Building a Hypercube and looking for advice
Building a Hypercube and looking for advice
Howdy y'all, much like the title says, I'm looking to build a Hypercube. I have what was once upon a time an Ender 3 V1 that I've rebuilt with an Ender Extender kit. I'm not happy with the aggressive ghosting I get from the 400x400 bed so I wanted to cannibalize the electronics and build the frame from scratch. I was also planning on keeping the bed since it's got a stick on heater and thermistor that'll work well with the new setup. Hotend too, probably, since it's an all metal Micro Swiss.
Any gotchas to look out for? I know belt tension is a biggie once I get it together, but any gotchas to look out for in the build process?
I'm not too nervous about throwing together a custom firmware for this, it's not my first custom firmware and I'm a software guy by trade so it's pretty straightforward for me.
Sir, this is 3DPrinting, not 4DPrinting. The technology to print hypercubes won't be available until the Great Contact of 2297.
But seriously, I don't think I have the right experience to give specific advice.
Just build the printer, and try not to break anything. Work slowly, and if you mess up, try to understand what went wrong, take it apart and do it again. Watch some YouTube videos if you want to see other people doing it.
When it comes time to print, start with small objects and work through any problems, before wasting filament on big objects.
Hm. That's all pretty good advice in general, thank you! Though I'm definitely not afraid to break stuff. I think that's generally how I learn.
The current motherboard in my printer is almost 100% functional except for one specific module that I completely fried (and as a result, my parts fans run at 100% all the time). I may have shorted a couple wires as I was working on some extensions. Whoops! Though as a result of that, I have a much better handle on how wiring works on these things and it's a lot simpler than I thought originally. The sparks were fun though!
Honestly I sorta wonder if I should document my build process and post it to Lemmy. It might be cool to have a "Here's how to convert" guide.
You wanna be mindful to get the plane that the hot end moves around on parallel with the bed as best as possible. Software leveling and adjustment are nice, but starting with something very parallel is a whole lot better.
And if you have the option I'd consider using precision rails instead of steel rods for movement in the x/y axis, you can get cheap ones from like Ali express but they'll be better for print precision.
With the hypercube we built at my last job, we were building a second printer but with rails instead of rods and my boss said he was way happier with the result, and we spent a while re-leveling the extruded aluminum pieces that our rails (that the hot end moved along) were mounted to, and that also helped.
Regardless, its better not to worry too much and just get started. I'm really bad about trying to perfect things or get everything just right right off the bat when I'd be better served by just starting and then figuring things out from there
One thing id definitely look towards is using klipper for the firmware side of things, being able sing an adxl345 (accelerometer) makes dialing in input shaper a breeze. And should get rid of most of the ghosting.
Sounds like you'll just end up with an ender 6. Maybe you can use that firmware and parts list and build guide?
Check if your extrusions are straight if you’re reusing chinesium. Watch out when/while building the Z axis, you don’t want to print parallelepipeds! Otherwise no advice, it’s pretry straightforward.