Ok. It’s Friday, I’ve spend too much time dealing with MS PowerShell, and while many are watching the Blue Jays and the Dodgers game tonight after the trick or treaters have made the rounds, I decided, with a mounting headache to start troubleshooting the latest temp failure.
In the past 4 to 5 months, I’ve been printing in PETG, though sporadically (that aforementioned demon PowerShell being the reason), prior to that, my printing has all been PLA. I mention this because temps and power draw may be factors I need to consider.
I, and my eldest daughter, have been running various jobs with the higher print temps needed for PETG - she was getting very good results for her needs with a temp of 240C, I was still tinkering for the sweet spot and was still running stuff around 230.
Under PLA, I had one AB temp warning, and a nasty nasty blob (mentioned here in the past) Using PETG, I’ve had 3. The first one of those about 3 or 4 weeks into the inital testing, with the next one happening mid August during a long print for my daughter, after that replacement I had to order more hot end kits but the fully assembled ones Creatity bundled/sold weren’t to be found anywhere that I could find in Canada, so I had to go to the assemble it your self kits and went the Ali Express route to replenish my stash of spares.
Last weekend, during what was to be an 8 hour job, that last fully assembled/sold as a creality official hot end failed. I swapped it out with one of the kits from Ali Express. re-ran the print job. no problem. phew.
Next day, I decided to print something for myself that would take 2 hours. I got my test print done, but it wasn’t quite up to snuff dimensionally, so I made a change to size, tossed it back to the printer. After 3 mm of print height was achieved, the AB temp warning was back.
So, out comes another Ali Express hot end assemble yourself kit - get it all in, tightened up etc. do my manual leveling, then the ABL test, and ran about 20 mm of PETG through at about 225 C as a primer. tossed my print job at it again, only to get the AB temp warning as soon as it tried to get to the printing temp of 240C (I decided to go with that this time). It was late, I was sweary, so I walked away as one should.
Tonight, I did the techie thing, and tested the resistance readings for my unused thermistors and heating elements, and because I’d hoped to reuse some elements from the failed kits one day, I actually was able to go back and check all of them, plus the one on the printer. All of them are within the nominal readings for the thermistor at room temp, and the heater elements at room temp. (between 97kOhm and 110 kOhm for the thermistors, and all under 18 Ohm’s for the heaters - lowest was 12)
Tigger doesn’t think it’s the thermistor or heating elements anymore.
I’m thinking it’s the Motherboard, or the Power Supply, but I’m not sure how to correctly figure out which is the most likely one to be the problem. I noticed that Creality has pretty much stripped the CR10 Smart Pro from their site, and I’m not having the best of times with the AI based search engines tonight - what worked for me in the past with google really doesn’t play nice in the AI enhanced search tools (grrr), or it’s that headache I mentioned turning my brain to mush.
So, before I embark on another debug project where I take over the dining room table for a day or two to troubleshoot at the circuit level, I thought I’d see if the collective wisdom here had any brilliant ideas on the next steps. I can’t even honestly remember if there’s a se[arate fuse in the chassis for the hot end’s heater or not… hmmm… (wanders away on the internet to try and find that out)
For me, it is a hobby, and hobbies have a way of not having limits, but I also just want it to work, which until this, it did.
I bought this unit because it was considered most likely to just work. Which is what I wanted, so I could do other sorts of tinkering.