Pleasant Hardware

The heated build surface works better than I expected!

It’s no guarantee for successfully printing objects, but it eases so many problems…

Building an object like the iPhone Dock (roughly a block of 70 x 15 x 20 mm!) just wasn’t possibe before (I tried it several times):

I recently started with printing objects without a raft (another thing not really advisable without a heated build surface).

Printing without a raft is still tricky, especially when printing complex shapes (like tooth wheels or something like that). So I started with more or less rectangular objects.

It’s crucial to get the nozzle height right for the initial layer. Apart from that, it seems to work quite well.

It’s great not to produce all the wasted plastic with the raft. And it’s also a big ease not to have remove the raft from the object anymore.

A great help when starting a raft-less print is to start the first layer with a long straight line outside the object. That way the extruder has some time to get the filament going and you also have a chance to readjust the nozzle height by turning on the timer pulley of the z axis.

I’ll probably write a script to do the post-processing of raft-less gcode files shortly. But for now I just insert the 2 additional lines of gcode manually with a text editor.

For example in the gcode for the above object I replaced the initial command for positioning the nozzle:

G1 X-2.27 Y14.78 Z0.2 F3300.0
M101
G1 X-38.69 Y14.78 Z0.2 F1590.0

with this:

G1 X40.0 Y40.0 Z0.2 F3300.0
M101
G1 X-2.27 Y40. Z0.2 F900.0 (additional line)
G1 X-2.27 Y14.78 Z0.2 F900.0 (additional line)
G1 X-38.69 Y14.78 Z0.2 F1590.0

I lowered the travel speed for the additional lines to give me more time to re-adjust the nozzle height.

I’ll continue testing raft-less printing with more complex object soon…

In the meantime, here’s a short movie of printing the object without a raft:

If you also like to control a second temperature zone with you v2.2 extruderboard, here are the changed files of the extruder firmware and ReplicatorG.

Use these to patch the most current source of Firmware v1.6 and ReplicatorG 001o. I’ll try to provide a better way to patch the firmware in the future, but I’m still new to GIT…

Firmware v1.6 / ReplicatorG 00010 patch

The heated build surface works better than I expected! It’s no guarantee for successfully printing objects, but it eases so many problems… Building an object like the iPhone Dock (roughly...