I started building my Spider V2 in the summer of 2015. I fiddled around with it on and off for about a year and had everything mechanically working about 95%. Had some movement, but never reached a point to try to print anything. Then life happened… I wasn’t doing much 3D printing at all for a few years, and the minimal printing I was doing was handled on my old Chinese i3. The Spider just lived in the back of the closet.
Now that I’m at home with nothing but time on my hands, I decided to finally get it up and running. And the first Benchy just came off the bed.
The pictures don’t really do it justice, but it looks great, especially for this being the first print complete print ever. Already better than anything that’s come off my Chinese printer.
Anyway, really looking forward to messing around with it some more and really get it dialed it. Feels great to finally finish a 5 year old project…
Great to see you got it up and running. Always happy to see one of the printers make it’s first print. Please keep us updated as things progress. And always feel free to ask for help if you run into any issues.
Is there a way with the Azteeg X5 mini to control the hot end fan to come on when the hot end heats up, or when it reaches a certain temperature? I’m currently just bypassing the X5 for hot end fan power, so it’s just on all the time. But it’s loud. I don’t like it. There’s nothing glaringly obvious on the X5 that says “plug in hot end fan here”, and that’s about as far as my familiarity with this board goes right now… I’ve been looking around to see what can be done with the exp1 and exp2 pins, but so far haven’t found anything that’s been much help.
If you want a fan output for the hotend heatsink that is thermostatically controlled to come on at a certain temp you will need to map one of the expansion header pins to a smoothieware “switch module” then wire those pins to an external mosfet or external SSR. Since you don’t need pwm on the hotend cooling either would work fine.
Go to panucatt’s website and download the wiring diagram for your board version, this will allow you to choose a pin to map. I have the X5 mini V3, there is a small fan header that you can connect the hot end fan, and part cooking fan. Although I see you went with Walters mini space invade carriage that had 2 part cooking fans. That presents a problem since the fan headers aren’t destined to push higher amp fans, I could never get my 2 part cooling fans to operate in Pwm, it was all or nothing. You could control one with Pwm though.
If the fan control signal is routed to to a header at logic level before the MOSFET, you can use a PWM-controlled fan, since PWM to the fan is logic-level. You give the fan power, ground, and logic PWM signal, and it reports actual RPM which you can use or ignore.
It looks like the Azteeg X5 mini doesn’t route fan PWM out to headers, so the alternative is to put a voltage divider on the signal from the fan MOSFET that drops the voltage to around 5V, or run it through a logic level shifter that is referenced to system voltage on the high side and 5V on the low side.
I did try modifying a mosfet module (irf520) and replaced the irf520 with a AOT240L transistor since it is a logic level 3.3v transistor. My electronics knowledge isn’t great, so I never had success and quickly abandoned 2 cooling fans in favor of 1, so I could use the on-board outputs.
