  I will give the dataset a name, something like Media.  Make sure that the Share Type is SMB since it is going to be a Windows share.  I also will make sure that the Case Sensitivity is Sensitive.  You can add comments if you like.

Once that is done, I will create the actual Share.  Selecting Sharing->Windows Shares (SMB) on the menu will bring up the Samba (SMB) shares list.  Click on the ADD button to add a share.  Set the path to the dataset that you just created.  The dataset will be under your ZFS Pool location.  It will be something like /mnt/ZFSDataPool/Media which ZFSDataPool being the name of your ZFS Pool and Media being a dataset that you created in your pool.  There is a selection box for Use as home share, but I am not going to be selecting that. The selection boxes that are checked will be Enabled and Enable Shadow copies.  What you enter for the name of the Share will be what you will see when you access from your Windows computer.  The Share name can be different from the dataset name that it is attached to.  You will want to make sure that the SMB service has started and will automatically start when the system boot up.  You will be prompted to do so.  But you can go to Services on the menu and start up the service and also check the Start Automatically box for the Service.

After you have create the SMB share, you will want to edit the ACL for the share you just created.  On the SMB share list, you want to put your cursor on the line for the share you just created.  Then click on the three dots on the right to bring up the options for the share and select Edit ACL.

Here in the Edit ACL window, you will be adding an ACL Item.  You can add a group or user.  If you have a a lot of users assigned to a group, then your probably would want to add that group.  Or you can just add individual users. You will need at least one of the ACL Items to have the Inherit flag set.

Then I should be able to access the shares from my Windows laptop.  And I was.  Since I have a Apple Mac, I also created an AFP share and attached it to those datasets that I added SMB share too.  I was able to access the Shares on the FreeNAS from my Mac too.

There are other things you can do later like work with Virtual Machines and Jails.

If I get a chance I am going to look into some free FreeNAS/TrueNAS training at ixSystems .

That’s it for now.

 

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P3Steel Build

Over a period of time from July 2018 to February 2019, I put together a 3d printer.  It is a P3Steel design that mostly comes from Thingiverse thing 157303 by irobri.  This design was based on the work by twelvepros.  If you are interested in the designers, then you can look them up at Thingiverse.  I made a few tweaks to the design using DraftSight, which is a 2D CAD Drafting and 3D Design Software program by Dassault Systems.  I incorporated the lcd holder from another variant into my build.  This is basically a version 2.0 of the P3Steel.

The frame is made of 3mm steel and was laser cut by a local company.  The other parts that I used for the build came from various places.  These places include Prusa Research, Banggood, E3D, and GeckoTek.  The bolts that hold the frame together came from Albany County Fasteners’ online store.  There were also a few printed parts (like the feet and carry handle) that came from other Thingiverse designers.  The orange printed parts came from Prusa Research.

I put it together for a friend who will need to fine tune it.  I got everything working mechanically, but they will have to do all of the final adjustments for printing.  I helped jumpstart his 3d printing effort.

Here are photos that I took over that time period.

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It’s Alive!

Yes, it has been quite a while since my last post.  This blog started out on my friend’s server, but he shutdown the server last summer and gave me a backup of my blog.  Just today I created a subdomain for my WordPress blog.   My friend used the plugin All-in-One WP Migration to backup my blog.  I installed the same plugin and restored the backup file onto my subdomain.  There were a few minor issues about the restore, but only one in particular is worth mentioning.  The restore overwrote the WP database and I forgot what the passwords were for the admin and editor accounts in the backup.  I had to go into phpMyAdmin on cPanel to browse the WP database.  From there I looked at the user table.  The passwords for the accounts are in an MD5 hash.  So I can’t just type in a new password.  I need to generate an MD5 hash of the new password that I want to use.  This website has an MD5 hash generator which I was able to use.

http://www.passwordtool.hu/md5-password-hash-generator

Once I generated an MD5 hash, I used it to update the password field (user_pass) for the admin account and my editor account in the users table.  That update allowed me to logon to my WP admin account and create this post.

 

 

 

 

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Changing to the BLTouch

Unfortunately the Pinda Probe experiment did not work out as I had hoped it would.  The MK42 bed was really made to be used with the Prusa Pinda Probe  in a MK2s.  Meaning the offsets from the hotend and the Pinda Probe needed to match what Prusa is using.  That is because the MK42 has nine probe points that the Pinda Probe will detect correctly when it is over them.  Other areas on the MK42 bed don’t trigger the probe.

So I removed the Pinda Probe and installed a BLTouch probe.  This is the new Smart version of the BLTouch.  It took me a while to install it.  I used an adjustable mount for a BLTouch that I got from Thingiverse.com.  The mount was for a different printer, but I was able to use it with a little tweaking of the mounting holes.  I used one of Thingiverse’s printer services (Treatstock) to have the mount printed for me.  I would have liked to have had the BLTouch mounted closer to the hotend, but due to the design of the carriage I was not able to.  It is about 52mm away from the hotend now.  The minimal distance is 15mm.  The mount was for made for another printer after all.  Maybe in the future I can do something about that and get it a bit closer.  Probable will have to design a new mount.

