Project Whurple - White/Purple Watercooled Build - Changes to 3d printer build!!

First stumbling block... The pinouts on my LCD and the Geetech board are different or there is some odd incompatability. With the Geetch board plugged into my bench supply, when I plug in the LCD it hits OCP. After some digging the cheap nasty LCD supplied with my printer was some mixup of a zonestar lcd which in the firmware has these reasuring lines:

Code: 
//
#define ZONESTAR_LCD            // Requires ADC_KEYPAD_PIN to be assigned to an analog pin.
                                  // This LCD is known to be susceptible to electrical interference
                                  // which scrambles the display.  Pressing any button clears it up.
                                  // This is a LCD2004 display with 5 analog buttons.

Now here is the thing mine isn't even a legit one of them but some copy and the pinout is mirrored. I am not even going to bother messing about anymore. I have much better displays on the way for my new machine.
 
Vince said:
The first board is here. Meet the Geeetech GT 2560 Rev A+ (mega 2560 + ramps / mega 2560 + ultimaker) The first thing I did was update it straight to the latest firmware which it loaded straight away without issue, this means the board has a bootloader. I still cant actually drive anything from it yet as the drivers are not here yet. Still i can mess around with it and see what it can do.



I cut the 4 pin off of an old atx supply and wired it into my bench supply to get her going and updated! Next up im thinking ill see what it outputs to the lcd and check the new firmware etc went on.

What im not sure about yet is if this can take my new 150w heat pad gel mat thing for the bed. Specs wise it recons 12 amps to the heatbed which I think should be enough but I have grabbed an upgraded heatbed mosfet of 20 amps just to be sure. Ill be using a mix of drv8825 drivers running 1/32 and a4988 drivers in 1/16. Once some drivers are here ill set up a test bench and have a little go with it. I think ill need to change the firmware I have put on it to deal with that as well as the pitch of my new bars. Talking about them I have a customs card so think the kits I bought are sitting at the postie... this means I might be able to get building on Monday :D
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Any reason you went for this board over a cheaper 32bit one and some nice TMC drivers rather than the 4988's
 
bulb66 said:
Any reason you went for this board over a cheaper 32bit one and some nice TMC drivers rather than the 4988's
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Probably because I have no idea what I am doing :D all of the other ones I have ordered are probably equally as bad but im learning as I go and its only cost a couple of hundred quid and im educating myself.
 
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bulb66 said:
Learning is the most important bit.
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This is it. I'm only a couple of weeks into my little adventure and am sure ill get it all wrong before it works! I can't work out why I can't get that lcd working but I have a couple of those 12864 LCD's coming including a fancy touch screen one so would rather try and fail at getting the board working with them rather than an LCD I am never going to use. I have bought a cheap ebay extruder for now to get set up with but will probably grab an E3D Hemera when they come back into stock as I was watching some reviews and they look pretty cool.
 
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Been messing around a bit more in cad and have decided that the frame is going to be all extrusion. I have been tossing up a few designs including a big box type thing but right now this one, or a variation of it is my favourite, everything in purple would need printing:

 
Some more stuff has appeared:



The second of the boards is here, this one is the Anycubic TriGorilla and its absolutely covered in flux. Then we have a couple of mounts that I was going to print but for a couple of quid I thought I would just order them. Then we have the Joke that is a pair of Glorious upgraded cables. Bought one for me in blue and one for the wife, spent some £40 on the glorious site and then got stung for £16 import charges and waited over a month for them... Poor show!

Oh and a roll of Carbon Fibre PLA to play with!
 
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If you're playing with carbon fibre PLA you're going to need some new nozzles. It's abrasive compared to PLA so it'll grind down the nozzle eventually. Cheap enough, but a bit of a pain to switch nozzle when you switch filament.
 
LePhuronn said:
If you're playing with carbon fibre PLA you're going to need some new nozzles. It's abrasive compared to PLA so it'll grind down the nozzle eventually. Cheap enough, but a bit of a pain to switch nozzle when you switch filament.
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Already got a selection of E3d hardened ends on the way as well as some Chinese copies. Hopefully they will do the job.
 
LePhuronn said:
Sweet, we do love a hardened end...

...sorry :p
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I saw this for £15 and had to have it! It was only after I bought it I googled it and realised it is one of those special filaments and needs 'stuff'

I hear all the best ones are the hard ones :D

One thing I have learned and this may make a difference later, the Anycubic board has much better schematics available which means I can easily program it for my fake Zonestar LCD as 2 seconds in google found somebody with the same issue and a solution of mapping pins in firmware. The same can't be said about the Geeetech board so that may be a consideration when building.
 
