On today's makers mash up.
We're building the resin assistant
Here we have the resin assistant.
This is a build that I've wanted to do for some time.
And the reason why is I find these yellow lids terribly annoying.
I understand the purpose behind them.
Keep the U.V. out, allow the rest to print.
And they're relatively inexpensive.
But these covers tend to get resin on them.
Alcohol.
And I always feel like I'm
moving covers around the shop between the printer and the washing cure,
just pulling them off and the entire process.
I'm constantly moving these to either the floor
or to a table or countertop.
I thought there had to be a better solution
And here we are, the resin assistant.
So let's talk about some of the features and benefits of the resin assistant.
First, it's going to lift the lid all the way up and put it back down,
giving you complete access or hands free access to the
bill plate on the inside.
You can use these large arcade buttons, and I built these enclosures
so you can actually mount them anywhere on the frame.
The way I put this together was so that I can hit this
with the back of my hand, not have my fingers dirty.
Even an elbow would work with these large arcade buttons,
and it really gives me the ability to put them anywhere.
So if we have small children,
they wouldn't be able to press the button because you could mount them up here.
So a lot of flexibility there.
Now, the other things that the resin assistant will do for you
is it uses no modification to the 3D printer.
These shock mag mounts that I developed
have a little bit of shock absorber to them.
And there's three magnets inside there.
Those magnets for each mount hold the lid on their
which is the magnetic force.
And the flexibility doesn't cause your lid to end up getting crushed
or cracked because they do have a little bit of flex in them.
Now, the other cool features that this will do as well
is if you look here, you can see we have a display screen.
It will do all of the thermal controls for you.
So if you want to heat up your resin enclosure to a higher temperature,
because when resin tends to get colder,
it gets runny and that results in paw prints.
This will allow you to set a temperature
for your enclosure and it will maintain that temperature.
Now, I use an AC pizza heater here.
You can use a 12 volt one.
It does make the build a little bit simpler for me.
I was a little worried that the 12 Volt wouldn't put out enough heat, especially
since I, as you know, put my resin 3D printer in a grow enclosure
and use that as a negative pressure environment to vent out all the fumes.
Well, the really cool thing about the resin assistant
is it sits in that enclosure, including the height.
So these are one meter extrusion.
You can build this for any sized printer that you personally have
the weight of the printer holds the entire enclosure down
The other really neat thing about this as well
is that because the resin assistant will put the lid down for you,
you can't easily lift it back up.
The nice thing there is, is that if you do have small children
there, it's pretty difficult for them
to just walk over and lift the lid off of your 3D printer.
Now, I would never rather 3D print around small children, but,
you know, if they were to get to access to the printer
and they would not be able to easily open this up.
Other cool things as far as the overall build is concerned
is that you have the ability now to mount things
such as tools or other things to extrusion.
A lot of the 3D printers out there like this one here,
the Moto Monarchs just doesn't have anywhere I can mount anything.
So it really gives you a lot of different flexibility.
Lifts your lid.
It's all automatic,
hands free heating, gives you ability to mount things.
A little bit of safety features as well.
Now, I know a lot of you are probably concerned,
hey, if there's a heater right here and I raise the lid, what's going to happen?
It's never going to open.
So one of the things that
I've tried to bake into the firmware was also safety features.
So you can't open this lid or raise it up
with the heating even enabled, even if it's not heating,
if you've turned on the heater, it won't raise the lid.
So safety features have been baked in there as well.
So today what we're going to be doing
is I'm going to show you and walk you through the build process here.
And then once we're done with the build process, we're going to put this into my
growing closure and then we'll run some tests on the resin assistant
So with all that said, let's get to work.
We'll start by creating the base for the resin assistant.
I use some inside corner brackets.
I think these worked really well.
They're fairly inexpensive and it hides the connections between the extrusion.
I put the 3D printer on top of the extrusion,
made sure everything will laid flat and then tightened up everything.
I also attach the one meter extrusion to the back
and then use these Heavy-Duty bonding plates
to make sure that everything was pretty rigid for the back
as it supports the majority of the weight of the resin assistant.
These cross beams should be the exact same length as the framing that you did
to hold the 3D printer and mine were roughly about 320 millimeters.
Then about halfway up you'll install one of the cross beams,
and then the second one, these are where the electronics will attach to.
Later on in the video.
Make sure everything is square and level as you install this.
Now we're going to measure and find the center of our frame
and then we're going to install the step about in the center.