I made more changes to the Configuration.h file for my Marlin setup.  Since I was already familiar with what I had to do, it didn’t take terribly long.  I was able to set up the bed leveling using the BLTouch.  The printer probes the bed with the BLTouch.  Next step will be to try to print something.

 

I did make another minor change to the printer.  I changed the LCD mount.  This mount blends in more than the other one did.  Note that the picture with the first lcd mount was taken before I made a lot of the prior changes.

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Adding the Pinda Probe

This post is about adding a Pinda probe to the 3D printer.  In order to do that I needed to make a probe mount first.  I thought about designing a mount in Sketchup and printing it. But that meant I had to learn how to use Sketchup and I would have to print the design too.   While I do have a pretty good book on Sketchup, the problem of printing the mount with the printer as it currently works, ruled out that idea.  So I looked to see if I could fashion a mount out of stuff I had on hand.

I found a thin stainless steel metal piece.  I believe it was a cover for some computer component, I’ve forgotten exactly what.  Here it is after cutting it, bending it in places, and drilling a few holes.

Next I put the Pinda probe in the mount.

Here I have the Pinda probe mounted on the printer.

One thing I had to do in order to configure the probe settings, was to measure the offset from the printhead to the probe.  It was -25mm on the X axis and -5.5mm on the Y axis.  I will plug these numbers into the Configuration.h file for my Marlin code.  There are a number of other settings I have to change, but for now I will end this post and report on those changes later in another post.

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3D Printer revamp

It has been a while since my last post. I hadn’t worked on anything in a while.  I am continuing with my quest to get my 3D printer to print correctly.  I had been trying to get the printer to print without having the filament ball up on the nozzle.

I ordered a new extruder assembly from the MendelFlex guy, but not sure when he will finish the batch he is working on.  It has been a while.  Any day now.

The OVM20 board has had some issues with the micro usb connector.  It kept disconnecting.  Very hard to upload an updated sketch when it keeps disconnecting.

I tried to use an avr programmer I had to program the OVM20, but it failed on the verify of the write to the on board flash. So I removed the OVM20 and went back to a two board setup using a Mega2560 and a Ramps 1.4.  I am using the Ramps 1.4 board that I got from the maker of the OVM20 board.  His boards are well made, inspite of the usb connector issue I am having. On his next go around with the design of the OVM20, I suggested that the board not use a micro usb connector but a usb b connector like the mega uses and other boards use. Those connectors don’t allow the cable to wobble when plugged into it.

After I reinstalled the boards, I had to adjust the step settings for the three axises and the extruder.  They were off now because the OVM20’s settings for stepping is hard set to 32 steps while the Ramps 1.4 I have it set to 16 steps.  Once the movement on the axises was set, I adjusted the settings for the extruder. I heated the hot end up to 185 C and then extruded 100mm of filament.  The amount extruded was off so I had to adjust it and try again.  I had it set correctly after two tries.

The plate glass did not sit completely flat in its 4 corner brackets. On two corners they lifted up a bit. I believe that this was affecting the print adhesion, but probably not the only thing.  I got 4 large binder clips and used them to hold the glass in place. I also got a simple bed leveling sensor to help with things.

I changed the marlin firmware to add in bed leveling in the menu options.  I couldn’t get the simple bed leveling sensor to work out. The bed isn’t level. I put the binder clips in place, but they did not seem to help.  I going to change out the print bed. I have a 4mm thick aluminum plate that I can use. It was made to match up with the MK2b size heaters. I will put a PEI sheet on top of the aluminum plate and print on that.

After thinking about it for a while, I won’t be using the aluminum plate and MK2b combo.  I have a genuine MK42 heatbed from Prusa Research that I will use.  It also works with a Pinda probe which I have. The MK42 is an aluminum plate with a built in heater.  It also has a PEI sheet on top. One bad thing is that I need to rearrange the electronics since the power cable for the MK42 won’t reach where the electronics are currently located.

I had some cork backing that I put on the bottom of the MK42 for added insulation.  I will have to mount the Pinda probe later after I figure how I am going to attach it.

Before I mount the MK42, I have to move the electronics. I swapped the two z motors also because the wiring on one motor was cut short before to reach the electronics near it.

Because of the heatbed’s power cable, the power supply would have to be moved also.  I removed the PS along with the Mega2560/Ramps setup.  I then installed the new MK42.

    

I moved the PS and the electronics into their new positions.

Lastly I hooked up all the wiring for the stepper motors, the end stops, the heatbed, the hot end, the thermistors, and then the fans.

Back on the testing center table ready to see how things go.

That’s all for now folks!

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Getting on the right track

With Thanksgiving at the end of November and Christmas time upon us, I haven’t had time to give an update.  So it has been a while since I last posted an entry,  so I thought I should give a quick update.  I still don’t have things sorted out completely with the 3D printer, but I am getting closer.  I was able to print a few calibration items.

I printed a calibration cube, but it was a bit too tall.  So I had to calibrate the Z axis again.  My next try was pretty much close to what it should have been.  Here is a picture of the two prints.  On the left is the second try.

There are still some major issues that need to be fixed, like having the filament at times form a blob of string around the hot end.  Oh well, I will solve that in time.