Gav's World : 3D Printing

3D Printing

After many, many years of thinking about buying a 3D printer, I finally gave in to my temptation and bought a Vertex Delta 3D Printer. Basically, it came up at a very good price at Pimoroni so I just had to...

This is an open source hardware platform (with 3D models of all parts should I need to print any - which I've had to already, after breaking a bracket that holds the print bed in place), that runs Marlin, open source embedded 3D printer software (no... it's not firmware!). There is also a freely available slicer: Ultimaker Cura which itself is composed of open source libraries etc. which (best of all) even has a native appImage for Linux! Note that there are many other slicers available, including some that will run on a Raspberry Pi.

There is over one million 3D models of all sorts of things on the Thingiverse, and when it comes to having to design a model myself, then FreeCAD is also available for Linux!

I had a the head crash into the print bed when I first built it (didn't quite have rods connected to magnets correctly) and I've had the odd crash whilst it performs bed-levelling just before a print (I'm hoping that my tweak of the senor sensitiviy has sorted that now though), but it is pretty straight forward to set up. However, by the sounds of it, the upgrade of the embedded software to v2.0.7.1 (thanks to this K8800 specific fork on GitHub) should hopefully resolve these issues.

After a couple of weeks with this printer, my only reall annoyance is with the filament run-out detector: the mechanism is just too sensitive and the steel pins inside it actually wear out with the friction of passing filament through... see below for a modification that I made to fix that.