Kids project: Family print (and firmware)

It's all fun and games until something goes wrong three quarters of the way in. But hey, at least it reminded me to update things firmware wise..

Whipped up by Sophie (6) via Tinkercad, the print was to one of the family. Mum, Dad, Sophie and her brother Jackson, Keke the cat and for some reason that I still haven't gotten to the bottom of, a random bottle of water. Unfortunately it hits a few snags before things took off and when we got to around 75%..

-Because I'd saved all the objects in her Tinkercad project as one file, I couldn't resize each family member the way she wanted. So now the kids were as tall as the adults. Also the cat looked squashed due to a poor resizing.

-One member of the family was so far over on one side of the plate that there were issues with their raft. And then issues with staying down. And then when he got caught on the extruder, suddenly everyone else on the build plate were having issues. Just like a typical family hey?

-'How do I stop this mess?'  my wife phoned while I was at work. The pause and stop commands on the lcd screen didn't seem to be doing anything so I relayed instructions on where to find the off switch. After the call I made a mental note to update the firmware, a job that's been on my list of things to do when I finally got off my bum, along with getting buff and finally writing my next book. The firmware upgrade would not just to get those options actually working but to add quite a few more features including one important safety one. 

So I came home to this printed car crash:

Which looked more like a diorama of a Dr Who creature set from an episode filmed in the early 70s than it did our family.   

Amazingly too the drink bottle stopped a couple of layers in. 

RIGHT THEN, BEFORE WE GO AGAIN, LET'S UPDATE THE FIRMWARE!

You don't really need an excuse to do this, more find yourself a spare half hour to read the benefits of upgrading, watch a video or two of the install to make sure you don't lunch the thing and away you go. Originally I was planning on the latest version of the highly recommended Marlin firmware for the Ender V3 (apparently it has some of this firmware already built in but not all the benefits) but a chance Youtube suggestion after ingesting a Marlin install brought me to trying out the similarly awesome JyersUI. There were a couple of reasons for picking this fork of Marlin:

-It's really not hard to install on the Ender 3 V2

-It hardly takes any time to install

-I didn't have to compile anything. Brilliant!

After removing a few screws to find which version motherboard I was working with (in my case 4.2.2) all I had to do was format my supplied microSD card, pop the update on said card, stick it into the printer and turn the machine on. 20 seconds later I had an updated machine with a lot more useful information now on display:

It now tells me what steps it's up to in the heating process. It displays the X, Y and Z co-ordinates as it moves along. You can set the brightness of the screen and things scroll so you can read them fully. Settings now save on the machine itself and not on the SD card. It'll now keep a record of how many things I've printed and how much filament I've worked my way through. I have a stack more options to slowly work through which makes this feel like a really big upgrade and not just a patch adding some fancy new menus. And it was all thanks to this ripper Youtube vid that explained everything: 

(I also feel a little bit better about having the latest firmware upgrades installed to minimise the risk of fire with thermal runaway protection now on board, which detects and responds to heating problems. Less chance of fire makes me happy when I'm not in the same room to keep an eye on things.)

FAMILY PRINT 2.0

So after updating the firmware, I went to work modifying Sophie's project in Tinkercad:

-I saved each family member as individual files so I could change the size in Cura easily. 

-I resized the cat carefully this time

-I keep figures away from the edges. 

-Instead of a raft, I opted for a brim support

-A few layers in, the water bottle still isn't working. But everything else seems to be and that is a great thing. 

First cab...er cat off the rank is the cat and while it looks nothing like the feline that wakes me at 5am daily for a feed, it doesn't look as compressed as the first version. This is one of those lucky paw waving cats from China but at this size and in shiny white, it's not so easy to see.

A short time later the rest of the family rolled up and aside from a few minutes with some mini files, all emerged from the printer relatively unscathed. Unfortunately Jack lost a finger in the cleanup and a skateboard (it was too thin and came away with the supports) but now I have a deleriously happy daughter on my hands. 

For the record, that's me second from the left. She nailed the hair perfectly..