Makerfarm 12-Inch Pegasus

This page is only here for historical purposes, this printer was sold off in 2024 after better printers were acquired for Bloominglabs use.

The Makerfarm Pegasus 12-Inch is the largest and most capable of Blominglabs's 3D Printers. It was built from a kit from now-defunct MakerFarm.

Using the Printer

Consult the 3D Printing page for general information.

Steps for printing

Get your model.
Turn on printer's 12v power supply. Note that the screen being on does not indicate that the 12v supply is active. The 12v supply is controlled by the large white switch, currently hanging near the power supply, in the rear right of the printer.
If this is the first print of the session, clean the glass bed with isopropyl alcohol or water and make sure it completely dries.
Home the printer using the built in display. Press the knob to open the menu, go to prepare, select by pressing the knob, then select auto home and press once more.
Check the extruder Z-height, and bed level. The extruder should optimally be the same height above the bed as the first layer height (0.2mm by default). If needed first adjust the screw sticking down off the right side of the printer (towards a switch) to adjust the Z-home position, then if the height of the bed is uneven, adjust the four corner screws on the bed.
Connect to the printer's octoprint server at http://192.168.1.4:5000/ and login with the normal password.
If you have not created a folder for yourself already, do so with the file manager on the left side of the octoprint interface.
Upload your model into your folder.
Underneath your file, there is a button to load the model for slicing. Click this button.
From here you can view your model, rotate/scale it, and slice it into commands for the 3d printer.
The primary setting you probably want to change is the infill percentage under the general settings tab. Lower percentages print faster and cost less, but may be less strong. Somewhere around 20-60% may be good depending on the application.
After you've decided on your settings, hit the slice button. This will create a .gco file in the folder with the model.
Before every print make sure to wipe down the glass build platform with some suave max hold hair spray to help prints stick to the build platform.
Underneath the .gco file, hit the load button to select it within octoprint.
From here you might want to check the preview tab to see that the calculated extruder paths seem reasonable.
Note the price listed on the left hand status panel within octoprint. This is a calculated filament cost. Members should divide this cost by two to determine how much they should put into the money box by the laser cutter to cover filament costs.
Hit the print button! The printer will start to heat to reach the necessary temperatures for printing.
Wait for the print to complete. Please keep a close eye on the printer in order to make sure that no issues crop up.
Remove your completed print.
If you are done with the printer, switch the main power switch off. Note that the screen should stay active. If you wish to continue printing, and there are no issues with the setup, return to step 8.

Still to do

It is worth noting that, despite being in working order, the Pegasus 12-inch 3D printer is an ongoing project, with constant room for improvement. Here is a list:

fine-tune slicing settings
put the octoprint server on the same power supply as the printer
- build a switchboard for the power supply, the AG150, the printer, and the extruder fan
convert to dual bowden extruders
The printer currently prints everything left-right reversed. This needs to be fixed in firmware. Fixed in firmware, and by swapping X-axis endstop to max header instead of min.
~~a power supply~~ We are using the power supply from Avh.on1's Reprap Prusa Mendel 3D printer.
~~We need a 12" square of glass or PEI~~ We are using a 12-inch mirror as a build surface

Wishlist

Some items that could improve capabilities or ease of use:

PEI sheet to act as the build surface, laminated to the glass bed.
Flatter glass bed, probably thicker glass
Some sort of bed insulation for underneath the heating PCB. Either a fairly thin layer of cork, or a sheet of something like polyurethane foam, with some degree of compressibility to allow the bed height to still be adjusted.
Leadscrews for Z-axis, along with shaft couplers, screw nuts, and possible anti-backlash nuts.
Swiss clips to hold glass bed to heater plate.
Some sort of enclosure, to help avoid breezes/cool surrounding air causing premature cooling and lifting with ABS or PETG prints.
The original 3D-printed extruder breaks easily, and has been reprinted and replaced several times. A stronger version would be much-appreciated.

Planned upgrades

These are upgrades currently in progress, or planned for the near future.

Dual 40mm fans for ramps board cooling.

Completed upgrades

These are completed upgrades for the printer.

Swapped to DRV8825 stepper motor drivers. These upgrade us from 16x microstepping to 32x microstepping, allowing smoother acceleration and quieter operation. They are also capable of driving steppers at higher current, or while staying cooler.
Print cooling fan, with shroud and mount printed by the printer. The original model found on thingiverse needed to be modified, stay tuned for a thingiverse upload of the modified version (or new version if we make further modifications).
Improved Z-axis end stop, with much easier to adjust stop height. Also printed by the printer, using another modified model from thingiverse. Stay tuned for upload.
Set of nut/spring traps for easier bed leveling (no longer requires a wrench). These were printed using the model found here.
Belt tensioners, originally printed out of PLA, later replaced with standard metal spring tensioners. These were placed on the X and Y axis belts, where they wouldn't interfere with movement.
3D printed X Carriage Stiffener, from the model here
LED light was installed to illuminate the 3d printer when the main 12v power supply is turned on. LED was supplied by Alex, a heatsink found at the space was taped to it with Gavin's thermal tape, and was wired into 12v with a voltage regulator supplied by Gavin to allow downvolting the led to not be blindingly bright.
Reclosable fastener tape holding AG-150's power supply conveniently to side of frame.

Configuration settings

Firmware

Our firmware had to be modified somewhat to fix X-axis mirroring issues, and for our DRV8825 stepper motor drivers. Find the files File:Pegasus12.zip.

