good morning YouTube so this is my type a machine series 1 Pro 3d printer and as you
can see I've got it torn apart here earlier this week I had switched over to printing
some PLA filament because I don't think I have printed PLA since I've switched over to build
tack and specifically since I've switched to the flexplate here and also changed to
the point 6 millimeter extruder nozzle I wanted to dial in the PLA and I had pretty good luck
with that I think this was a pla part i printed about all i had to do to get the pla dialed in
was i used the generic PLA profile that taipei machines provides and then I changed the nozzle
2.6 millimeter and change the layer thickness 2.3 and then change the wall and top bottom
layer thickness to one point two millimeters and then the only other thing I did was I turned off
the heated print bed because with buildtak the PLA sticks really well and I printed a about a
30-minute part and then I loaded up about a four hour print and I came back after about
an hour and there was a big rat's nest there was basically that sitting on the build plate
and the extruder was pushed off to the side and when I went and looked at the octoprint
web interface the extruder temperature had been oscillating between 220 and lo something below
a hundred C and then about the last 30 minutes it was at room temperature I thought maybe the
extruder had jammed what I noticed was on on this printhead this is what's called the X cable so
it's a flat flex ribbon cable that comes over comes into this little circuit board right here
and over here there's a small blue LED that is labeled PWR so I think that lights up when
there's power factories should be able to see that here I'll turn the printer on yeah there's
the blue LED and that LED was not on and then down below there's a small red LED the red LED
comes on when the heater cartridge is getting power there was no red LED or blue while I tried
checking these cables and they all seemed tight you know I thought maybe one of these connectors
either on the Harwich here the why I guess this is where there's a little circuit board back on
this stepper motor where there's a cable that goes back and down and then there's the X cable
comes off here both those cables seemed tight I've never touched them so I just checked to make sure
they were tight and they seem to be so my next thought was to check the main circuit board down
in the bottom of the printer and let me show you what that looks like here again this is the type
a machine series 1 Pro and this is the bottom of the printer so what you have here you've
got your 24 volt power supply over here and I guess it probably has a 5 volt output as well
and then this is the main processor here this is what's called a BeagleBone black it's like
an open-source version of a Raspberry Pi very small like they don't have a lot of connectors
there's just one USB connector one Ethernet port and then power over there so it's real
minimal board here's your SD card right there with the firmware on it guess the ethernet is
extended out to the back panel this must be your 5 volt yeah 5 volt input there here's
your USB comes into a small 4 port hub it looks like so you've got your Wi-Fi transceiver right
here I think is the front panel USB port one of these is probably for the camera so
the webcam is up on the build platform this cable I guess goes over here and so this is
the rhumba board that has all the stepper motor controller drivers that's these guys on the top
this printer uses the TMC 2100 stepper drivers and so those work up to 1 over 256 microstepping
instead of just having 200 steps per revolution or 1.8 degrees they can break that one point
eight degrees into 256 micro steps so it gives you very fine control and it also makes the stepper
motors very quiet when they're operating and then over here you've got your analog outputs I think
there's three high current MOSFET drivers over here so this is your pot end heater this is your
heated bed plate and then this third position in the middle would be for a second extruder and then
you've got your false width modulated fan outputs and then there's analog inputs for thermistor so
you could have a thermistor on the main printhead on the second printhead on the build plate so
there's like three analog inputs and I think there's also an analog input for a proximity
sensor so anyway that's kind of the inside of one of these and reason I opened it up was I figured
there's probably lights on here I'm going to turn on the printhead here and right there that's the
light saying I'm commanding the printhead to turn on and you can see it heated up and there goes the
fan the fans running of course I don't have the printhead plugged in to the heatsink so it's not
gonna cool off I'll shut that off here anyway I was getting lights here and I also measured
voltage right there I was getting 24 volts so that told me everything down here was working properly
I guess this is where the main ribbon cable if you can see back there this is like a little
connector board here's the main ribbon cable that goes up to the top of the printer and when I came
up here then I was basically stuck so I emailed Taipei machines and the thing they told me to do
let me shut off the printer here what they told me to do was to pull this cable the X cable out and
then swapping ends of the cable take this end and put it over here and take this end and put it over
here and so I had tried to do that before but this connector I found was really tight in fact I had
really hard time getting it out but what I found I had to do was push up here with one finger and
then get a flat bladed screwdriver in there and lever that bottom piece up it's really hard here
cuz this fan connector up here is right in the way so it's hard to get even pressure on those
in fact this top one doesn't want to come off so let me try my trick again with the screwdriver
that's why you have to turn the power off when you do that and there's your flat flex cable so
I pulled this cable off both ends and this is the end that used to be over there and that end
used to be over here so I bought that cable around plugged it back in and as you saw everything was
working okay so what what I need to do is put the whole printer back together and get back to Taipei
machines and they said they're gonna send me a new X cable I guess this is probably a fairly common
problem on these printers this cable is rated at at 1 million flexures and 1 million sounds like
a really big number how much is that well I've had this printer this is August 2017 I got the printer
in April 2016 so just round numbers that's about 500 days and I've probably averaged about one
print a day some days I do two or three some days I don't do any but let's say I've done 500 prints
and a typical part let me show you one of those so this is one of the typical parts I print it's
like a round spacer and then it's got pretty dense infill in there so these parts are about an inch
tall 25 millimeters most of these were printed at 0.2 millimeter layer height so you've got
five layers for every millimeter 25 millimeters tall there's a hundred and twenty-five layers in
that part I typically print four of those parts okay so instead of printing a really complicated
part let's just say I was printing something like one of these test cubes and maybe I was
just printing the outline let alone any infill inside there you can see there's some infill
but let's just say I was printing the for size so for every layer that's for carriage motions move
to the next part for next part for next part four so you got 125 layers four parts gives you 500 and
then four motions per part is 2,000 so you got 2,000 motions and then times 500 days that's a
million so just printing 4 inch tall cubes per day for 500 days gives you a million cycles on that
ribbon cable so yeah that's probably something to keep an eye on in the future and with this
printer design everything goes on this one ribbon cable so if you break one conductor in that ribbon
cable you've got to replace the whole thing hard to say if that's good or bad because I see a lot
of these lower end 3d printers or the kits will have all these separate wires so they'll have the
fan wires the heater wires all those wires are in separate and then they run all the way back
over to the side into the back and then down to the bottom and plug in to the main board down
below yeah so if you've had any problem with these sort of cables breaking in your 3d printer post up
in the comment section below I just want to see if this is a common problem I would imagine it
is because you take a wire and start flexing it back and forth millions of times and who knows
what's going to happen something to keep an eye on is that cable and if you don't see your little
blue LED that's the problem right there most likely and then you can check if the light on
the rumah board comes on and that light doesn't come on it's probably that cable real simple
troubleshooting pretty quick fix if the cable itself is not damaged just pop it out plug it
back in and if the light comes on it's probably good to go just thought I'd share that with you
I'll put some other 3d printing videos over here on the side and as always thanks for watching