Next, we move on to installing the linear rods.
The kit comes with all of these different pieces that are bought
for Amazon, which was super handy and made assembly much easier.
Once we have the two bottom rods installed,
we're going to add a crossbeam at the top where the rods end.
Don't tighten the rods to the Crossbeam.
Yeah, we'll do that in just a little bit.
Now, we'll move on to the bearing blocks.
You'll need to bearings per bearing block and you'll need to create
two bearing blocks, one for each side of the resin assistant
And once you've got all the screws in and I took to a power drill
for the number that I had to install once I had these all together,
then you're going to use a piece of 2020 extrusion
and the two bearing blocks to the 20, 20 extrusion.
Then we're going to slide the entire piece over the top rods
and attach the top rods with the mounting brackets at the top
Now we can install our stepper in lead screw.
One important thing to note is that I did use a thrust bearing here
because there is a significant amount of weight
in the lid and the aluminum extrusion lifting it up.
You should have a thrust bearing here in order to offset the weight
and not put that load on your stepper itself.
Make sure the coupler is resting on the thrust bearing
before you tighten everything up here.
Next will install the brass nut into this 3D print.
And then we're going to slide that down the entire length of our lead screw
and attach it to the 2020
extrusion where we have our bearing.
Now we're going to attach the lead screw bearing with the 3D printed spacer
and after that will run it all the way up to the top
to make sure that everything is nice and smooth.
Now you're going to need to frame out a piece of aluminum extrusion,
and this is what's going to lift the lid of your 3D printer and attached to it.
So you'll make this
whatever size your 3D printer is and attach it to the back extrusion.
And those inside corner brackets are super handy for getting everything
adjusted before you tighten up the screws.
Now we'll need to install six magnets into our cover,
one on each side of the cover, and at three different mount points,
one in the front into in the back shown, just like I have here.
Now it's time to install the shock back mount.
You may find that you'll need a shim in order to have the bottom
rear of the lid push out away from the stepper.
And I've included Shim 3D prints to make that a little bit easier.
I found that using one shim was enough.
But if your lid is large and heavy, you may need a couple of extra shims
and you can just make the shim bigger by adjusting the z height
in your slicer before printing the print.
Once the mounts are installed and lined
up, all you'll need to do is insert the third magnet
and that will cause the lid to attach to the shock back mount.
Now, one thing to note is I did go back and add a rear bonding plate to the back.
This is for added support because the weight of the lid
was a bit too much for the inside corner brackets.
Now we're going to install the front face plate
and then from there we're going to move on to the electronics.
The wiring diagram here, source code
models are all available down in the description.
I'm going to be walking through the AC install,
which is what I did for this build but you could easily swap it up
with a 12 volt PTC heater in reassign the heat bed pins.
We start by mounting the main board to the back of the resin assistant.
Now I'm using a old credulity main board here
and I do have a model included in the description
where you can use an M as general or you can use an escape,
or all of that bolt pattern will fit and mount onto the other version.
Of this main board.
Mount the stepper plugs into the export.
And then from there I'm just testing to make sure the lid fits
before moving on to adding the display
that just bolts right onto the front part of the resin assistant.
This has all of the display and controls
the PTC heater mounts the left hand side,
and this just bolts on the exact same way as our display.
I did print this in Two-Tone Color to add just a little bit of effect.
The right panel holds a book converter, but more importantly, a full size
power supply as I'm hooking up the AC here.
Now, if you're going to use a small 12 volt PTC, you can probably get away
with a plug in power supply versus the full size one.
I chose to use a straight power cord and switch the resin assistant
at the outlet because it was a bit difficult to reach the back of the unit.
I used an x 60 connector to connect the 12 volt
mains to the main board and then wired in a book converter.
The book converter
goes to the power supply directly and this is required to power the relay.
The MLC main board, in my case did not have enough power
to drive the relay directly, so it added a buck converter
and then set it for five volts and then split the red wire on the AC
DC heater and drove that to the live and neutral lines of the AC.
The blue wire on the relay that you see here
is the only signal wire to the Chelsea board.
Needle nose pliers and the terminal strip
were very helpful in getting this wired up.
Once I had the relay wired, I just mounted that to the terminal strip
and then from there connected those to the power supply AC lines
As always, be careful in wiring AC
and if you're not in the United States,
you may need to adjust this wiring for your particular country.
