We need to know the printers current e-step value, and a physical steps/mm value (what the printer is actually spitting out). This calibration is especially important if you’re changing the extruder from one that uses gears like the Titan Extruder found on Anycubic printers to a spindle drive.
Determining your current steps/mm value for your 3D printer
Connect PC to USB port on printer. Download and run “Pronterface”.
Set Baud Rate to 250,000 and select your COM port. Make sure you have closed any other slicers such as Cura as they make try and take control of the COM port thus making it impossible to connect in pronterface.
Once connected, In the Command Window enter M503 (report settings)
Look for a line starting with M92 and at the end you’ll see your current e-step (steps/mm) value
example. echo: M92 X80.00 Y100.00 Z400.00 E405.00
Determining the physical steps/mm value for your 3D printer
Heat the extruder on your printer.
Using calipers (or ruler) and a sharpie, place a mark on your filament at 120mm from the entry hole to your extruder.
In pronterface, Send: G1 E100 F100
This tells the printer to slowly extrude 100mm of filament
Determining the correct steps/mm value for calibrating your 3D printer’s extruder
Measuring the distance from the extruder to the mark on the filament, then subtracting that value from 120:
120 – [length you just measured from extruder to your mark] = actual length extruded
Next, we need to know how many steps the extruder took to extrude that much filament. We can determine this value by multiplying the current steps/mm value (found earlier by issuing an M503) by the length we should have extruded, in this case 100 mm:
[steps/mm value] x 100 = steps taken
Using this, we can obtain the physical, correct steps/mm value by dividing by the length extruded:
The Laminar flow hood or FFU has peaked my interest for years but only recently have they become more compact and affordable. From time to time I’ll take liquid cultures purchased from my favorite mushroom culture vendor sporesfast.com and isolate them on agar to see which phenotypes, or physical characteristics emerge.
For years my go to, when handling sterile mushroom cultures was Mushyluv’s ez-SAB-mini still air box. This little dynamo processed 1000’s of mushroom tissue samples reliably and contamination free. I’ve even used the SAB-mini in the field to take tissue samples from wild mushrooms on site and at friend’s houses. You can imagine my excitement though when I heard Mushyluv was producing laminar flow hoods.
The Clone Cube laminar flow hood Has been great to have around the lab. Working with sterile cultures is so much easier when you don’t have all the restrictions normally associated with still air boxes. One of my favorite aspects of owning a flow hood is how easy it is to pour stacks of agar plates. As mycologists, we spend so much time following best practice guidelines with the aim of reducing chances for contamination. When you run across a product, like the Clone Cube, that makes it effortless it seems almost magical.
Ease of Use: ☆☆☆☆☆
Take it out of the box, plug it in and it’s ready to go.
Price: ☆☆☆☆☆
The price tag is a fraction of the cost of larger wooden FFU units.
Sound: ☆☆☆☆☆
About as loud as the vent-a-hood fan over the stove.
Filter Replacement: ☆☆☆☆☆
common HEPA filter available at mushyluv and online retailers.
In closing, the Clone Cube FFU is a solid performer that makes life much easier in the lab.
I’ve created a list of list of possible issues that can cause the Anycubic MEGA S and Chiron to randomly stop during printing.
Loose connectors
Bad thermistors
Corrupted SD card file system
Failing SD card reader board
Broken wiring
Symptoms often include:
A random (heartbreaking) print fail.
Your printer will sound it’s power up chime. (Then you sing a four letter aria that would make Pavarotti proud.)
When attempting to manually move the print head or build plate you get an error message, “The Machine is running, please try again later.”
An inevitable power cycle to regain gantry control to unbury the print head from the 90% completed garden gnome sized baby yoda you were printing for your grandma.
General disgust.
Loose Connectors:
You’ll notice most of the connectors on your Anycubic printer have blobs of hot glue on them.. this struck me as odd until I watched this YouTube video about similar random print fails. The hot glue acts as a lock minimizing the chance of connector back out. I was really surprised to see the temp sensor for the heated bed glued to the mother board. If you’ve purchased your Chiron recently, you’ll also see the hot end data/power cable is cinched to the cage using a zip tie locking it in place.
Loose connector resolution:
Pretty straight forward. You simply go connector to connector checking to see if they’re seated and tight. If you’re feeling frisky you can add reinforcing hot glue.
Bad thermistors:
Thermistors are used in the hot bed and heater block as part of the feedback loop that keeps the printer on task. If the thermistor fails, gives bad data, or gets disconnected the print head will halt immediately and the hot end cooling fan will kick on full speed. I think it does that so it can’t hear me cussing. “T0 sensor abnormal”
Hot bed thermistor Resolution:
To test if your hot bed thermistor is causing problems, you can turn off the heated bed in your slicer and run a few test prints. If the intermittent fail goes away, you’ve got your culprit (and hopefully a bunch of double sided tape). In the case of my Mega S, my print would fail at 3 hrs out (randomly), then 1 hour, then during the skirt print, then it just wouldn’t start. Anycubic customer support recommended turning off the hot bed and sure enough it printed to completion. Anycubic will work with you to get the bed replaced or you can learn more about replacing the hotbed thermistor here: https://youtu.be/UEfxie6aVtw
Heater block thermistor resolution:
The easiest solution is to install the spare hot end that came with your Anycubic.
