3D Printer

I purchased a Creality Ender 3 V2 3D printer in March 2022. I used it for many school projects before graduation in May 2022. And for many projects since. I have also installed several modifications / upgrades since, with several more planned.

Upgrades

I installed new hotend and part cooling fans after the stock part fan started to fail. It would make loudwhining sounds at startup as the bearing were failing. The stock fans were also very loud and I wanted to quiet them down. I installed two Noctua fans 25mm x 25mm x 10mm 12V fans. One for the hotend, and one for the part cooling fan. Since they are 12V fans, I also neeeded to add a 24V-12V buck converter to reduce the voltage. The first, very cheap buck converters I used kept failing. These buck converters had no protection for low output current, and due to the functional requirements there has to be a certain load on the output, or the internal inductor current will increase until it fails. Rather than try to deal with choosing an appropriate output resistor size, I decided to use a much larger DC-DC converter with these limitations internally handled.

I also replaced the motherboard fan with a Noctua fan, and wired it to be powered whenever power is on. This is compared to the stock motherboard fan, that only runs when the part cooling fan is on, which, depending on what material is used, may not provide enough motherboard cooling.

While I had the printer apart to replace the fans, I also replaced the bed springs with more sturdy versions, and the stock plastic extruder with the upgraded creality metal version.

The final upgrade I have planned is to add risers to the feet of the printer, so I can raise it up high enough to add another Noctua cooling fan to the bottom - mounted power supply. After this upgrade, all of my cooling fans will be replaced with nearly silent Noctua fans. This upgrade is also made easier since the power supply cooling fan is already 12V. As part of rising the printer, the motherboard cover will also likely be replaced with just a fan shroud to make it easier to work while the printer is running.

Methods and Tools

I normally use Autodesk Fusion 360 to create my models to print, due to my familiarity with Autodesk inventor and Autocad from school. Autodesk Fusion 360 is a semi-cloud based CAD program, that is reasonably powerful (At least for an Electrical Engineer’s 3D modeling abilities.) Fusion 360 has a free version availible for students and hobbyist, in contrast to solidworks, that is paid. Originally, after buying the printer, I had purchased a Solidworks maker subscription, but was quickly turned off, by the failure of the softwareto install correctly, and the need to go to a website to launch a machine based app. Fusion 360 is cloud based, but does allow some offline editing, although features such as exporting to an .stl are cloud based only. A workaround when my network connection was not strong enough to export an .stl that works well is to export from Fusion 360 to an .stp, that does not require cloud translation, and then open the .stp using Freecad, and exporting to an .stl.

I use Cura 4 as my Slicer. All of the default settings have served me very well for the most part. I have just played with part cooling fanspeed And minimum part support angle settins to get it all dialed in.

I installed Octoprint on a spare raspberry pi 3B I had to provide a webserver front end to the printer. Octoprint allows me to upload start, stop, and monitor prints from a web page without physically going to the printer. It also removes the necessity to use a micro SD card to move gcode files from a PC to the printer.

There is also a Home Assistant plugin that displays data about the printer status. I also display the camera that watching the printer in the same window.

Projects

The First print that I created after printing the included benchy was to create a rectangular change box.