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I tried emailing you but you never emailed me back

i really liked this video if it is possible could you check your email i writed something to you

Hi I got your mail, I'll reply later when I've got the time, currently struggling with work related stuff myself right now

I didn't (and don't intend to) publish the design files for this printer because it ended up being pretty much a piece of crap as far as 3D printers go, to put it bluntly. Nobody needs to repeat my mistakes, especially as there are plenty of great 3D printer projects around in the community. If time's not an issue you can wait a bit longer as this year I'll launch my first non-experimental 3D printer which will be fully open source

@ I know that there are some mistakes But this is a project that I can develop according to my environment We are almost 5 students 😅 They want your project file because we want to develop it honestly

Haha! You haven't seen me mill a pocket into mild steel using the drill press recently...

@@ChronicMechatronic 👀

Haha yeah!

Afraid I don't understand what you mean?

Yeah, the new video's taking ages 😭

​@@ChronicMechatronic Upload it before 3rd world war begins

Haha I'm not sure I would recommend anyone to repeat the that journey! At least not if they just want a working printer xD It strongly depends on what Ewaste you have access to, because only large old-ish office printers and stuff actually have any useful components inside. Around here all I can usually get my hands on are new cheap inkjet printers that got thrown out after like 6 months because the print head dried up, and aside form the scanner glass there's basically nothing useful inside (not even a linear rod on Epson models) :(( Bragging rights aside it sounds more promising to keep an eye out for a broken _3D printer_ sold cheaply for parts, to get kind of like a starter pack of components. At least in my neck of the woods...

@ChronicMechatronic I have two perfectly good printers, this is about the journey (and the TH-cam content), not the destination. I found a table with metal legs on the side of the road today that looks like it's a great candidate for the frame :) If most ewaste printers don't have any useful stuff inside, that's a bummer, I'll have to check out other sources of motors and whatnot. I know that floppy drive and CD tray mechanisms have usable motion systems, at the cost of making the print volume quite small. My goal is to learn more about how and why 3D printers work, and just the research for this project has accomplished that before I even started building anything, so I'm happy so far. If I ever get anywhere with making the project/TH-cam video I'll include a disclaimer to the effect of "just buy a used Ender 3" since new parts can't beat used prices, and scrap components, even if free, start to be expensive very quickly if you value your time at even like $10 an hour.

@rosly_yt aah yes, if it serves a second purpose as TH-cam content different rules apply and it makes a lot of sense 😅 I have a "normal" printer too these days, the wooden one would've broken down way too frequently to be a daily driver as I slowly came to realize the more the series progressed. I really should've done a disclaimer like that too, just to dissuade people from unnecessarily going the hard route. I just didn't know it myself when I started out - back then $50 was an investment that I legit didn't know if I would break even on. Metal table legs indeed sound like a great printer frame! The new printer I'm in the process of designing will use square tubing from a trashed pop-up gazebo for the frame x) The ewaste printer situation indeed sucks, I have half a mind to develop a closed loop driver board running FOC or something to make building 3D printers with the DC motors from inkjet printers possible. This would be a long shot though, and there wouldn't be any advantage over traditional stepper motors since getting custom boards manufactured also kind of ruins the "free" aspect of using Ewaste... :(

I was thinking about it today, and the solution might just be to assume a printer is better than the sum of its parts and do only minor retrofitting. Assuming you can root it and run arbitrary code, or write something to do fucked up things to printer code (like partial page retractions) such that a gcode to printer language conversion makes sense, any printer that can do double-sided printing should have mostly the right motors in mostly the right places (minus z motors and extruder motors) to be a 3D printer. If you lean more on software than hardware, and do positron-style upside down printing so you can keep the inkjet gantry where it's supposed to be on the stock printer, you could theoretically make it work. You'd probably need to put in a little extra work to keep the toolhead light, but I can't think of any burning reasons this setup wouldn't work. I've put out some feelers on my local BuyNothing group, if I can get a free printer out of it, I'll tinker with it and post a video if I get anything out of it.

@rosly_yt not gonna lie, the programming for that goes way over my head. Even just trying to jailbreak the proprietary control board would have me totally lost... But it would be great to see someone achieve it, if you end up doing it let me know; it'd definitely be a video I'd watch. In the meantime, I'm happy to reuse the drop-in wifi module they used on one of the printer controllers and maybe even reflash the main MCU after desoldering (if it belongs to one of the prevalent MCU families in the DIY world)...

Thanks for letting me know! I'll remember to fix that later today :) Yeah it's surprising how well it ended up working in the end - it should be even better once I enable linear advance!

@@ChronicMechatronic I'm having fun watching the series back, the part where you machined (rather than just printing) V-Groove sleeves from bottle caps was quite something. For some reason, your series has me thinking a lot about what an industrial revolution era printer would look like, given that plastics technology wasn't really there, so it probably would have involved some sort of natural resin. Anyway, thanks for all the videos, glad I could help out a bit!

@rosly_yt well, I didn't yet have any printer to print them on :p And getting PCBWay to make them for me like I did for the fix later would've been completely cheating... I'm glad this series struck a chord with so many people, I'll soon get started on the natural sequel to it after spending much of the last six months designing a much better printer that'll be built using parts printed on this wooden one! 😃

@@ChronicMechatronic Very much looking forward to it!! I already own two commercial 3D printers, but I'm currently researching how 2D printers work a bit because if I want to learn more about 3D printers, I think I just have to build one from nearly scratch, and an ewaste printer should have most of what I need in terms of parts but still require some original engineering. Building a 3D printer on a reasonable budget without using any 3D printed parts is a really interesting challenge, I hope to take it on myself some day.

