Tuesday, March 3, 2015

RigidBot projects

The list of 3D printed artefacts I need is growing longer each week. In no particular order:


  1. If I decide to continue with the RUMBA controller board, I will need an enclosure for it.
  2. I need an enclosure for the Parallella which will hold the fan over the Zynq chip.
  3. I want a translucent enclosure for the CharlieCube I made late last year.
  4. My "grand project" is a Perl 6 implementation of the Threesus project. The original project has a video camera watching an iPad screen, OCRing the image it sees, deciding the best next move then activating one of two stepper motors to swipe the iPad screen up or down, left or right. Not sure if I want to get to the stage of using the stepper motors (although I have a couple in my spares box). I want to use my Raspberry Pi with camera module for the video processing, so I would like to build an enclosure to hold the RPi and camera in a config which makes it usable for OCRing an iPad (or iPhone).
  5. An enclosure for a reflow oven controller.
  6. An enclosure for a coffee bean roaster controller I am designing for an Elektor competition.

RigidBot repairs

The sharp-witted amongst us will have noted in my previous blog that I had found the cause of all the problems with the RigidBot, but I didn't recognise it even while I was writing about it.

The open-circuit on pin 1 of the extruder flat cable is a sufficient explanation of all the problems the printer showed. I simply didn't follow an orderly chain of testing the components and cables to isolate the cable.

Anyway I've ordered some replacement cable and connectors and I will now have to wait the three or four weeks it takes will they arrive.

My hypothesis is that I will be able to return the original main board to the printer, replace the faulty cable and everything will work correctly. And if it doesn't, I now have so many replacement parts that I can replace nearly all of the fragile parts of the printer to keep it running.

Monday, March 2, 2015

RigidBot tale of woe

My pretty RigidBot(RB) was churning out pretty and occasionally useful things for a few weeks after it arrived in October. I made every mistake there is to make with the RB until I finally got it printing reasonably accurate and repeatable things. I even ordered some "crystal" ABS filament with the intention of putting a translucent cover over the CharlieCube.

Then last December the extruder died. I'm not sure if I was the cause. I had accidentally put a knot in the filament and left the printer running overnight. So it spent about 12 hours pulling the same section of filament.

Initially I thought one of the coils in the stepper motor had burnt out or partially degraded. So I ordered a replacement motor and went on to other things. But the motor I'd ordered was the wrong one and it required a higher current. So I ordered another one. But this one didn't have the flat on the shaft. D'oh!

In the meantime I tried swapping motors around and eventually realised it was the driver that was faulty, not the motor.

Pity that the RB main board is an all-in-one board. Apparently it was done to "save money". But according to the RB wiki, Invent-A-Part (IAP) had to re-work every single board because the Chinese supplier had cheated on a whole swag of parts (without mentioning it to IAP of course) and the boards were dying all over the place. So much for saving money.

A few hundred RB owners quickly realised that the RB main board was simply a RUMBA board with stepper driver modules built onto the PCB instead of being pluggable (and hence replaceable). There was sufficient demand that one enterprising chap built a (BYEBYE) breakout board for the RB extruder cable so it wasn't necessary to completely re-wire the RB to replace the main board.

So I ordered a Geeetech RUMBA board + 5 x A4988 modules (+ heatsinks) and a BYEBYE board and forgot about the RB for six weeks and worked on other stuff.

The RUMBA and BYEBYE boards arrived last week a day apart and so began my tale of woe (not actually woe, just a huge exercise in yak-shaving).

All the RUMBA connections are screw terminals. I feel happier with these. No stuffing around with crimping tools etc. First I had to unsolder the thick power cable from the power supply board and replace it with bare wires I could put in the screw terminals. I don't have a soldering iron with sufficient wattage to melt the thick layers of solder holding the wires to the PS PCB. Luckily I do have a hot air gun for SMD soldering and when I cranked it up, I was able to melt the solder enough to extract the wires.

The next task was making connections from the BYEBYE board to the RUMBA board. Last year I had purchased a 'Make your own cable' kit from SeeedStudio which proved really helpful for keeping wires in some sort of order otherwise it would have been an even bigger rat's nest. (In retrospect, I should also have purchased the 'Make your own keyed cable' kit as many of the connections would have been cleaner with a keyed plug. No harm done though.)

So after a couple of days wiring and checking and checking again, I turned on the power and waited for puffs of smoke or flames or whatever. Nothing. Just some lights which should have been on.

Then began the task of programming the RUMBA. I was following Jonathan Roscoe's excellent blog on just this exercise. I've had to learn heaps of details about the RB (and 3D printers in general).

First I had to learn how to flash the Marlin firmware into the RUMBA. Took me a while to realise the RUMBA is simply an Arduino with some pre-wired peripherals (e.g. stepper motors, thermistors, heaters etc. etc.). Once that got through my thick skull, I was able to use all I had learned playing with Arduinos.

I've been using Repetier-Host(RH) to drive the RB and the Panel tab is particularly useful for testing individual parts of the RB. Using RH I was able to work out that the wiring for the motors on the RUMBA is different from the RB main board. The X, Y and Z motors were going in reverse. Simply required swapping the Blue and Red wires. The Z-steppers weren't responding correctly and I had to tear the RB almost completely apart before I was able to isolate each Z-stepper and verify that the A4988 module was faulty. Luckily when the Geeetech package arrived, they'd included 6 x A4988 instead of the 5 which I thought I was ordering. So after swapping in one of the spares the Z-axis worked correctly. I then had to put the RB back together again.

So finally I was ready to test the extruder motor, the original cause of all this hoohah. And it didn't work. Maybe a connection wasn't working. I traced the wires and discovered the BYEBYE board is missing a trace altogether. [Ed: no it was my faulty circuit tester; the board is fine.] So I tried plugging the extruder motor directly into the RUMBA and it sat there buzzing. We've heard that before, it means a faulty A4988. Luckily I had one more spare. I swapped it in and the extruder motor now turned correctly. Two faulty A4988s! I wonder if I accidentally damaged them when I put the heat sinks on.

So back to the wiring harness. Discovered that pin 1 in flat cable is not connected. Was it always open-circuit? Presumably not, otherwise motor would never have worked.

Anyway this gives me an excuse to take the whole extruder apart and put back the original stepper motor with the flattened shaft. Talk about an exercise in futility aka yak-shaving. And now I have to find where to get a replacement flat cable.