Heater thermistor combos are not that expensive if you’re comfortable splicing wiring. 24V 100KΩ NTC3950 Thermistor & Ceramic Cartridge Heater 12V 40W. Consider using thermal paste when installing your thermistor and ceramic heater cartridge.
Corrupted SD card file system:
The file system on your SD card has become corrupt or you have a memory failure going on.
Corrupted SD card file system resolution:
Reformat your SD card using fat32 for the file system or try a new SD Card.
Failing SD card reader board:
So it’s possible (rare) the SD card reader daughter board is acting up and causing intermittent failures.
Failing SD card reader board resolution:
Remove the SD card from your printer and plug a USB cable from your Anycubic to your PC to run the print directly from your slicer. (At the time of this writing I was literally 15min from completion on a 7hr Cura/PC to Chiron test print (1 of 3) to determine if my SD card reader is flaking out. Just one of the reasons I decided to make this list.)
Broken wiring:
In my experience broken wiring normally affects the hot bed where the power and thermistor wiring come off the bed and begin running down the Chiron frame. They really need a cable plug assembly mounted to the bed that reduces stress on this cable and allows you to simply unplug the connector from the bed to replace or service it. You could build it into the bed clamp assembly for added strength.
Broken wiring resolution:
Shoot a pic to Anycubic customer support and they’ll work with you on getting it replaced. OR if your handy with a soldering iron and heat shrink tubing, the fix is straight forward.
Anycubic Mega S and Chiron upgrades to make your printer a reliable workhorse (paid links):
Left handed all aluminum Bowden extruder. (left handed on Anycubic printers)
After you get tired of the cheap metal axle sleeve wearing out on the Titan extruders. This is real fun to diagnose by the way since it doesn’t appear as a catastrophic failure at first. Your prints just start coming out ugly. Anycubic chose to use weak extruder motors and then gear up to compensate. One of the sketchier Achilles heels on the Chiron. When changing from a stock extruder to a 1:1 extruder you will need to change the estep values. A stock Titan extruder is set around 405.. I would recommend setting the 1:1 all aluminum to 100 to start with then calibrate from there.
Don’t eva… eva…eva..eva… run your printer without a heating block sock. Just asking for trouble if you do.
Anti Backlash Spring Loaded Nut & Flexible Couplings
The T8 brass nut that mounts to the frame needs 4xM3 Threads to mount OEM on the Chiron.
The flexible couplers are 5mm to 8mm.
Pro tip: There’s a little screw on top of the worm gear caps on the Chiron that allow you to take the cover off. This makes extracting the worm gear muuuch easier… you don’t have to remove the cover.. but it’s waaay easier once you do.
TMC2208 Stepper Motor Driver set for quiet operation an reliability.
When the stock motor drivers fail you get print drift. Irritating but not too bad.. unless it’s your Z axis driver.. bad things man bad things. I replace the stepper motor drivers on any new anycubic printer I get right out of the box. Noise reduction is a huge benefit here too.
Lately Wordfence Two-factor authentication has been flakier than a country biscuit on my e-commerce site. The only suggestion from wordfence technical support I’ve found online is that it “might be a conflict with another plug-in”.
Here’s a quick remedy to get logged in.
FTP to your host account
goto /wp-content/plugins
rename your wordfence directory wordfence1. This will disable the plugin and allow you to log in.
Once logged in and back on your dashboard, rename your wordfence plugin back to wordfence via FTP. Reload your dashboard.
Goto Wordfence > login security and click disable two-factor.
Configuring a Raspberry Pi and VLC to act as a streaming audio server for your home or office is inexpensive and relatively easy to do.
The tutorial below configures your Raspberry Pi to autorun VLC on boot and play a pre-configured playlist of streaming audio sites (or any audio content you wish). You control the VLC web instance using a browser on your cell phone or home computer.
Hit ctrl-O then <enter> to save the autovlc.desktop file
Hit ctrl-X to exit nano
reboot your Raspberry Pi by typing:
sudo reboot
Your Pi should reboot and begin playing music automatically. One thing to note however this launches VLC in the back ground with its only interface being the web interface so you wont see it come up on the desktop.
To switch between streaming stations, you will need to connect to the VLC web instance on the Pi by entering http://<raspberry-pi’s-ip-address>:8080 in a browser on your home computer or cell phone.
A login prompt will come up. Leave the username blank and enter a “.” as the password (you can change to whatever you like). You’ll see the VLC Lua web control interface come up.
The Clone Cube laminar flow hood Has been great to have around the lab. Working with sterile cultures is so much easier when you don’t have all the restrictions normally associated with still air boxes. One of my favorite aspects of owning a flow hood is how easy it is to pour stacks of agar plates. As mycologists, we spend so much time following best practice guidelines with the aim of reducing chances for contamination. When you run across a product, like the Clone Cube, that makes it effortless it seems almost magical.
In my experience broken wiring normally affects the hot bed where the power and thermistor wiring come off the bed and begin running down the Chiron frame. They really need a cable plug assembly mounted to the bed that reduces stress on this cable and allows you to simply unplug the connector from the bed to replace or service it. You could build it into the bed clamp assembly for added strength.
