Transcript

Hello Everybody and Welcome to another video. Today’s we’ll be installing the Repkord Upgrade kit for the CR-30 since the motors lack proper support. Full disclaimer, this is not a paid sponsorship, I purchased this upgrade kit with my own money and the opinions that you see here are my own. As always, do this mod at your own risk, and I’m in no way responsible if any damages may occur.

Before we begin, I wanted to mention that this video is based on the original Repord installation video and although it was jam packed with useful information, I believe that it would benefit from an instructional over hull. For this reason, I will be including the link to the original video as well as the upgrade kit in the description below.

So there’s a couple of main reason why you may which to undertake this modification, however it is mainly to help prevent issues after long printing sessions. As mentioned in my review for this machine, this printer is better suited for a production setting where it can be expected to run 24/7. For a small business, having a machine go down can cause expensive delays while replacement parts come in. The CR-30 comes initially with two stepper motors, which do not have proper supports and could potentially deform or break over time. Depending on the deformation of the D-shaft, you could also experience extra rigging on your 3d prints if it becomes bent to one side. This modification adds a support across the stepper motor D-shaft where the belt applies constant pressure.

To start things off, we’ll first remove the original stepper motors that came with the machine. These motors are attached with a 4 mm hex screw and have 3 connection points. Making sure to unplug the original motors, we’ll completely remove the screws holding the mounting bracket in place so that only the tensioner remains. The tensioning screws only needs to be loosened enough to remove the stepper motor. Make sure to place these screws in a safe location because we’ll need some of them latter on.

Before we begin installing the new stepper motors, we first need to adjust the timing pulley to ensure that it is roughly the correct height. This will also allow us to adjust the orientation of the stepper motors according to our preferences after we’ve attached the mounting brackets. From the upgrade kit, we’ll remove the T-spring nuts and screw, while making sure to place these in a safe location for later. You’ll then need to loosen the 4 screws which are holding the stepper motor in the mounting bracket with a 2 mm hex key. Take care when lifting the bracket away from the stepper motor so that the screws don’t fall out of place. You can then place the mounting bracket flat on the table while you work on attaching the spring T-nuts to the frame of the machine.

I found that putting my tweezers in the slot was a great way to keep the spring nut from falling down the T-slot. In order to actually put the T-nut in, you can place a hex key through the hole to allow you to tilt into place. The pliers will keep the T-nut from sliding down while you attach the mounting bracket with the provided screw. Make sure that the bracket is just tight enough to keep it into place while still allowing you to move it if necessary. You’ll place the timing belts within the mounting bracket, making sure that they are opened over the hole for the stepper motor shaft.

We can now begin adjusting the timing pulleys by loosening the small hex screws holding them into their position. Using the original motors that came from the machine as a reference, you’ll line these up and set them to the same height. You’ll want to make sure that at least one of the screws is making full contact with the flattened portion. This will mean that the motor with the shorter height will need to be flipped upside down for a better connection. With the height properly set, you can now connect the motor to the mounting bracket while making sure that the connector is either facing up or down and that the timing pulley is within the timing belt. With the screws for the motor tightened, you can then slide the assembly up towards the tensioner screw and begin tightening it just enough to get a small amount of tension. If it doesn’t reach completely, the belt is most likely caught somewhere, so double check that it’s correctly threaded through its entire path. You can now attach the final screw to hold the motor into place and begin adjusting the timing belt tension until both belts are adequately tightened. Make sure to fully tighten the T-nut once it’s installed correctly by using a hex key which has a ball tip. Don’t overtighten the belt, it should have just enough tension that there’s enough resistance when you pinch it together Both motors need to have approximately the same amount of tension to ensure a proper operation of the machine.

The final stage is to adjust the steps per milometer for the new motors. Go to” Advanced settings” + “Configuration” + “Steps/mm” and adjust the steps for both the X and Y motors from 80 to 160steps/mm. With this complete, you can now begin printing once again.

So who is this mod for and when should someone consider doing this? Well, if you’re in a production setting then I would consider this a mandatory upgrade since it prevent issues before it begins. In this case, it would recommend that the user do this upgrade alongside the Bowden tube and tinned wire replacement. If you’re a more casual user of this machine, you could wait until a latter date to upgrade the motors since in most cases you won’t be tied to a specific deadline, however you do risk wasting materials and time should the motor shafts become deformed.

Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to another video. Today, we’ll be circumventing the creality Wifi Box that’s inside the CR10-Smart. We’ll be doing this in order to be able to fully test the machine for troubleshooting purposes, however this can also be useful if you want to disable the creality box entirely. As always, what you see here is my own opinion and do this at your own risk. I’m in no way responsible if any damages may occur.

