Mega Upgrade - Anycubic i3 Mega - S - Fan and Stepper Driver Upgrade - Chris's Basement

the anycubic i3 mega s a great low cost 3d printer that's a workhorse but it does have one slight problem hello everyone chris here i have done hundreds of hours of prints on the mega s and it has worked out really well for me there are a few things here and there that you could probably upgrade to make it even better but for a low-cost 3d printer right out of the box it's always done a really good job but the biggest drawback is the noise that it makes whether it be a bad fan or just the operating noise all together it's not a printer you want in the same room with you but i definitely think it's worth spending some time on to correct some of these issues to make this printer even better and it probably won't cost a lot of extra money so that's what we're going to do today we're going to take a look at the issues on the printer we're going to address them one by one and see if we can solve some of these problems so let's get right into it and we'll start by addressing that initial fan noise that you heard at the beginning of the video so let's just start by popping the cover off the bottom and taking a look around it's much easier if you remove this support bar there's two screws one on either side no need to remove it all the way it can just hang loose and then there's eight screws all around the outside of this cover to remove this panel so with those removed we just slide this panel off and be very very careful when you're in here you don't want to touch anything especially over in this area where the mains voltage comes in but i am going to go ahead and plug it back in and turn it on so we can identify where that noise is coming from and the first issue looks to be the fan that's inside this psu but it does look replaceable so let's remove that and see if we can get it fixed be sure to unplug the machine after you're done with this test and wow this thing is dusty but that psu is held on by these four screws up here in this top cover we'll definitely have to do some cleanup on this thing before we start using it once again back to the underneath now we should be able to just lift it out i'm going to go ahead and remove the wires but now might be a great time to take a picture of these wires so you know how it was hooked up when you took it out if you're not used to the standard for mains wiring on some of these printers a lot of times you will see the hot wire be brown and the common wire be blue here's our psu these covers usually only just have a couple of screws in them there's one right here then one up here at the top and then this whole thing should slide out now remember if you're going to open one of these psus be very careful inside here these capacitors can hold charge for a long time and you can get a shark even though it's not hooked up we're just interested in this case fan right here and it has just a regular jst connector on it so we can remove it from the board and this looks to be around a 60 millimeter fan i do have a couple of these on hand let's see if we can find one that's halfway quiet i'm gonna go with this fan right here i believe this is a cooler guys fan is what it's called it is a little taller than the stock fan but i think it will still fit in the case remember this is a 12 volt psu so 12 volt fan on the other side this is a couple of screws and we'll swap in our new fan with the blades to the inside so we're pushing air out there we go we'll go ahead and put the cover back on our psu plug in our new fan it's probably a great time to check the polarity make sure it's the same on both fans the old one and the new one this one was and we can slide the cover back on and we'll put our screws back in and we're ready to hook it up and put it back in psu's back in let's fire it up that is so much better you can't even hear it running that's great so we're already making progress so there it is we're done for this week i'll see on the next one no i'm just kidding so now that we have the most obvious thing fixed and the printer is quiet when we turned it on let's start a print and see what other things we might need to fix this might not be the only fan issue on the printer there is a main board fan a hot end fan and a part cooling fan so we might find something else we need to change out but let's just take a listen see what it sounds like when we kick off a print and that didn't take long at all you can hear the main board fans spin up underneath there it is quite loud and the hot end fan comes on as well which is also a pretty loud fan it does feel like it's kicking out quite a bit of air let's go ahead and let it run so we can see if the part fan is adding any noise to this then we'll just take a look at them all at the same time so the part fan's on now the fan noise is just ridiculous so i really can't tell how much it added you could tell it kicked on but it might not be all that loud by itself you can hear the machine operating probably right now just in general it is really loud stepper noise it's a little radley so we have a few other things to fix other than fans but let's go ahead and take care of the fan problem now back underneath this is the fan that's causing us all the problems it is actually triggered by g-code by the board