Creality Ender 5 Upgrades #4: TL-Smoothers

so if you've spent any time on any of the Ender 5 message boards or under 3 message boards and are learning about how these printers work and learning about possible upgrades or problems that people have with it then soon you'll hear about something called ATL smoother well why do you need a tail smoother well some people find that on their printers whether it's an indoor 3 under 5 or specifically any printer using the drv8825 stepper motor drivers that you might run into something called salmon skinning and what that is it's a phenomenon that you'll notice that the printer actually leaves kind of a fish skin effect on the the print it's usually on curves that it happens due to the fact that the the stepper drivers they're not actually delivering a smooth signal to your stepper and it results in just a waviness on the surface so I wanted to know does this affect the Ender 5 that I've been running and that I've been doing all these upgrade videos on and so what I did I ran a few tests prints there are a lot of various test prints that you can find on Thingiverse and other websites and what I did I ran this one and I ran this one and I ran a Vinci upscale to show the problem and I have to say on the under 5 it's fairly sporadic but I can reproduce it so while this one and this one didn't produce the problem my bin she did and you'll see here that it shows the scaling problem and since it's reproducible I think we can fix it so since I've shown it's a potential problem on the end of 5 and I can reproduce it I'm gonna add some tail smoothers to my printer I'm Chris and this is Kersey fabrications [Music] so as I mentioned I've shown that in certain test prints I can reproduce this it's not a consistent problem on the Ender 5 though as I ran different prints that should have reproduced the problem I wasn't able to see it so I had to find one that would produce it consistently so this Benjy printed in the left-to-right orientation will actually show this scaling problem that others have reported so what exactly is a TL smoother well a TL smoother is simply a small board it has a series of diodes on it that will even out the signal coming from your stepper driver in certain cases to your stepper motor so any of the rapid moving motors that we have both on the X and Y axis will need to add one of these two to sort of smooth out that signal what's that going to take well first of all I have printed this mounting bracket I will provide the link to this it is straight off the Thingiverse I did not produce this myself we're gonna add this inside of the electronics enclosure and we've got two of these like I mentioned so we're gonna have to pull this apart this is one required just a little bit of electronics work it shouldn't be that dangerous but again we are opening it up it does deal with the electrical components of your printer do this at your own risk but let's get started alright as usual let's start with the parts that we're going to need for this upgrade first we have the 3d printed mount that I printed before we have two TL smoothers with the cables that they came with I've got eight of these m3 eight millimeter screws now this probably works better with six millimeter screws but I didn't have any of those so we're gonna go with what I've got and then according to the instructions on Thingiverse I'm also going to need two of these m5 nuts so obviously some pliers to put everything together and I'm going to need a screwdriver which I don't have in this picture boom there is a screwdriver that we will need to screw everything together so let's get the printer part and get this installed so if you like me you keep all of the tools and everything that came with your printer right there and we're gonna get rid of that and then obviously make sure your printer is off unplug the power cord from your electronics enclosure and now before you tip over your printer let's set all of these to where they're not going to fall over now let's lift it up so that we can get underneath through the electronics enclosure so this is pretty easy to take apart we just remove these four screws and that'll be all we need to do all right screws out close your off now how's your pulling this off there's a fan connected here you'll need to just unplug that from the motherboard and set that aside now let's look at what we've got in here [Music] I decided to change orientation here so that you can better see where this is going to go so these screws are gonna be the mounting points for this bracket first thing I want to do before I do anything else let's make sure that this mounting bracket is actually going to fit where it's supposed to go cuz yep as you can see it fits right there well pull that off and let's actually mount the tail smoothers it won't come on up there guys okay let's actually mount the tail smoothers to this bracket so I'm pretty sure orientation doesn't matter on these I looked at these diodes and notice they go you're at two going in each direction for for each signal line here alright since my screws are a little bit long I'm going to add some washers to mine if you've got the six millimeter screws you probably won't have to do this well I'm screwing these in keep in mind there are actually more than one version of TL smoothers there's the four and the eight diode version I find that the eight diode version these days are not really that much more expensive than the four so you might as well get the eight that should work better crap alright pick two there are different mounting options for these Co smoothers this is the one I thought would work best for this printer so this is the one I downloaded it feel free to use whichever version you think will work best for your setup there we go tl smoothers mounted to the mounting bracket so before I actually get this mounted into the chassis I'm actually going to use this opportunity to get the wiring done a lot of things loose and easy to get to so these