It's critical that you interrupt the live line
and not the neutral line when you wire this for your AC.
The relay should be connected to the live line
that will disconnect the live circuit and energize the PTC heater.
You don't want to leave it the other way around.
Once you're done you'll install a ground strap that just connects with a T nut
and a screw to the 2020
and then connect that to the ground line of the AC.
Once our wiring is done, will hook our main power
back up to the main board and move on to our switches.
These switches are pretty slick.
There's an LSD that you can pull out and switch,
so it doesn't really matter which way you wire these.
Just swap the LSD around.
If the light doesn't come on, the two on the side go to the LSD
and the two on the bottom go to the switch,
which will go to one of the N stops,
which is either X or Y.
The button enclosures attach directly to the frame.
You can attach them almost anywhere you don't have to mount them
on the bottom. That's what I chose.
The wires simply go out the back and the front plate will point
either up or down, depending on which way you install it and with what button color
the LEDs are wired to the heater or the extruder.
And I did this that way I could take advantage of the P.W.
AM for those lighting effects.
Otherwise you can hook
the 12 volt power directly and you don't have any effects at all.
That could be simpler if you're using the 12 volt pins for the PTC heater.
Here we have the unit inside
the enclosure and as you can see, there is room to spare.
This fits really nicely in here and I've got still a lot of room
to have a little bit of storage for resin bottles and a few other things
inside the enclosure.
Now it does open the lid really well, and I know a lot of you
are going to wonder how does it heated up if the lid is down?
Well, I'll give you a little secret there.
I simply turn the lead screw a little bit and that opens the lid up about
five millimeters and that gets some air
circulation in there to heat up the resin.
It doesn't raise the lid very much.
And yes, there'll be some order that comes out.
But because I am using an enclosure, all of that is being vented outside.
I did also turn down the speed of the enclosure fan.
So it wasn't drawing as much air out and it gave it more time
to heat up the enclosure.
Since it's a tight fit for the USB port,
I went ahead and added an extension cable and ran that out of the enclosure.
I don't know why I didn't think of this when I built the enclosure,
but this works great.
I use this and it allows me to access it without having to squeeze in there.
So I think this is a pretty exciting build.
I really liked the way that it's flexible.
I don't have to have these electronics
when I put one together for the washing here, and it's really
a great little unit to be able to lift the lid up.
And for me, it's time savings, convenience and the relatively inexpensive,
I would say, depending on where you buy your parts, you should be able to do this
build within 100 to $200.
If you've got some reusable parts or steppers laying around.
But 200, I would say on the outside,
inside maybe $100 if you've already got some of these parts,
depending on how you put your build together
overall, really simple to put together, you should be able to get that done in
a weekend.
Now, if you need some help with this, check out our channel Discord
tons of people in there all the time.
And we really do help out a lot of different people
on a lot of different topics.
Anything from laser cutters, resin 3D printing,
you name it, electronics.
We do it all in discord
and it's really a great place to share ideas and get ideas for projects.
I got a number of really good ideas from talking to other peoples
and patrons in the channel who have been seeing this for some time.
All of the models and all of my patron members
had access to a lot of these models early on before I was able to do the video.
I got sick right before I was ready to do this video.
So that's why I haven't produced a video in a little bit of time here.
So overall, I think it's a great build.
If I'd love to hear what you think about it.
Let me know down in the comments.
What would you have done different with this?
Would you have made it maybe a two wide or maybe some other features?
I was really looking for great ideas from people, and that's where we got
some of these ideas for the resin assisted in the discord.
Let me know down in the down in the comments
what your thoughts are, the resin assistant? whether or not you'll be building one.
So with all that said, I want to say thanks again for watching
and we'll see you next time.
Thanks, everybody.
For watching the video.
Look at all these great patrons over here.
Really.
I am so happy all of the support that you guys have
provided over the last couple of years has really been great.
The channel has grown so much.
Even the casual viewers and casual subscribers, people that purchasing links
you guys have all really supported this channel and I'm really looking
at making the rest of 2022 really great with a lot of great content.
I've got some home automation projects that are going to be coming up here.
Very some really cool builds that allow you to do some cool things
with home automation.
More 3D printing.
We're going to be putting a revo nozzle on the 301 here soon and upgrading that.
The Clipper, along with a lot of other things.
And all of you patrons over here are really all part of that
as well as Daniel and our Discord MVP's who help everybody out in the chat.
Thanks again, everybody. Have a great day.