What is a TL smoother and will it actually help yourEnder 3? We'll test
it on today's Filament Friday. This episode of Filament Friday is brought to
you by these Patreon supporters. So what are TL smoothers and do you need them?
Well it comes down to this; it depends. It depends on your printer. It depends on
what circuit board it's using. It depends on how it's designed. And it depends on
what you're printing. I haven't seen a lot of issues with my prints but in my
last video when it printed those benchy's, I saw lines on the cabin and salmon skin
on the side. And that's an indication that you could use the TL smoother. So
what is the TL Smoother and what does it do? It's basically just a series of
diodes that go between your stepper drivers and your stepper motors. You see
the steppers are micro-stepped as I explained in a previous video
there's variable voltage on the coils so you can get multiple steps or micro
steps in between your natural steps of the stepper motor. And it's these micro steps
that give us the resolution and a lot better printing. But, as it turns out, on some
drivers, in some circuit boards, when you get to the max on one coil and a minimum
on the other, the minimum can actually give you a little spike. And that's just
the nature of the stepper driver and how it's driven. If you have a very good
circuit board, like I know the Prusa doesn't require this. They're using trinamic
and with feedback, they really don't have this issue. But in older
machines and the low-cost machines it tends to show up. And so that little
spike needs to be blocked and that's what TL smoothers do. There's a 4 diode
version and that will block any spike that's 0.7 volts or less and the
eight diode version blocks anything 1.4 volts or less. So basically
what it's doing is stopping any current from flowing in this lower coil until
the voltage is at a level that's acceptable. So instead of seeing a spike,
it just lowers it to nothing so you get a lot closer to what the steps should be.
What I want to do is just put them on my machine and see if I see a difference in
these benchy's. So let me show you how to install them and then we'll test it out.
These are the TL smoothers that I chose to use they're eight diode versions. They
come in a pack of 3 for $12 and include the wiring harnesses. I'll put a link to
these in the description below. I'm only going to install these on the
X&Y steppers, and I'm going to use double-sided foam tape to hold them in
place inside where the circuit board is on the Ender 3. So I installed the foam
tape, two strips, and I made sure I covered the soldered pins on these
boards. On the back of these boards. That way I can mount them and they're
insulated from any kind of shorts. Plus the double-sided foam tape will hold it
real easily. The boards only have one harness to install and you can put it in
either connector. It doesn't matter these boards can go either direction. So put
one harness in each board and then we're ready to install it inside the printer.
Now we need to get to the circuit board on the Ender 3 and that requires removing
three screws. Two in the front and then you turn it around slide the bed forward
and then there's one on the back. Right here after those three screws are out, I
can lift the cover off and I can get access to the wiring harness. I just
pulled off the y-axis wiring harness and I plugged it right into the TL smoother
and it only goes in one direction. And then I plugged the harness that came on
the TL smoother into the Y board connector. Once that's in place, now I can
mount the board here on the side just by peeling off the double sided tape. So
I'll just peel that off and then I'll just squeeze this in place. Now it's
gonna block some vent holes but it shouldn't be a problem, there's plenty of
places for air to leak out. I make sure to mount it low enough so I can put the
cover back on and not hit it. The next step was to do the x-axis so I pulled
the x-axis connector, put it in the TL smoother, pulled off the double sided
tape. This one there was a little less room and I had to fight the LCD cable.
But once I got that in place I squished it into its position it held. And then
all I needed to do was connect the TL smoother cable to the X connector on the
circuit board. And that's it. It's all connected. So let me give you a close-up
here of the finished design. As you can see, we got the two boards the X and the
Y wiring and here's the direction. It'll come from the board through the TL
smoother and then out to the stepper for the X and Y-axis.
And the proof is in the print, so here's a TL smoother version on the left non TL
smoother on the right. And if i zoom here you can see the diagonal lines on the
cabin on the non-TL smoother and it's smooth on the TL smoother. So clearly it made a
difference here. But what about the salmon skin? You can see the salmon skin
on the non TL smoother and it's smooth on the TL smoother. So it worked.
Next I tried matter hackers test print Phil a ment. TL smoothers on the Left, no
TL smoother on the right. I thought the face mask might look
different between the two but they both look great. This is a great print. And I
can't tell them apart. But that means the TL smoothers didn't hurt the print
either. But it definitely helped improve the Benchy's, so based on this simple test,
these TL smoothers actually helped my prints. At least in the X and y direction.
The Z? I'm still not sold you need it on the Z. I need to do more testing. If you
use the magic numbers where you're going up full steps anyway, I really don't see
it as a problem. Even if you stop on one of these blips you'll get the same blip
all the way up. So I really don't see it as a problem on Z, but I'll try it. But
for this test, I knew x and y were the problem on the benchy's and that's what
I eliminated, the problem, by using the TL smoothers. Now I prefer the 8 diode
version because that gives you the full 1.4 voltage block. Maybe somebody wants
to use a 0.7 but I recommend the 8 diode version and for the 12 dollars I
paid for these, I think it was, to me it's well worth it. That's an upgrade I highly
recommend. And very easy to install. So if you like what I'm doing here maybe check
out some of these other videos that are popping up? If you want to help support
the channel Patreon is one way or just use the affiliate links in a description
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nothing else click on that CHEP logo and let YouTube know you like what you see
and you want to see more. That's it for this week. I'll see you next time, right
here, at Filament Friday.