31 October 2025
Having spotted problems with the standing water in the garage resulting in rust appearing where I would rather it did not, I moved the 3D printer to the flat last weekend. First problem of cause is that it is too big assembled to go through the loft opening, so currently it's sitting in the bedroom and I thought I may as well start having a play with it. It's been some time since it's been in action, and the original build log is on medw.uk but I could not locate the videos and manual initially to remind me how to get it working. Fortunately the Tronxy website is still active and there are also some good third party videos on YouTube which had prompted me to make improvements to the hardware early on. Also having machines that can cut metal allowed me to create a couple of useful replacements to the plastic ones supplied in the kit and which were less than optimum for sorting the path of the belts around the top of the gantry.
One of the changes I made was to replace the 12V bed heater with a mains powered one which just needed one of my mains relays added to the setup and this reduced the power needed in the 12V power supply considerably. The extruder head still needs 12V for it's heater, but a 5V power pack from one of the ITX computers is more than adequate, so no need for the large PSU that is normally used. I was pleasantly surprised that everything just burst into life, but I immediately spotted a couple of problems. The X cross rail was not running parallel to the edge of the bed was the first problem. I'm not sure how that has come about, but all my kit has moved between several containers in the last few years so perhaps to be expected. Realigning was relatively easy and now the nozzle tracks the front edge of the bed perfectly. The Z axis home switch had been modified to handle the thicker heater and so was not picking up the top of the bed properly. It is almost right, but will need a little more work along with fine tuning the bed of for level. It's very slightly out, by perhaps 0.2mm so the first layer of plastic was not laid down cleanly. But at this stage I'm not too worried. It is currently loaded up with white PLA filament and several milliammeters into the nose cone of the Eagle Transporter from Space 1999. The layering is obvious on the surface I can see so far, but I suspect that is down to getting the heat right. At the moment it's a little low on the nozzle and something I need to play with. It's already 10% of the way through this print so I'm leaving it to finish. Also the table I've got it on is a little flexible, so the top of the printer is jumping around a bit which will not help things. Also I need a better way of supporting the reel of PLA as the weight of that is causing the stepper motor feeding the extruder to struggle at times.
That the Cura program that creates the g-code is actually working 'out of the box' with the default settings for the Tronxy X5SA was magic. And that it's running on the linux box is a bonus as the previous setup was using the W10 machine. There are a number of things I can play with such as adding the Raspberry Pi into the mix and running Octoprint, but I think the next step will be to simply update the firmware in the X5SA driver with the latest version which seems to have a few useful additions over the old one, such as I think, tweaking temperatures while it's running. Need to read the manual next I think.
Picture of the finished part when it's done ... in 7 hours time :)