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LePhuronn said:
Surprised because Geeeeeeeeeeeeeeetech boards are commonplace, so I would've thought there'd be more community twitterings about it.
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It is quite bizzare how little there is out there on the geeetech, they have a forum but it is next to usless. The anycubic appears to have pin numbers on everything whereas the geeetech ommits them on the board from loads of stuff including the LCD connector. Perhaps im just not looking hard enough. I found the lcd pinout for the trigorilla in next to no time at all, with the geeetech I had to resort to the multimeter.

The port on the geeetech for whatever reason is also mirrored so pin 1 is 10 and vise verse(hence my bench supply hitting ocp when plugged in normally) so you have to jam the cable in the wrong way around. Madness.

For example with the AnyCubic and my fake ZoneStar that is missing a cable all you need to do is define the pins for this pinout:



Which somebody has usefully shared on the AnyCubic wiki as definitions in the pins file in marlin as:

Code: 
#define ADC_KEYPAD_PIN 8
#define LCD_PINS_ENABLE 17
#define LCD_PINS_RS 23
#define LCD_PINS_D4 29
#define LCD_PINS_D5 25
#define LCD_PINS_D6 16
#define LCD_PINS_D7 35

I didn't even have to work it out myself somebody has done it all for me. With the Geetech no amount of googling came up with anything at all like that. In fact most stuff I am finding on the Gt2560 is old stuff whereas the AnyCubic the details above were shared late 2019 so there appears to be much more current info available on that board. Still not entirely sure what I will use yet.
 
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@bulb66 could you recommend some 32 bit kit that I can buy and play with please? A board that works on 12v would be nice as I already have a 12v 40amp supply. I could get a 24v as well but for my first build I would like to keep with at least some bits I know.
 
Got a start on this and built a mock up of the bed bit of the frame. Not sure yet on how to properly secure the belts so will design something in cad to replace the couple of plates i have there at the moment. This might change yet but i think i prefer this to the two circular rails.



I love how the belt just sits perfectly inside just missing everything. I might file the ends just a bit but it works a treat.
 
LePhuronn said:
Oh, if only my X carriage belt ran so true. o matter what I do it always slips about 3mm to the edge. Started slightly rubbing on the extrusion now :(
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To be fair I haven't got the parts fully sorted out etc but I recon it should work pretty decent when it is done. Ill hopefully have my other printer up and running soon and the rest of the extrusion will hopefully be here this week. When I have a few more bits I can get to work properly. Little bits turning up every day is good though, it's always a mystery what the postie is going to bring.
 
Some updates on the software and hardware side of things as well as some musings about what I have and just general waffle. Some more stuff came today to play with and below in the pics you can see most of it and the mess im making playing with this stuff. New stuff includes a Mega2560 board, Ramps 1.4 board, RepRap Discount Full Graphic Smart Controller and an adapter board for it. Some endstops, some a4988 stepper drivers, some more just random bits of extrusion and some gt2 pullys etc. A fairly decent haul today but really there are other things I would rather have got here. One good thing is that an lcd is here that is more trustworthy and something of a known quantity to deal with so I flashed the boards (both the gt2560 & Trigorilla) with the updated marlin firmware and enabled the LCD with both boards. The GT2560 I get nothing with the instructions on their site but with the TriGorilla I get a garbled mess so at least something to work with. After a small amount of messing about and googling it appears there is a small firmware issue that fixes the garbled lcd, re-flashed it with the fixed code and in no time at all I was up and running. I tried the same fixes on the gt2560 and as yet have no luck with that board but to be fair haven't invested the time into it yet. I now have at least some of the bits so i'm going to wire up my new X axis and play about to make sure that works as well as get some other bl touch etc related bits loaded onto the board to make sure I can do that as well. I will invest more time with the 2560 as I think I have at least now found a pinout for the board so should be able to at least get it running as really that was the board I thought I would end up using for my build but right now the AnyCubic board is proving easier to work with. Anyway here are a few pics:









If anybody wants to chip in with anything at all, particularly if you know anything about the geeetech board, even if its to tell me I am a massive noob (you don't need to, I already know) and I'm doing it wrong then feel free. I have already found a home in another project for the Mega2560 and ramps board as my friend wants to make a camera slider thing and there are already projects out there based around that so I video called him and offered him some presents to get his project off the ground.

Just so you can see where I am at:

 
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Use your endstop to let the board know where X Home is. That should then reset your X 0 position to the end of the extrusion and give you full range of motion. Disable steppers in the menu, roll the carriage to the end of the extrusion and then auto home. When the carriage smacks the endstop (and it will smack so hold tight or mount it :p ) the board will have its home set.

Essentially you can't do negative movement so you've set your X 0 to the middle of the extrusion just by virtue of installing the carriage there.

As for X Max, I believe that's something you'll need to program into the firmware.
 
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