MakerBot Industries

10 Comments so far

• LJ

  April 21, 2011 at 1:10 pm

   

  So a question about the thermal cutout. The thermostat is rated at 140C. I run my mendel extruder at 210C for ABS. Won’t this stop the heater from getting to proper temperature? I’d like to upgrade to this cartridge heater, and use the thermal safety circuit, but this cutout temperature just seems like it won’t get it hot enough to extrude. Or am I missing something, or misunderstanding something? Thanks

   

• LJ

  April 21, 2011 at 1:24 pm

   

  Oh, I found my answer in the bottom of the assembly docs in one of the pics. The cutout thermostat is mounted on the retainer plate. I had assumed it was mounted directly to the heater block since there was no information in the product page.

   

• Jetguy

  April 21, 2011 at 3:25 pm

   

  There were some questions in the forum about this too. Just curious how it takes heat soak on a long print lasting a couple of hours? The heater upgrade is good, it’s the auto shutdown we are yet to see “field” tested.

  Maybe a comforting testing story from the product development team is in order? Something like, “we have tested this for weeks with print jobs lasting 6 hours or longer. There is sufficient margin of X temperature between the trip point for reliability. There is little to no chance of premature shutdown based on these long range temperature charts”.

  I ordered 2 so we’ll find out really soon.

   

• Webca

  April 21, 2011 at 4:51 pm

   

  When will you get the Stepstruder™ MK6 back in stock?

   

• MTO

  April 21, 2011 at 7:42 pm

   

  @webca

  Not soon enough! They were sold out before I realized they were for sale.

   

• Zh4x0r

  April 22, 2011 at 3:10 am

   

  I have a MK5 right now, and am snapping one of these up right away, I’m too paranoid about my power resistors blowing out and taking the EC down with them…

  Also, I’m looking into the possibility of having the relay on the heat switch board trip a second relay, which would cut power to the extruder motor as well (If I cut power to the heater, I don’t want the motor to keep running and create a giant mass of goo, and possibly broken acrylic…)

   

• jetguy

  April 22, 2011 at 7:51 am

   

  It is designed to cut off the whole bot if it trips on overtemp. See the wiki directions showing it plugging into the Estop enstop port which shuts down the printng operation. One more reason to move to a gen4 (really just an arduino mega). You don’t have to buy gen4, you just need to wire the connections from the mega to the stepper drivers, endstops, and provide the serial tranciever to talk to the extruder ($0.88 at Digikey or Mouser), add $10 more for an SD breakout board from Sparkfun-then you have “gen4″. Again, this is open hardware.

   

• Zh4x0r

  April 22, 2011 at 2:48 pm

   

  I do want to upgrade to the Gen4 electronics, but they’re too spendy for the moment… I would try to rig up my own, but I’m a mechanical engineer who can’t make heads or tails of programming… I’d prefer to upgrade everything to gen4 in one shot. Having the relay cut the whole bot is a bit trickyer on Gen3, I may have it just cut the ATX on switch…

   

• JETGUY

  April 22, 2011 at 4:56 pm

   

  So I got both of my heater upgrade kits today! Building them I noticed a major difference in the height of the aluminum block compared to the MK5 stainless version, meaning this has way lower thermal mass. This is a good thing for faster warmup and no more reason to keep the head hot between prints like I was doing before. The best thing (MK6) just got better!

   

• JETGUY

  April 22, 2011 at 4:58 pm

   

  Yes, I believe there would be a way to wire the relay into the ATX power on wire on Gen3. I’ll try some stuff and put up a thingiverse thing if I get it to work.