Plastruder MK5 Usage / Discussion

This is the discussion related to the wiki page Plastruder MK5 Usage.

Smell

AlexWillisson 06 Sep 2010 19:18

I just assembled one of these and I've run into a small snag. On the step to heat it up, as the instructions said it let off pretty smelly smoke. While I'm fine with that, my roommate isn't and the smell sticks around for a few hours afterwards (nowhere near as extreme but noticeable within 10' of my makerbot). The extruder itself still smells (at least 4 hours after running it), and my roommate won't let me run it again until I can make sure it doesn't smell at all. So far my two best ideas are to find a very well ventilated area and do all my work there (not preferable, I don't want to have to move my entire setup to do any work on it) or to build some sort of box that will vent the smoke out my window.

While the instructions say it only takes a couple minutes to stop smelling, I was running it for at least 5 minutes (a couple minutes at 50, rest at 200) and no sign of the smell stopping. Anyone have any suggestions? I'm really looking forward to trying out the plastruder mk5.

New PID settings?

lylefile 13 Sep 2010 02:14

I have just finished assembling and testing my MK5 plastruder, and it looks awesome! But it seems to have a wide variance around the set temperature. It doesn't track the target temperature nearly as good as my MK4. Does anyone have suggested servo parameters?

Testing resistance

cshapiro 07 Nov 2010 20:44

If you have an inexpensive multimeter with a dial pointing to various functions, make sure it can measure the resistances of the thermistor and the heating resistors correctly. The thermistor is a 100K resistor, but the two heating resistors are only 5 ohms each. You'll se a dial on the multimeter with various resistance orders of magnitude on its scale. Measure the heating resistors at "1", and the thermistor at "100K". In particular, if you attempt to measure the thermistor at "1", it will appear to be an open circuit.

PID settings given in the page

cshapiro 11 Dec 2010 14:14

The PID settings given here work a *lot* better than what is shipped on the Extruder firmware v2.3 for
relay-equipped machines. I was getting temperature swings of 20 degrees (10 up/10down). With these
settings, it's more like 1 or 2 after my Mk5 is warmed up properly.

Thermistor trouble?

HeathH 10 Feb 2011 00:54

I have had difficulty to get a reading other than 255 degrees from the thermistor when the makerbot is operating. The thermistor is not shorted, and when I test the thermistor on its own it reads an appropiate resistance, and the resistance decreases with heat. The board seems to work fine independently as well, but when I insert the thermistor into the board i cannot get a current temperature output of anything but 255. Is the board the problem? Maybe the two heating resistors?