As some of you may remember, I did a review of the Creality smart kit, which included the Creality Wifi Box. Although a reseller provided me with wifi box to review, to this date it’s performance has been the poorest I’ve ever rated because of several reasons, which you can check out for yourselves by clicking the video in the description below. Needless to say, I wasn’t thrilled to discover that this machine in fact had the device hardwired within its confines. At the time I was still working on the review for this machine, but I was running into strange issues while printing and I did suspect that they may have been caused by the inclusion of the wifi box. In order to test this theory, I first needed to find a way to print without the use of the integrated box.

After doing some research, I came across an article by Sebastiaan Dammann where he explores a method of unplugging and adding a cable to connect the 3d printer to a computer or raspberry pie. I will be including a link to in the description below for those of you who might be interested. After doing some testing of my own, I did discover that I could achieve the same results, but by retaining to USB input that came with the machine. This meant that I didn’t have to worry about messy cables sticking out of the machine, and I could retain the clean aesthetic. Now, technically, you have two options with this machine. The first, is you can connect the machine via the USB input or in theory through the Ethernet cable. As of recording, I have yet to attempt the second method, mainly since in most cases a person would want to connect to the USB port instead.

Now, the great part about this method is that it’s entirely reversible. You can do these changes and reverse them as you see fit, allowing you to benefit from either solution. There is one thing that will need to keep in mind. You will need to purchase a Male to Male USB Data cable in order to establish a proper connection with your device. Most people don’t realize this, but there’s actually two types of USB Cables that you can get. You can get a cable which only transfers power to another device, which would be the in-correct version for this project. The second one, is a USB cable which allows for information to transfer along with the power and is this one we that will be required. Also, very important to note, the machine MUST be disconnected from the external device in order to start up. What this means is that you will need to disconnect the USB, the connection to the computer or raspberry pie prior to booting up the machine.

As per usual, many of the connections that we will be modifying will be glued together, so you will need to remove the glue prior to changing any of the connections. The first connection that we’ll remove is the connection to the PC and Wifi Hub board. All connections on that board will remain the same except for the WIFI connection which is used to connect to the Wifi Box Board. Next we’ll take the connection going from the Wifi Box board and move the Camera connection to the WIFI connection which is on the PC and Wifi Hub Board. We can then remove the Ethernet and power switch connections going to the wifi box, although this shouldn’t be necessary because the data cable is no longer connected.

Once everything has been properly connected, you can test to make sure that the machines are still functioning properly. As mentioned before, the CR10 Smart must not be connected via USB when first starting up. Once it’s turned one, however, you can then plug it into the device. Doing a simple test to see if the machine is responding to movements and seeing if the machine heats up properly will let you know if everything is working correctly. You can then begin printing or testing your machine depending on your use case.

So is this mod worth doing? Well that would depend on your use case as always. If you are using this machine for client work where security would be an issue, or you’re troubleshooting something on your machine, then I would consider this modification a must. If you are however already used to using the creality cloud even if they don’t respect content creators works then perhaps it isn’t necessary. You can still use the SD card reader which is appreciated, however you may run into unforeseen issues because of the integration of the Wifi box. So although I can see how it could be beneficial to some people, I personally would have preferred that it wasn’t included in the CR10 Smart. Once I’m done testing this machine, I will most likely be removing the Creality Wifi Box entirely unless I can find a proper use case for the device.

Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to another video tutorial. In today’s video, we’ll be covering how to update the firmware for the CR-10 Smart since this machine has a very particular way in which it prefers to update. As always, do this mod at your own risk, and I’m in no way responsible if any damages may occur.

In order to update the firmware, there are a couple of things we need in order to do so. You’ll, actually require, two SD cards that are 8 GB in size. The size of the card is important in this case, since you could run into issues if you don’t set the correct parameters. You’ll need one regular sized SD card and one that’s a micro SD card in order to do this upgrade. The regular SD card is used to update the motherboard through the SD card slot that you load your printing files from. As for the micro SD card, that one plugs into the reader that’s inside the LCD screen and must be opened first.

Before we can use either of these cards, we’ll first need to format them in a specific manner. Insert the SD card into your pc or mac and format it so that it follows these requirements. As mentioned previously, the card should be 8 GB in size since other versions may not have the correct settings available or be compatible with the upgrade. The file system option should be set to FAT 32. The allocation unite size needs to be changed to 4096. We can then select “Quick Format” since we don’t require an in depth version to be done. After making these changes, we can then choose Format.

There are a couple of different alliterations of this machine, therefore we’ll need to check and make sure that we have the correct firmware to do this upgrade. On the main website, you’ll go to the download section and select the firmware that you want to download. Once downloaded, there’s a README file which gives you information on what type of firmware goes with which motherboard. In my case, I had the CRC-2405V1.2 and was able to use this version of the firmware at the time. Unfortunately, the only way to find out what type of motherboard you have is to open the machine and check, so I’d recommend doing this at the same time as the safety upgrade which is included in the follow-up video.

