Portable 3D Printing

Effectively a free machine and its transformation

For some background, my mom likes to go to auctions, garage sales, thrift stores, and other places where the selection of items is always unknown and the quality of them is as well. At one of these places she was able to buy an open, mostly unused roll of filament, an unopened roll of filament, and an entire 3D printer all for like $40. Since that amount of filament alone is about $40 the 3D printer was effectively free. However, free does not make it a good machine, it does make it a machine that I will take for parts or modifications though. (If you don’t want your 3D printer, I will take it, if you are local ish.)

The Machine

As has been danced around for a while, lets get to what the machine actually was. It was an unmodified, MonoPrice Select Mini v2 Black (mpsm). These, are not machines known for their reliability, their ease of use, or even their ability to stay working. These are machines made with low ish quality components in a surprisingly strong metal case. These are machines that when plugged into an instance of Octoprint, Octoprint says there is critical firmware safeties that are missing. These are machines that last just long enough, and have just enough print volume, that you can find out if a different machine is worthwhile for you. Product image since at no point did I consider documenting my process. Image of a 3D printer with a large squareish column on the left side attached to a rectangular base that has a large angled face for a screen and knob. From the column is a long rectangular arm that holds the hotend and is positioned over the build plate that contains a 3d printed bhudda cat thing.

The Modifications, a jumbled mess of a timeline

Me being me, I immediately went to find a case to attach a raspberry pi with octoprint to the mpsm. I found this octoprint case, which hangs off the back of the machine. Attempted to get octoprint set up on the printer and did, but with the significant warnings from octoprint about how there was no thermal protection in firmware, I was hesitant to actually use the machine. With that, the printer was shelved.

Months went by with the machine only gathering dust, till, I was tasked with showing 3D printing to others in a space that did not have a machine, nor did it really have space. I just so happened to have a small machine that with some finnagling I knew I could make it a one plug everything works out of the box thing and brought it out again, with an entirely different idea for it. This time it would be my “portable” machine. Something I could bring with me if I pack my bag and tools for tinkering or fixing 3d printers elsewhere. Especially because the number of times that a single part that needs to be printed and would fix the machine being worked on is the limiting factor, this sounded like a good idea to me.

I was able to get a friends help and weekend at their place to try and make this all work and somehow got a good chunk done. In that time with my friend, we attempted to reimage the existing main board to no avail. Swapped it out for the BTT SKR Mini E3 v2 control board since I had that already for a different shelved project (major CR10 overhaul, might write about it later then forget to link to it.). Was able to add the new mainboard with this mainboard mount print. New mainboard in place and no firmware flashed to it, well, there’s the major options available at this step. The one I went with was Klipper, I think I used both the mpsm 2018 config and the skr mini e3 v2 config because I had both. Not sure if it was the 2018 mpsm config or 2016 mpsm config that I actually used but close enough. Whatever I used, I got it to a point where it was moving with the new mainboard. I think this is where I was able to get it at my friends place and then went back to my place and worked on it for even more time to get it finished up.

Which, finishing it up, is an understatement, since that included so many more things. The first of which, since it was now to be a portable machine, it had to be easy to carry. So, I found this Handle after trying another one that did not fit my hand. Added it atop the the printer and placed the octoprint case the handle mount as well by using longer M3 screws than the machine had. Also, since I wanted more control in how the z axis levels, added this external z endstop cause I wanted to have more then just the bed screws for leveling it. Since the external endstop needed the column removed I figured then was also a good time to redo the bed wires since I’d have the machine apart anyways and printed a whole host of pieces for that. Firstly, found a no drill rewire side panel that I printed the heated bed pieces for in PETG. The remix said to use a universal cable chain and about 9 sections of it. As well as to use the this front half side panel and this back half side panel. Which, would work great, if I didn’t have a different main board so I combined them in tinkercad and made my own side panel for the BTT skr mini e3 v2 board. In all that side panel and rewiring since the bed was removed already, I tried out a fancy leveling knob hack but went back to the original bed screw mount leveling setup as the hack didn’t hold well. While still apart, added a buck converter to usb so that I could power the raspberry PI from the machine power, this did not go as well as expected since the PI always complains about low and undervoltage but at least it powers on and without camera, I don’t care. I did care about having external boards and wires floating around in a metal case unprotected so I printed a buck converter case. No idea when, but at some point printed a spool holder as mine didn’t have the original and I like that the filament now is mostly going straight to the extruder setup. Which, even the extruder setup wasn’t left alone since I had a dual gear extruder upgrade laying around I decided to pull the old press fit gear off and add the upgrade to it. As I already had this much into it, I figured why not go full ease of use and got a spring steel PEI sheet for the machine too.

Then came the tuning, more or less followed my Intro to 3D printing tuning steps since that’s legitamately the process I use.

Final Product

Overall, it’s a pretty nice little machine now. Does it work amazingly, not really. Does it work well enough that I can print small parts for others machines if I decide to pack 100lbs of equipment over to some place, yes. There’s still some tuning to do as I recently got the calilantern and found out that it’s off by more than I thought it was, but that’s for another day when I can tolerate tuning a machine again.

At some point get a photo of its current state and include it here.

Effectively a free machine and its transformation

The Machine

The Modifications, a jumbled mess of a timeline

Final Product

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