The Ender 3 Pro is a brilliant printer for the cost. Mine’s running most days
Have you made any modifications or upgrades to yours? Mine’s now got a glass bed, upgraded springs, a support for the top of the Z axis screw, custom firmware and a clamp-on dial gauge for leveling - the prints I get are fantastic, even with cheap filament. (The £15 black PLA I’ve got came out looking close enough to carbon fibre yesterday to keep me happy, as you can see below!) I picked up a cheap auto-leveling probe but I couldn’t get on with it, so I’ve gone back to the old microswitch endstop.
I’ve kept mine pretty much stock except for the spool holder, which I printed a custom bracket for. I’m more proud of my storage system for holding all of my extra filament.
A glass bed sounds terrifying! How do you detach your prints? I love having a flexible surface because I can pick up the whole work and pop it off easily.
It’s actually pretty easy! As the bed cools the glass contracts ever so slightly, which helps loosen it, and I’ve got a plastic ‘razor’ blade that came with a phone screen repair kit which I use to lift the edges.
I was happy with the magnetic surface until I had to print something very large and flat and discovered the bed wasn’t completely straight and no amount of leveling could fix it. The glass is perfectly flat and helps spread the heat evenly
Just an odd idea ive had but not put any design into yet…
What about RAM style mounting for the PCBs? one kind of securing channel and one groove and clicky clip thing?
It’d take a whole bunch of tries to get a nice/usable design, but i like the idea of less tools and hassle.
Its certainly possible. It would take some pretty serious engineering - and probably the creation of a whole new form factor standard.
The one problem I can see is that even eurorack modules have a pretty broad range of sizes. It would be difficult to arrange the power bus in such a way that there are either too many or to few sockets. Buckling down on that and saying “Ok, it can be one of these two sizes and nothing else” seems like it might be a little too limiting.
It might be good for a really small like… micro-rack sort of situation though.
I did understand @willow2x’s idea like this :
Use this RAM-like slot’n’lock thing just for mounting the PCB onto the panel, instead of screws, but no electrical connexions.
But then, this gave me an idea, I have to think some more about it…
Yes, To clarify… i meant purely as a securing method, not as a signal sending adapter.
To be fair i didnt think about that zorch, of all the PCB ive made - none are the same size haha.
what ive thought of so far is, make notches in pcb (like RAM), have 2 clips that need to be glued the right distance apart (so it clips securely)…
Panel components connect via Molex/Headers?..
The more i think about it the more i think its not worth the effort haha
Basically my train of thought was ‘how do i make repairs easier/faster’
