Well since @Dr.Marvin called me out on the other thread on my lack of updates I figured I’d better come back with SOMETHING… I’ve been crazy busy with work lately so I haven’t had a lot of time to do much on the enclosure. However, I HAVE been playing around with LED lighting that I want to control via Octoprint (why? why not?).
So the first thing I need to do is connect the LED strip to the rPi. However the LED strip is 5V and the rPi GPIOs expect 3.3. So I needed to introduce a level converter to the mix. Since I haven’t played with any circuits since university I am kind of muddling my way through. Here’s the setup so far:
But then i thought to myself “Self! You don’t want to just have a breadboard that can be easily damaged in there do you?”. I did not. So my next step was to buy a soldering iron and learning how to make this into a more permanent solution. So I’ve assembled a number of pieces and it looks like this so far:
You can tell by my ubertechnical schematic there that I know EXACTLY what I’m doing (not!). But if by some freak chance this works then I’ll model and print up a case for it and will have my very first from-scratch thingy that I’ll have made. Yay!
Anyway… once I get the LED strip working then I’ll mount it in the enclosure. In the meantime I’ve still got to pop a hole in the back for the power bar to poke through and then I will start printing some accessories (most importantly the ribbon cable redirection chain that will send it to the back of the machine rather than dangling on the side where it can get caught on the door. I’ll also need to print a new spool holder that I will have in the top compartment - right now my spool holder will still be side-mounted as before so I can’t close the doors while printing yet.
Sooooo that’s about it for now. Hopefully I’ll have more to show soon.