i'm guessing when the print starts probably when the motors are energized so we're just going to swap this one out as well it just has a bracket that hovers over the board we'll just take out these two screws and it's plugged into this center set of fan pans and this one is a 50 by 50 by 10. again i went with the cooler guys fan because they got really good reviews and after hearing the one that went in the psu hopefully this one is just as quiet so it should be a direct swap out remember to check your polarity this one is correct for this board so we're good there we'll just plug it in and we'll screw it back into place the airflow is going to go down towards the board that one's all set now let's check out what's going on with the hot end so on the hot end carriage you can take just this bottom section off that's where the fans are they're just screwed down to the sides part fan over here hot end over here there's a pcb inside here where they connect so you don't have to run it all the way back to the main board so that's nice but we'll take off these two screws here on top and then in back you want to take these two out this one this one over here that'll get that cover off then you can pull that cover and let's just unplug them both there is a little bit of hot glue on here you might have to peel that to be able to get those plugs out hot and fan is the right one part fan is the one in the center now we can remove the whole thing so on this side we have one of these slim fans it's a lot like an ender 3 fan it might be a little thicker than that i think they're 30 millimeter blower type that's the part fan i want to leave that in place for now i don't think that's hurting us too bad it's this one right here the hot end fan it's a 40 millimeter 40 40 10. this is the one that's causing all the noise so i'm gonna swap that one out and it just has screws with nuts on the back holding it on here's the old fan do note they use this smaller type of jst connector these are the ones with the pins that are two millimeters apart the lot smaller than the ones that are on the board side so you could either cut this off use that connector solder it together or if you have some of these you can go ahead and replace it on your new fan that's up to you i just clipped and spliced the connector to save some time again you can put a new one on if you want if you have one around i don't carry these usually usually just the bigger ones that i have on hand but the fan we're going with is a sun on fan it is a 12 volt fan and it is .72 watts this fan is pretty quiet but it does have a pretty good output so it should be more than enough to handle that hot end and reduce the noise of the printer so we'll just put it back in the shroud note there are some nylon washers to keep those fan blades away from this vent we want all the air to push towards the hot end so the fan will install just like this with the sticker up now we can plug the fans back in and we'll put our shroud back on make sure your wires are routed correctly you don't want any of those getting close to the hot end now that we should have most of the fan issues taken care of let's go ahead and start another print and just judge how loud the printer is now the board fan already started you can barely hear it running you do have the psu fan and that board pen running at the same time but it's so much quieter than it was before on these the hot end fan doesn't start until the printer gets to 60c which is nice because it's not running all the time so the hot end fan is on now it's a little loud but a lot quieter than stock the stock fan was actually starting to give out a bit so you could hear that when it first started it would kind of level out eventually but the sun on fan is going to be a lot higher quality it'll last a lot longer so even with just the fans running the printer is still fairly loud but take a look at when the print actually starts we definitely have some work to do here and just for reference this is full blast with the part fan on it really doesn't make a whole lot of difference so there's the fan upgrade and i'm not super happy with this hot end fan it is still just a little bit loud but i don't want to use a quieter fan because it might not put out enough air to cool that hot end you might cause some heat creep but the honda fan isn't on all the time on this printer only when it's printing so it's not going to be setting somewhere running constantly so i can definitely live with that now this machine is pretty noisy in general mechanically and there's a lot of little tweaks you can do to quiet it down but the best way to resolve stepper noise is to upgrade your stepper drivers and there's a lot of great silent ones out there especially the ones from trinamic today we're going to take a look at some tmc 2208s and there's a few reasons why i went with the 2208 than some of the other models and that's what we're going to check out now so here's the board we're dealing with here this is a try gorilla 1.1 any cubic uses these a lot in a lot of their printers they're fair boards they have a lot of extra pins it is a 2568-bit processor but that's usually just fine for an i3 machine you do have five drivers because this printer it actually levels the x gantry by using two z motors so they control one with