Thank you! You too! 🤗

hahahaha. tel me somthing please,.. this grbl route to build ploter isnt good, yes. Is tehre eny other route. I need healp. hahahah

@theguy186 there sure are plenty other ways to do it, just not any better ones to my knowledge. Instead of GRBL you could always try a different CNC firmware like UCNC or something, but documentation will be worse at best and it'll be just as hacky. I think it's a common misconception that these pen plotters are a suitable beginner project just because they look like one, when, in fact, they most definitely aren't. I give this advice to everyone these days, but if you want to do yourself a favor, build a 3D printer instead. The whole software ecosystem is 10X more mature and easier to use - as well as to get working in the first place. Plus you won't get bored of the printer afterwards like is probably bound to happen with these pen plotters.

@@ChronicMechatronic This is realy sugestion on point. I dont wont 3 d printer becose tehy are poisunus, and to get them working is pain in the ass. Temeprature jade jade lol ahhaha,.. It is posible to revrite this stuf filmwere. Do you know for eny route to get form kicad pcb out so you can plot it. ;)

Hey, thanks for the comment! I'm sorry to hear about your difficulties as a maker, is at least ewaste and stuff you could salvage parts from accessible in your country? I guess despite growing up in a low-income situation compared to my distinctly middle-class surroundings, I was still quite privileged by my parents owning the house and allowing me to set up shop in that spare basement room compared to the standard of living in quite a few other countries... Thanks for asking about the next video, I was all but resigned to the fact everyone had forgotten about me already :') I unfortunately had to cancel 2 videos due to some contractual difficulties with sponsors, then I really didn't know what to even do a video about seeing how this laser cutter ended and all my other projects still being stuck in the development phase; and now I've been working on a big video which turned out way more involved than I anticipated for the past two months, and that I still haven't finished. It should be ready (very belatedly) around mid-January though...

Haha I definitely have OCD, probably in it's original definition too! I've always been obsessively perfectionist 😅

Yeah, you can do that if you want to do yourself a favor - some NEMA 14 or pancake NEMA 17 steppers with GT2 timing belt seem like the best option. Then you can also use a normal GRBL shield with A4988 drivers which will make the wiring and software a lot easier. Lead screws are good for something like a CNC router but not a pen plotter, as it'll be very slow and take ages to draw a single picture. Generally you get bored of these plotters pretty quickly. I don't think making the frame out of plastic would be really beneficial here if your design is going to be anything like mine in the video, I've never had any problems with hygro-expansion of the wood - the spring loaded rollers took care of it quite nicely it seems. I'd rather go for better linear rails, a few V-groove POM wheels on (anodized) aluminum square tubing from the hardware store should do a nice job. Hope that helps :)

@ChronicMechatronic Thanks for the reply, I am planning to use linear rails with sliding linear bearings. Is there a reason to use pancake nema 17 motors?

@MegaTechno no real reason other than full-size NEMA 17 being slightly overkill. But if you have some of them kicking around already, or can get them for cheaper, they'll do the job just fine of course :)

@ChronicMechatronic Thanks for the quick reply, Yes full size ones are cheaper. And is a core XY system faster, or should I stick to this design. And why are most of your builds made from wood?

@MegaTechno corexy is certainly faster and probably has more "cool factor". I make stuff from wood mostly because I've been into woodworking for like forever, and wood is a fairly cheap, abundant commodity (albeit not quite the right material for CNCs =)

Oh i thought they were copper I kid I kid

Yeah I guess I did, not sure why I didn't tone it down a little bit after the cut failed to feel as dangerous as I imagined it being. I hadn't actually seen it being done a whole lot before - maybe once...

Yes, incredibly kind! That single shipment easily dwarfed my previous stock of mechatronic parts I collected over a decade... No worries, I think my channel will always be on the low cost end of building stuff, not least because I enjoy it! If the basics get too accessible as the channel grows I'll likely just raise the bar and tackle bigger projects on the cheap (like maybe a mini-mill with those MGN20 rails Eric sent...) In any case I'll try to find a balance between using crap, and getting the right stuff for the most essential components so as not to have my DIY efforts derail to the same extent as in that 3D printer series anymore ;D

Interestingly enough no one on the internet seems to have experienced something quite like this before, based on what I was able to deduce from the comments; so my case here might've been a bit of an outlier in how extreme the pitch difference is. But still good to be aware and check in advance! 👍

@@ChronicMechatronic ironically nobody having experienced this is how i stumbled onto this video lol, was looking up threaded rods on CNC out of curiosity and found this video!

Love looking at stuff like this for inspiration!

I'm not sure it'd work very well since with an astable multivibrator the frequency changes with voltage. So slight fluctuations in the power supply might change it enough to make the servo stop responding to the signal, depending on how adamant those servo control chips are about getting the right frequency. But, in theory the way it would be done is to increase the capacitor values until the frequency is low enough. I think the easiest way to do that is trial and error. Then, since servos scale their position on a 50-100% duty cycle range for some reason, replace the 10k potentiometer with a 4.7k pot and a 4.7k resistor in series, making sure to connect R3 to the end of the potentiometer that is connected to the resistor. Connect the wiper of the potentiometer to the other end, wired into C2. The loose end of the 4.7k resistor gets hooked up to C1. This should modify the circuit to only produce a 50-100% duty cycle instead of 0-100. (or 0-50% IDK, if it comes out wrong just flip the whole resistor/potentiometer thing around) In any case if you're just looking for a servo tester, all this effort is probably not worth it, those things are like $1.60 on Aliexpress...

I tried that once but didn't feel like it made any difference - maybe I just didn't crank it up enough... But I've since bought a filament dryer, which works great :D

@@ChronicMechatronic Awesome!