Before we begin upgrading the machine, there’s some very important things to know prior to starting. The first, is that you can only use a file name once to do an update with the .bin file, so make sure to use a simple name which can be changed in the future. The second thing to know, is that you have to hold down on the power button until the update completes, otherwise you’ll render your machine inoperable. The easy fix, if you make this mistake, is to re-flash the firmware after having renamed the .bin file.

In order to update the motherboard, we’ll transfer the .bin file to the regular sized 8 GB SD card after having formatted it to the proper specifications. We’ll then turn off the machine and also turn off the power supply button in the back. After having done so, we’ll insert the SD card into the slot in which we load our 3D printing files. You can then turn back on the power supply button and press and HOLD the power button until the firmware finishes updating. You will know that the update is complete when you are brought to the home screen.

To update the LCD screen, we’ll first need to open it up to get access to the micro SD card Reader. First turn off the machine before unmounting the screen. You can then unplug the monitor from the rest of the machine and unscrew the back to open it. With the micro SD card properly formatted, you’ll transfer the DWIN_SET folder to the card without renaming it. Unlike the motherboard, the LCD screen doesn’t require that you rename the folder, so leave the name unchanged since these files need to be referenced, and it may not work if you change them. With the machine completely turned off, you can then insert the micro SD card into the LCD SD card slot. You’ll then power up the machine and wait for the update to complete. This can take a while to finish, but you’ll know when it’s completed when you see “SD Card Process….. END!”. You’ll then need to power off the machine and turn it back on to see that the menus have been updated.

With everything now updated, you can then do a couple of test prints to help ensure that everything is working correctly. Unlike most machines, I can verify that some of the issues I had encountered have been addressed with this update and I would therefore consider this update mandatory since it greatly affects the machines’ performance.

Transcript

Hello everybody and welcome to another video tutorial. Today we’ll be addressing an issue which is quite common among budget friendly printers and isn’t discussed all that much. The CR10 V3 like many other 3d printers in the market today, have tinned wired connections at their terminals, so today we’ll be replacing those with ferrules. As always, what you see here represents my own opinions, and undertake this at your own risk. I’m in no way responsible if any damages that may occur.

Now, there’s a couple of reason why you might want to change the main power connections to ferrule ones, however the main one is for safety. Not having ferrules means that maintenance will generally be more difficult since you’ll have to deal with the wires unravelling when being placed inside the terminals. Tinned one’s on the other hand can make the strands more susceptible to vibration, loosing and corrosion, all of which are to be avoided when it comes to the main power connections. So for this reason we’ll be taking a closer look at how to replace the those connections on the CR10 V3 by Creality.

Since the CR10 V3 has a separate case for the electronics, I will be removing this portion from the rest of the machine to make things a little easier to manage. In order to get access to the terminals, we first need to open the box and to do this, well need to remove the screws on the bottom of the case as well as those holding the power supply in place. There shouldn’t be any need to disconnect the power supply from the motherboard, but you will need to put it to the side as you work on the components.

According to the wiring diagram, you can see that we have a couple of terminals, which we will need to double-check for tinned wires. I’ve turned the diagram around so that it matches the orientation of the video footage. It does seem to be typical with most 3d printers, is that both the hot end and main power tend to have tinned wires. I have come across some that also have the sensor tinned as well, although that it more rare.

To make things easier to keep track of, we’ll only remove one wire at a time by unscrewing the screw at the top of the terminal. With wire cutters, you’ll remove the part that tinned before beginning to prep the wire for the ferrule. In order to have proper contact with the ferrule, well need to strip the tip of the wire by using one of the two methods. If you have wires strippers, you can use those to strip the wire connection, if you don’t, you can use your wire cutter to do the same thing by gently adding pressure until you’ve cut through the outer protective layer. You’ll then be able to remove the coating by holding the cutter’s partially open while pulling that part away. When choosing a ferrule, you want to choose one that just barely fits onto the wire to help ensure a proper connection when crimped. By making sure to twist the wires first, you’ll have an easier time inserting them into the ferrules. If you have a ferrule crimping tool, you can use that to crimp the connection, if not you can use a pair of pliers’ to do the same thing. Always test the connection before putting it back into the terminal.

In the end, I’ve found that I had to replace both the hot end connections and main power with ferrules. This means that we’ve ended up replacing the connections for 2 terminals. By only disconnecting one connection at a time, you’ll be able to keep track of what connections need to be changed next. This is the method I generally recommend so that you don’t end up mixing your connections. When you re-attach the connection, make sure to double-check that it’s properly secured before moving on to the next one. Once you’ve finished upgrading the terminal connections, you can then put back together the machine and do a quick test print to make sure everything is working correctly.

I hope this video has helped some of you out, and if there’s a video you’d like to suggest, please leave a comment down below. I hope you guys enjoyed this video and I hope to see you guys soon. Thank you and take care.