NVBot 3d printer end of life ideas

[Erik Nauman]

We have an NVBots printer that is no longer supported by the original company we bought it from, nor the company that bought them and ended up supporting it for a little while. The slicing software is web based and hosted on the company's server, the machine has a Raspberry Pi connected to the custom board for controlling the printer so there's no simple way, maybe not any way, to make it work with other slicing software. 

Does anyone else have one of these? Our best case scenario as far as I can see is to scrap it for parts. Good stepper motors, a raspberry pi, and other stuff.

Other ideas welcome.

Thanks,

Erik

[Joseph Chiu (Toybuilder)]

I suspect the printer is largely the same as most other printers of its vintage and the extruder and steppers operate with power from the control board (versus a "smart extruder" or the like).  If so, it might be as simple as installing a 3d printer controller kit -- a RAMPS kit can be had for under $50. The Pi can be repurposed to run Octoprint.   Whether it's worth doing depends partly on how good the printer is mechanically, since you can buy new printers for a few hundred dollars, it might not be worth your time.

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[Erik Nauman]

Interesting, that sounds worth looking into! Thanks!

[Erik Nauman]

Amazing, it actually had all it needs to simply run the Octoprint image on the Raspberry Pi and I have full control. The control board turns out to be a Printrbot board so it must be compatible. So far have just jogged the motors a bit, will try printing tomorrow.

[Scott Janousek]

A lot of OEMS making printers in that year just wrapped a custom octoprint into their own custom rolled software and slicer. Looks like you're making progress! I'd recommend trying to make it viable as it sits rather than scrap it. I may have a contact at NVBots (before acquition) who was on the software team to help if you get stuck. Sometimes they are sympathetic and have an emotional attachment to aging printers they helped create.

-sj

[Erik Nauman]

I was able to get it working very nicely! To get to successful prints I reached out to Cincinnati, the company that bought NVBOTS and stopped supporting them, for configuration specs to make gcode from Simplify3D and they already had the steps worked out in a support doc, so that was seamless. The last step was adding some gcode to the finishing step of the simplify3D profile because as it was the printer just stopped moving in place once the print is finished. Octoprint provides a really nice terminal interface to work out the gcode so it was easy to figure that out. It's great to have this printer still working, in fact better than it was before, we were getting a lot of failed prints.

Erik