Slic3r config

Find Gavin's current Slic3r config File:Gavin-fast8.txt. The wiki won't allow .ini files to be uploaded, so change the extension to .ini before using.

Kit Contents

The Makerfarm 12-inch Pegasus 3D printer kit was received on Thursday, the 20th of October, 2016. It was shipped in a 22-inch by 14.25-inch by 7-inch box weighing 26 pounds. Inside were 3 cardboard boxes, 1 styrofoam box, one paper package, the aluminum extrusions, a packing slip, a makerfarm sticker, and a gambody.com promotion code. There were also some packing peanuts and sheets of thin packing foam. The boxes were not labeled, and there wasn't anything saying what should have been in each box.

The Large Box: Print Bed

The largest box contained the aluminum print bed and the heated print surface.

The First Small Box: Electronics

One of the smaller boxes contained more of the packing foam and 2 antistatic bags of preassembled electronics. One bag had a LCD control panel and cable. The other contained a preassembled Robotale RAMPS 1.4 board, complete with stepper drivers and an OSOYOO MEGA arduino clone.

The Second Small Box: Extruder Parts

The other smaller box contained

a tube of ball bearings wrapped in packing foam
2 lasercut wooden sheets (which may have originally been 1 sheet, broken in two during shipping)
a bag of 3D printed parts
a white plastic bag with
- 2 pulleys
- 9 set screws
- a hex key
a clear plastic bag with
- a 5.25-inch long PTFE tube
- a clear plastic bag with
  - a heater cartridge
  - a thermocouple with a modular connector
  - a pair of 2-wire cables with a modular connector on one end and two 0.1-inch pin sockets on the other
  - a 30mm computer fan
  - a 4-inch zip tie
  - a rubber (silicone?) hot end nozzle insulator
  - a clear-red indecton-molded plastic piece
- a clear plastic bag with hotend hardware. Inside was another bag labeled "V6 UNIVERSAL FIXING KIT".

The Styrofoam Box: Stepper Motors

The styrofoam box contained 5 NEMA 17 bipolar stepper motors. The axles are 0.85 inches long and they all have flats ground out of them.

The Paper Package: Small Hardware

The paper (tyvek?) package contained

3 individually bubble-wrapped stepper motor mounts made of welded, black-painted steel
a clear plastic bag with
- 7 corner inserts
- 35 corner brackets with nubs
- a clear plastic bag with 4 corner brackets that had no nubs
a clear plastic box with a label:

50-M3 Nut, 40-M3 Nylock Nut, 25-M3x10mm Bolt, 65-M3x16mm Bolt, 15-M3x25mm Bolt, 18-M5x30mm Bolt, 35-M5x12mm Bolt, M3,M5 screw Wrench, 04-M5 Nut, 17-M5 Nylock Nut, 25-M5 Washer, 25-Zip Ties, 04-Spring, 04-Binder Clips, 03-Endstop Switches, 05-MR125ZZ Bearings, M3,M5 Nut Wrench

The box seemed to contain all of these. It also clearly contained even more hardware, such as:

- 3 different cut black steel sheets
- a 6-mm wide toothed belt
- 2 more springs of a different type than the 4
- a brass filament drive pulley
- a full-size skate bearing

The Loose, Large Hardware

The aluminum extrusions:

4 20mm x 20mm x 19.75-inch 8020-style
14 20mm x 40mm x 19.75-inch 8020-style

Last, there are 2 16.5-inch long 3/32-inch diameter threaded rods.

Kit Assembly

Instructions

There are several manuals and sub-manuals. The URLs were all easy to find, but they are listed here for convenience:

General Assembly Notes

Theg guide opens up with a visual giude to all of the hardware components. This is followed by a couple of "if you have this stuff, you have version 1. If you have that suff, you have version 2." The kit we received has Frame Kit Version 2, and requires instruction pages 19-21 rather than pages 22-23.

The instructions are generally in the form "Here's a paragraph of instructions, and here's a picture of the results". Be sure to read all of the paragraphs; there are some details that are not obvious from the pictures.

Kit Complaints and "Gotchas"

Reversing front and back
Out of order - put top on
30 mm 3M screws?
Different Z nut traps from picture
"just press the nuts into the nut traps" - nope! (Z axis and Extruder)
Difficult to put zip ties on the belt tightly
Belt is BARELY long enough
No pictures of assembled screen from front - difficult to tell if oriented correctly
No screwdriver included for fan on hot end
Extra hardware from hot end - did I miss some steps?
Wooden extruder mount was too thick. It was very difficult to puton (required C-clamp) and bent to the point of snapping.
1 of the printed electronics mounts is different - made it difficult to align with picture to put nuts in right place
3D printed electronics mount doesn't fit over through-hole pins of arduino's DC barrel jack. Fixed by cutting gouges into 3D printed part.
Through-hole pin of power supply connector on RAMPS interfered with DC barrel of Arduino, preventing shield from being flat on Arduino, also preventing the same screw from reaching into the electronics mount. Fixed by using cutters to trim the one pin.
Earlier instructions said to connect the screen, but it has to be disconnected to screw down the electronics
Instructions do not say where to plug in fan for hot end
The heater cables from the heated build platform were too thick to fit into the connector on the RAMPS
Extruder heater wires needed to be manually stripped
Needed to provide 16 gauge wire to connect power supply to RAMPS
The arduino came pre-flashed with firmware, but it had some sort of bug where it crashed during firmware retraction. This was fixed by re-flashing the firmware.

Nice Things about the Kit

RAMPS board was completely preassembled
all necessary hex keys were included
carefully following the instructions does result in an assembled 3D printer