the z and one with the e1 where the first extruder would be now i'm not interested in flashing the firmware on this machine but i do want to change out the drivers to those 2208s and because i don't want to edit the firmware there's a couple things we're going to have to do let's take a look at the drivers first then we'll come back to this board these are both big tree tech 2208 drivers but there's two different styles of this driver that you can get one is in the step direction mode or standalone the other is in uart mode where you can use the software to control all the attributes since we don't have uart connections you do have some on this board you could jumper them over but then you'd have to flash the firmware to control them i wanted some that were in standalone mode and you can move some solder pins around on these to configure them however you want but that takes a real skill in my opinion because those are really small pens so the step direction version is available so they come pre-soldered the way they should to be in standalone mode it's all about these three solder pads right here these decide what uart pin you're using you can see these two are soldered that's the lower pin this is a uart driver on the stand-alone driver those three pins are all open there's no uart pin in play so that won't confuse the board you can run these as is and use the trim pot on top to set your current and just so you know what to look for if you want to get some of these standalone they'll be marked as step slash der the ur1 just says uart mode so get the ones that are soldered correctly save yourself a lot of headache trying to solder those really small pins so now we have the drivers we're going to use i'm going to pull this fan off because it is really close to the top of the drivers and show you what's underneath each one of those these are all a4988s they're kind of noisy and they can leave artifacts in your print quality so it's always a good idea to swap these out to something newer like a tmc driver like the 2208 we're going to use now notice where the potentiometer is on all of these they're all facing down we need to make sure that we install the new drivers in the correct pin orientation so let's go ahead and pull all of these they should just slide out and you'll notice underneath all these drivers there's no jumpers on a lot of boards like this that are set up kind of like ramps you'll be able to set the micro stepping with jumpers underneath here you just remove the caps and set them accordingly this board defaults to 16 times micro stepping you can't change it but that does work with the 2208 however this board is set does work with these tmc drivers the big tree tech boards to set it to 16 times so it's not a big issue for us but just be aware that you can't control that on this board the next hurdle we have to jump over is how these motors are cabled the 2208 is going to run in the opposite direction as that a4988 and you can again adjust that in the firmware but we're not flashing firmware today so your best option is to flip the cable over and it's relatively easy to do you can remove the motor cable these caps for the clips they do slide off pretty easily i usually just work them loose with a flat blade screwdriver on the bottom a little bit at a time do one side than the other until it kind of wiggles loose and then i just flip it 180. you can put it back on put your motor cable back in and now your motor will be turning in the opposite direction so that'll be correct for the 2208 and i'll just do all the rest of these because we're going to do all five drivers so all of our motor cables have been flipped over so it'll run in the right direction you might want to go ahead and take this fan bracket off there's just two screws on the top side here and you can pull that bracket now we need to install the drivers but you need to make sure that you get it in the correct orientation if you get it flipped over it could ruin the driver or the board the badging on the board is pretty good so you can line up the pins but it's just as easy to take a look at the a4988 so here's the a4988 and it the potentiometer was in the down position so if you flip it over here are the pins i always look for direction and ground so compare that to your big tree tech driver you can see on the top of this driver you have direction and ground so it will be the exact opposite so direct and ground are down so the potentiometer on the a498 was down on your new driver it's going to be up so we'll install all those just like that and they just slide into the same pins just like the a4988 did just like that and we'll put all five in all the drivers are in we need to put on some heat sinks but that's one thing to note the ones that the big tree tech drivers come with they're pretty tall and they just barely clear this fan so you might want to print a different fan mount bracket or at least put some washers underneath here to raise it up just a bit but it does just clear it'll set in there just fine but you might want to back it off that heat sink just a little bit so be aware that or you could use a lower profile heatsink if you wanted to they should still dissipate enough heat for these 2208s they should work just fine so just keep that in mind i'm going to go ahead and put