are labeled both on the board and on the wire and but these are glued on and so we're gonna have to break the glue in order to get these off and you be careful not to break your connectors and we will see the easiest way to get these off well on that one that actually pulled the whole connector off before it actually did get the glue off of here so they're gluing works really well you can see what the other one does if I do this yeah see there that one actually came off correctly but I'm not really concerned again if you're doing this to be very careful you can break these connectors given that I now have to get this glue off unrehearsed unscripted live [Music] there we go that's what I wanted now this connector will come off and I can pop that back on the board and same orientation it was in there before there we go notice same orientation as before now in order to get these wires where they need to go I'm going to actually have to cut this first cable tie I've grabbed the snips be careful when cutting this cable tie do not nip your wires that'll ruin your day there we go okay so now the X and the y wires should be free kind of untangle them here there we go so I'm going to plug in one of them to here let's see it's going to orient this way in the case so I'm going to put the X up top around the back make sure I do this or it's going to hook up correctly X up top and then like I said this one's already labeled Y so Y on the bottom and then we're going to take these that came with gotta put one here and we're gonna put one here there you go everything looks good we're gonna take this one again check your labeling don't get these backwards or you'll find out quick when you try to front and we're going to put X into let's take it behind again trying to make sure my wiring looks good when I'm done go put X here and I'm gonna take why let it behind again but why here and that is it for wiring now we just need to get this mounted in the chassis so sorry if you get the back of my head here but trying to put this in here they go right over these two bolts which are m5 screws and then we just have to figure out how to get your fingers in here with these m5 knots and actually secure these in place [Music] we will double-check our wiring everything is in place you don't really need to glue these back down because we're not transporting this printer and then you're going to make sure again these are all the way seated that should be it now moved it there we go now we can reattach our cover when we reattaching our cover make sure we first reattach the fan which goes into this connector down here not only gives them one way as a key on the side [Music] [Applause] all right let's get the printer upright let's reattach the power cable and first things first let's make sure powers back up [Music] no sparks good sign so now that we've got it all put back together powers back up let's do a test print make sure everything's oriented correctly and we'll see if that salmon skin is gone on our bin Qi [Music] so then she's off the printer and we can do a direct comparison to the exact same G code that printed our original one so if you look at these two prints you'll notice the one on the left is definitely exhibiting the salmon skinning effect particularly on the cabin if you look particularly close I don't know if you'll see it in the video but you can also see it a bit on the curves of the bow of the ship but if you look at our new one again produce using the exact same G code the salmon skin effect is completely gone all of the surfaces are smoother and in fact and I can't account for this other than just that the steppers are working better using the smoothers but the entire print is better the overall quality has gone up dramatically and all these little dots and bumps that you would have thought were just retraction settings or wipe settings or something like that are completely gone using the TL smoothers so the only things say now I notice a little bit more of the ringing but before I don't think you could have told if it was there due to the fact that there were so many extrusion errors or movement errors in the original when it comes to results like I saw on the bench he I was skeptical I couldn't just let it go with just one print so I went back i reprinted another one of my test pieces with the original G code and I found the exact same results that I saw on the bench II the print on the left is the new print with the TL smoothers installed and it clearly shows that they're doing the job and that it really does clean up the print overall so I just wanted to add that here again I you know this is a cut and dry one if you have an ender five you should buy some TL smoother so you should put it on this printer it will be a lot happier with your results so I will leave a link in the description to where I bought mine on Amazon I think that the adapter that I use to put it into the electronics enclosure is the best and easiest to use and I will include a link to that as well that can be found on Thingiverse again if you enjoyed this video please subscribe to my channel I'll be producing more content like this talking about the end of 5 talking about my cosplay 600 printer as well as doing projects where I'd get to use these printers to build props and costumes other things like that if you have any questions for me if you want to comment on what my next upgrade should really please leave that below please like this video please go ahead and subscribe which I've already said anyway that's it I'm Kris this is courtesy fabrications thanks everybody [Music] you

Channel: Kersey Fabrications

Views: 38,043

Keywords: creality ender 3 upgrades, ender 5 upgrades, creality ender-5, tl smoothers, 3d printer projects, creality ender 5, 3d printer upgrade, ender 3 upgrades, 3d printer, 3d printing, 3d print, creality ender 3, tl smoother, ender 5, salmon skin, ender 5 3d printer

Id: BppPx5kVr3Y

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2019