I received my 3D printer a little over a week ago. It took me about 6 hours to build it and another 4 to realize that the rods that came with it were bent too much to be useable. I replaced the cheap steel rods with some hardened rolled steel ones.
It still took me a week of fiddling with it, but I finally have it printing reliably. The first thing I did was to print new versions of the DC-9000 pump mounts. I only have the power supply housing printed right now, but will print the controller housing tonight.
I’m not quite ready to start leaving the printer running through the day while I’m at work. The plan is to get a Raspberry Pi running Octoprint with a camera working. Then I’ll be willing to leave the print going. I’m going to install a relay so that I can shut off the printer when the print is done.
I also plan on mounting the whole thing in a box to help keep the air temperature stable. The programming I’ve done on the aquarium controller should make a simple fan controller pretty simple to do. I might try to write a plugin to Octoprint to tell an arduino what temp to maintain, since PLA and ABS both have their own settings.
Here’s some pics of the printer I built and the new power supply mount.