all the rest of the heatsinks on then we're going to have to adjust the current on the drivers so now we're powered up we want to check the current setting on all these drivers and you do that by measuring the reference voltage so you want to use your multimeter and find a ground i just use the ground coming in to the printer and for these drivers there is a reference point that you can check there's a spot that you can put a pin it's the top one to the left from my orientation this one right here this will give you the correct reference voltage you can see on my meter i'm setting just a little bit over 800 and that's usually where i start i usually set them all to 800 if the motors are getting too hot i'll turn them down or if they're too loud if you're seeing shift layers i turn them up a bit but i usually start around 800 on most drivers and to adjust that in standalone mode you set it with this potentiometer right here it's probably a good idea to use something like a ceramic screwdriver so you don't short anything out just be really careful there's really no rhyme to reason as to which direction increases or decreases that reference voltage to adjust the current you just got to play with it a bit on these turning it to the right actually lowers it turning it to the left brings it up so very small adjustments recheck with your meter and then do that for all the drivers again i'm going to set all of them to 800 for now the drivers are all in all of them have been adjusted with that trim pot to 0.8 of a volt that's a good reference voltage to start now we can go ahead and put our fan back on it will probably ride just on top of those drivers but that should be okay and now we're ready to put everything back together and start another test print to see if we've improved anything and here's the printing after the driver change it has quieted down the motor noise a lot and again it should improve print quality so we're doing pretty good the printer is a lot quieter we've probably got a lot more efficient fans now and the new drivers should improve print quality and they've reduced the motor noise greatly but there's one more thing that's always bothered me on this printer and that's the fact that when you level this bed you almost completely compress all of these springs and i never really cared for these bed knobs so i definitely want to swap out the spring and there's a lot of great stl files for bed knobs out there i got these off of my mini factory these were created by mark mccary i will leave a link to these but these press fit really nice on the existing knob you might want to put just a little bit of glue on there but they're actually pretty snug without it so i'm just going to spin all of these wheels off you can go ahead and remove these clips if you like they are screwed down from the bottom but you probably don't need to so let's go ahead and remove the bed now is a great time to do any maintenance you want to do clean this up just a little bit i definitely need to remove some dust on mine and then i'm just going to swap all these bed springs out for these yellow springs that i put on a lot of printers they're affordable they're available pretty much everywhere and they're nice and stiff they'll hold up to a little higher temperature as well you shouldn't even have to change this screw you should be able to use the stock hardware all the new springs are on i've got my new knobs on there the spring is still compressed quite a bit but it should make the bed a lot more firm and if the nozzle is too close to the bed after that there are adjustments on the back of the printer for both z end stops you can adjust these two screws right here just turn them down a bit so it triggers the end stop earlier and you won't collide with the bat so now we'll go ahead and level up the bed and we need to do a test print [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] and here he is this is hellboy from wexter veteran did a great job on this he always has a lot of cool characters it's on my mini factory i'll leave a link but the print turned out pretty darn good this is red glitter i believe it's blood red glitter from printed solid this is jesse pla so the printer is turning out some pretty nice prints so there we go our anycubic i3 mega s upgrade is complete the new drivers are going to help out a lot they definitely made the whole thing a lot quieter as well as the fan replacement and the cost wasn't all that much the drivers were around twenty five dollars for the set and the fans were around five to six dollars each so a definitely a worthwhile upgrade and now i can start using this printer again because it's quiet enough for me to run it while i'm trying to work down here in the basement so that's it for today hopefully you found this interesting and i'll see you really soon on the next one you

Channel: Chris Riley

Views: 15,193

Rating: 4.9051385 out of 5

Keywords: 3D, printer, Printing, 3D Printing, 3D Printer, ChrisBasement, ChrissBasement, Chris'sBasement, Chris Basement, Chriss Basement, Chris's Basement, ChrisRiley, Chris Riley, benchy, 3dbenchy, 3d, Upgrade, Anycubic Mega S, Fan upgrade, Stepper Motor upgrade, Bed Spring Upgrade, Hellboy

Id: ywscQehQ80M

Length: 25min 18sec (1518 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 28 2021