Did a bit of work on my TronXY X5S printer.

Did a bit of work on my TronXY X5S printer. Moved the electronics and power supply to a pegboard attached to the back of the printer. Added a Raspberry Pi 3 (running OctoPi) and video camera. Made some effort to route the wires cleanly.

OctoPrint is very, very nice. (Finally got around to setting up OctoPi.)

By mounting everything on the pegboard, get a clean appearance from the front. Easy to re-arrange for any future experiments or revisions.

The printer comes with a (noisy) 12-volt power supply, which I plan to convert to 24-volt (and the much quieter supply). Seems the stock control board can accept 24V, and a 24V heater cartridge is only a couple bucks.

The only question is the (badly under-powered) heated print bed. Might try that on 24V, and if that burns out, replace with better.

When taking pictures, noticed the printer was rocking a bit on the table. With all the moving about, the frame had come askew. Printing corner braces…

Posted the printed bits to Thingiverse:

I like the pegboard electronics rack. Seems obvious in hindsight but I don’t recall ever seeing it before.

Great idea with pegboard!

@Ryan_Carlyle Thanks! I will aim to do more obvious things.

@Glen_Beer I thought so, but then I usually do. Except when my experiments fail badly.

I doubt if the print bed will last with 24 volts…it’s of fixed resistance so it will draw double the amps at 24 volts…too much.

@Richard_Karlson About 1.3 ohms, measured. Figure about 10 amps on the 12 volt supply (tweaked to 13V). So ~18 amps on a 24V supply. Or 400+ watts across a bed ~330mm square. Too much? Unclear.

@Preston_Bannister I tend to recommend 0.25-0.5 W/cm^2 and you’ll be in that range. But 18A is a lot more than any typical connectors can handle. The PSU supply to the board and the heatbed wiring to the board will both probably need upgraded connectors or directly soldered wiring. It’s also a lot of amperage to put through PCB power/ground traces. You might want to switch to a relay.

@Ryan_Carlyle Good point. Was focused on the bed, not the current through the board. Might fry the board. (Not interested in replacing the board, just yet.)

Have a batch of SSRs to put in printers. Have not yet ordered an AC heating pad for this printer.

@Preston_Bannister As Ryan has mentioned, 18 amps is too much current for the connectors and wires. Come to think of it, just because your circuit board can accept 12 or/to 24 volts input, doesn’t necessarily mean that it will output 24 volts to the print nozzle and heat bed if powered by 24 volts instead of 12. I would bet that it would still put out 12 volts regardless of what is used as input voltage.

@Richard_Karlson Heatbeds use so much current that they’re pretty much always wired straight from the PSU to the MOSFET, no regulation. Some boards do regulate to a fixed 12v for fans though, that’s a good thing to check.