If you mean the wires from the motors, yes the thickness is different, but the drivers and traces are all identical, so you could actually arrange the motors in any way you want (I mean using any driver header to plug in any motor) by just changing the pin assignments in printer.cfg, because all drivers are identical DRV8825 drivers and have the same voltage/current specs as far as limits. The motor will command only the current it requires for the speed/torque at which its attempting in the moment. If you look at the documents, the regular “Bolt” 3d printer used the same arrangement of connections as my Bolt Pro does, and the motors were the same.
The Y and Z motors are NEMA 23 and the X and E motors are NEMA 17 (to explain the size difference). Ultimately I am likely going to upgrade to a BTT Octopus Pro board with much higher voltage drivers so I can attempt to achieve Voron/VzBot speeds and accelerations, but I am doing this in phases to prove to myself that I can I suppose haha. I am a software engineer and huge diy’er so this is just an exciting undertaking for me.
Currently trying to map out the GPIO connections from the Pi to understand and implement custom usage of the Power Button, the chamber LEDs (have you messed with these yet?), etc.
Ahh ok I understand, than its doesnt matter indeed.
Yes my brother did the complete gpio bootup process for the Pi including the power button, leapfrog logo during bootup, only the Led is just one color at the moment.
I was extually also hoping it would be quiter with the upgrade to klipper, but thats not the case unfortunately. The PSU fan is making alot of noise when heating the bed. And possibly the stepper drivers making noise?
I was also thinking about upgrading the motherboard to the Btt octopus pro and run with 48V psu so the stepper would be more efficiënt and less heat in the motor would be produced.
But for now it is working, learn to set it up and than maybe later do the upgrade motherboard.
The printer itself is worth it, its built like a tank
Awesome man. It’s been a pleasure meeting someone undertaking this on such a non-widely owned printer, and I will be sure to come back and share any discoveries/milestones! Good luck!
I only printed on the machine for a few days before undertaking this, and havent done anything yet as I am trying to get as much original/custom functionality as possible implemented first, so I can’t speak to the noisiest sources yet.
That said, the fans seem to be very loud alone (the pi hat fan + the fan aimed at the driver heatsink + the psu fan). Could start there, as it’s a cheap upgrade to replace with “silent” fans. Without testing different drivers, I’d have no way to say how much of the printing noise those are making, and haven’t really cared about the noise enough to ever investigate driver differences in that respect.
Definitely will pay more attention to it going forward to try to increase my own understanding and be able to provide more informed opinions going forward.
Also, inspect all the fans, in particular what they are mounted to. If it’s mounted directly to metal, that could be a significant source of noise, and you can dampen that by adding either rubber washers between the fan and metal, or any other vibration dampening technique.
I just did a quick search and the 4010 series fans in the electronics bay are high rpm noisy buggers (high pitched). Sourcing some more silent variations should be possible.
The original drivers are DRV885 SMD (surface mount) chips. They are not replaceable without significant work, and even then, you won’t be providing any higher voltage to them without frying the board. You could run external drivers via the Pi, but this is not different and more convoluted then just replacing the large leapfrog board with a BTT Octopus Pro and new, better drivers altogether.
Also, I wouldn’t rely on passive cooling for the Pi, as that hat is a power gating hat that likely generates a decent amount of heat, which is why the fan is made to blow between both boards.
You might need more than 8 drivers, but that will come in the future.
I disagree. I think, that board produces almost no heat at all. D217 are dual channel optocouplers and that SO14 looks like a triple channel inverter. The board is mounted on top of the RPI 3 for the 40 pins connection and used for mounting the fan for the RPI 3.
After looking at the board again, I agree. Since it was responsible for activating everything but the raspberry pi, I incorrectly assumed it would have more power handling, and looking now I can see it’s a pretty barebones hat designed specifically for some gipo breakout functions and not much else.
Maybe an out of topic question, but was chatting with chatgpt and he told me that the drv8825 driver is way to light for driving a nema23 motor. He suggested the tmc5160 or leadshine em556s.
Looking at both drivers, they are way different in size? That leadshine is almost 4 to 6 times as big as the TMC.
TMC5160’s generally are more compatible with boards with slotted driver ports, like the BTT Octopus series. I’ve never heard of the EM556, and I’m not sure if Klipper would support it.
I was talking in the context of noise, where it explained that a nema23 likes to run at 3A and 48V. The drv8825 has a 2 - 2.5A with peak 3A maybe and running at 24V, making it noisy with more vibrations.
I also have a Raise3d pro2 which is using the leadshine drivers, I think the EM445s. Thats why i was asking.
