I’ve had my predator converted to a duet board for almost a week now. It seems to be running really well. I’ve tweaked so I am getting consistent prints. The details are nice and clean etc. I still have some more work to do regarding overhangs, bridges and some slight ghosting but for the moment, its all issues I can live with.
I also seem to be getting the odd layer that doesn’t seem to extrude 100% correct but this seems to be an issue that most people are having and not just on this printer. It appears to be down to the hotend that anycubic use so at some point that will be getting an upgrade. What I will probably do is upgrade the effector to a smart effector at the same time and kill two birds with one stone. Then I only have to order the extra E3D parts required as the effector comes with a custom heat sink.
The above images are of Phil A Ment. As you can see, I still have some issues with overhangs. This will be my next issue to tackle. He was printed at 0.1mm layer heights and 60mm/s print speeds. He took 6 hours to print. I know he has a hole in one foot but that was from me messing around with the print settings on the fly.
The above images are of Cali Cat. Again, the overhang issues can be seen going up the underside of the tail.
All in all though, I am happy with the printer so far. I have moved my config files to GitHub for easy management.
Installing the Duet
At the moment, my duet is sat on one of the mounting pegs that were used to secure the trigorilla pro. Not ideal but I’m waiting for a panel mounted ethernet port to arrive before I go ahead and mount my board properly. Once it gets here, I’ll document the process and post the mount I design to thingiverse. I have already found a mount I like the look of, so I may remix that to make it fit our printer. That of course depends how well I get one with freecad.
After building my printer on the dining room table, I knew I
would have to move it out into my workspace in the garage. My wife has a
“no wires in the house” policy that I have to abide to.
Whilst moving the predator, which is just about doable by
myself, I managed to damage the SD card slot. The main annoyance with this is I
won’t be able to update the firmware and I won’t be able to use the printer
without plugging it in via USB. I could control it using Octoprint but this
wasn’t my ultimate plan. This meant that converting the printer to a duet
controller has been brought forwards.
I have a duet 2 ethernet v1.04. It’s a controller that I was
using to control my Anycubic Kossel Linear Plus. I was planning on selling the
linear plus machine, but seeing it next predator, I may just keep it so I have
something a little more portable. At the moment, I’ve fitted the linear plus
with an MKS Sbase V1.3 but its not performing as I would’ve liked. I may end up
buying either another duet or a Bigtreetech SKR.
Anyway, back on the topic of installing the duet to the
predator.
Connections
There are 4 x motors connections. X, Y, Z and E.
There are 3 x optical endstop connectsions. X, Y and Z.
There is one probe connection.
There is one filament sensor connection.
There is one fan connector for cooling the board.
There is one fan connector for the 2 sets of fans mounted to the effector.
There is one hotend thermistor connector.
There is one heated bed thermistor connector.
There are bare wires for the heated bed, hotend and power in cables.
Each of the connections need modifying in some way or
another to be able to fit them to the duet. One of Anycubics bad habits is to
tin the end of the bare wires with solder. This is widely accepted as being bad
practice. Therefore, the end of each bare cable needs to be cut off, stripped
back and either left bare or crimped with a bootlace ferrule. I prefer bootlace
ferrules that are uninsulated so its easier to get them in to the terminals.
You’ll also find this applies to the cables which run to the heated bed mosfet.
The endstop wiring needs to be wired differently in the connector to work with the duet. The three images below are from looking at the connector from the top as it it was connected to the board.
The above images show the original connector on the left and the duet connector on the right. Apparently, Anycubic haven’t been consistent with their wire colours so just check your cables match mine. Otherwise use the before and after pictures to help configure yours.
The z probe connector should be wired as shown below. It doesn’t matter whether your wire colours match mine as its just a mechanical switch.
The filament sensor should be wired as shown below. Same principal applies with the original on the left and the duet connector on the right.
The motors can be wired as they are. The duet wiring shows the red and blue connectors the other way round but this doesn’t matter and can be wired in the order they are installed on the trigorilla pro.
Fan connections at the effector end of the wiring
The only connections that need any major change are the fan
connectors. The trigorilla connector had both set of fans ran off one
connector, but the duet doesn’t have this capability. All three fans are
connected together using the positive as shown in. The duet switches the fans
on and off using the ground connector so you may be able to split off the
negative for the one fan and have that in a single connector. I decided to run
another cable and fully separate out the fan. The wires are as follows:
Red – Fan 2 (Hotend fan) ground
Blue – Fan 0 (part cooling fans) ground
Yellow – Positives for all 3 fans wired together.
You can now connect everything to the duet. I separated out all 3 fans. The part cooling fans are connected to Fan 0 and Fan 2 and the hotend fan is connected to Fan 1. The z probe is connected to E0 and the filament sensor is connected to E1. The rest should be self-explanatory and if you get stuck, use the duet wiring schematic here.
Here are my config files for the duet. I now have a GitHub repo with all of my config files. The only one that may need adjusting is the filament sensor as I have not tested this yet and it may need changing from active high to active low.
When turning the machine on, home all the towers. Then go through the delta auto calibration and you should be good to go.
