Replicator status

[Robert Ristroph]

The Replicator quit powering up about a week ago. The voltage
regulator on it appeared to have blown up, I bought a replacement and
with David's help desoldered and resoldered it.

While that made more LEDs come on on the board, it doesn't display
anything on the LCD screen or show other signs of life.

I'm thinking of buying either this:

https://www.amazon.com/Geeetech-Printer-Control-MightyBoard-Atmega1280/dp/B00PMTH6Z6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1466718839&sr=8-1&keywords=makerbot+mightyboard

Or maybe a more complete kit like this:

https://www.amazon.com/MightyBoard-Motherboard-Dashboard-Printer-Introduce/dp/B01GM9CDV6/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1466718839&sr=8-3&keywords=makerbot+mightyboard

Any thoughts before I order this ? ( Particularly from Martin, who of
course has the most knowledge about this machine. )

--Rob


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http://rgr.freeshell.org/

[Martin Bogomolni]

The first board should work.  I think the Geeetech boards lack the RGB LED control port, but that's trivial and doesn't affect the function of the printer.

Remember what I said about the short -- if the endstop is accidentally shorted, it takes out that regulator with a POP.   Carefully check that the leads coming from the endstop are not frayed, and that all the endstops are correctly plugged in. 

Also, NEVER force the bed up or down ... That generates a pulse of electricity through the board ( you might even see it power up ) and that also can lead to the regulator popping.

-M

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[Riley Cassel]

oy geez....

Anybody mind if I fire up the replicator with a standard ramps board?


*prolly got two dozen of 'em on hand



-
Riley

[Dustin Silverman]

Sounds like a good plan to me, Ristroph what do you think?

[Martin Bogomolni]

I would prefer it be run with the correct hardware it was designed with.

It's a -fantastic- printer, the most detailed and reliable one.   Please , don't just hack a solution.

-M

[Riley]

I dunno, if moving an axis by hand fries the board I'd opt for a slightly less fragile solution :-\

An Arduino Due (m3 cortex) with a RAMPS/RADDS board and 2amp 8255 stepsticks works quite nicely. Better acceleration, larger lookahead, faster rapids, etc...


-
Riley








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[Robert Ristroph]

From what I can tell by googling it's not a drop-in replacement;
there's the 12v vs. 24v for motors and heaters, and the Replicator has
thermocouples instead of thermistors. The cost savings end up smaller
than appears, and it's less complicated to just drop in the
replacement for the same electronics.

On the other hand if someone wants to be in charge of that specific
printer, and nominally be responsible for it's on going uptime, I'd
support whatever decision they wanted . . . but then if it's a
Franken-printer, we also have to document it carefully on the wiki so
others can maintain it, which hasn't been something we're great at.

--Rob

P.S. In general, we now have enough 3D printers that maybe we should
be a bit more organized about maintaining them and start a 3D printer
committee, and let the committee handle stuff like this.

http://rgr.freeshell.org/

[Marshall Peck]

Just in case it's some weird LCD issue, try connecting to the board with pronterface or something.

To my recollection it had a version of Marlin on there before (same/similar as the Prusa i3's).

Basic RAMPS should be all good except that thermocouple. There's a breakout for that. Then again, thermistors are .99¢ and like Riley was saying, there's more than a few laying around. Pretty sure RAMS + MEGA and thermistors would be a sub-$20 solution ya'll could try. Can't imagine that's gonna risk any damage to anything else.

Riley know what he's doin' ;)
It's an extra good sign if you hear him go: "mwahaha".

I've been moving my printer beds around with a RAMPS for ages and not yet have had it blow anything up. Other boards, who knows. Un-plugging the motor never seems like a bad idea if you need to manually move it around. I've definitely blown a few drivers plugging them in backward, though!

[Martin Bogomolni]

It's not Marlin..it's Sailfish.  MakerBot made their own binary encoding to send the movement and control commands.

To use the replicator with other slicers, you need to pass the G-code output through a program like 'gpx'

-M

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