Mendel 90 Resurrection

Mendel 90 after cleaning

     Last august my local Craigslist turned up a piece of 3D printing history, a Mendel 90 scratch-build. It was in a sorry state when I got it, what follows are my modifications to convert it into a functional and semi-modern machine. Not shown is that it was coated in cobwebs from a couple years of disuse, so I started with a good cleaning and then it was time to strip parts down for upgrade and repair.

TR8 lead screws installed

     As I received it, this Mendel had M8 or 5/16" threaded rods for the z-axis movement that looked to have been twisted with a vise or badly mishandled, result was a 20mm bend out of true over the entire length so the printer was functionally limited to half of the original 200mm build height. I had a couple TR8 lead screws leftover from an older project, so the first fix was to rebuild the x-axis with updated ends to integrate them. Then it was time to do something about the extruder and electronics which were both non-functional.

Mendel 90 with corrected extruder being tested

     Turning over the electronics turned up some burnt traces on the Ramps board, mostly those related to the heated bed control area, so not critical to basic motion testing, but I swapped it out with a working spare regardless. The extruder that was installed originally was a Greg's Wade reloaded for 3mm filament, not ideal considering the hot-end is an E3D v5 clone for 1.75mm filament. Fixing this was mostly just tracking down a compatible 1.75mm version of the extruder body online, then printing and installing it. With those quick fixes done it was time for a full scale test-print.

3DBenchy attempt with original extruder and gantry

      After several weeks of fiddling with it this was the best result I could get out of it. The main issue was the gantry jamming on one end and flexing at strange angles, often half-way through a multi-hour test print. Eventually I decided to rebuild the x/z gantry setup with a more modern design to fix this issue, ultimately settling on the 'Bear Exxa project' upgrade since I'd used some of the parts from it in refits to the Sculptor over the last 3-4 years and they've proven to be some of the most sturdy parts on it.

Mendel with Bear Exxa half installed

     Installing the axis upgrade was simple, the project has excellent documentation and assembly instructions, so it was mostly making minor tweaks to accommodate the Mendel's design, mostly mirroring things from left to right since the Mendel design is flipped in that direction relative to current i3 designs. The largest change needed was cutting a strip off the right-hand side of the electronics bay to compensate for the x-axis motor position change. With that sorted out it was time to fire things up and test the print quality.

3DBenchy on Mendel Bear

     Much better print quality strait off, guess that's what almost 10 years of design refinements will do to things. I've yet to install the part-fan assembly and a couple other components but this is much better than the melted mess from the inital testing. Overall it's been fun reactivating this old relic and turning it into a reliable printer for future projects.

Mendel Bear ready to print

Remote Power Control Update

Remote Power Setup from last time

     There's been some changes to the remote power setup from last post, so I've documented the updates here if anyone wants to duplicate this modification. It's primarily a hardware change but there has also been a software update to the OctoPi plugin that can be a bit confusing for new users.

Keyestudio 4 Channel Relay Hat

     The hardware side has changed over to a proper Raspberry Pi Hat, mainly due to the relay from last-time glitching out once the temperature in the workshop went from 10°C average to around 20°C, something about that slight increase made the relay trigger current increase past the Pi's current output limits. This isn't covered in the data sheet for the 'JQC-3FF-S-Z' relay that I've been able to find, so your results with that relay may vary depending on the environment the printer lives in. I've upgraded to the Keyestudio 4 Channel Relay Hat which uses relays that actually play nice with the Pi's onboard current limits, installing it was almost plug-in and go, only needing to screw the load lines into the terminal blocks to finish hardware installation.

Updated Settings for PSU Control

     On the software side, the creator of the 'PSU Control' plug-in did a major overhaul of the code-base in April, end result was it splitting into 3 plug-ins. The original which is now basically the switching logic for when to turn things on/off. And a pair of support plugins that act as interfaces for Raspberry Pi GPIO or TPlink smart plugs so far. Functionally this means that the 'Switching' settings need to be set to 'Plugin', and then the 'PSU Control RPi.GPIO' plugin installed via the plugin manager.

PSU Control RPi.GPIO settings

    Configuring the new plugin is fairly simple, it's really just a matter of telling what pin-mapping mode and which pin is in use for the printer relay. I'm using what the plugin calls 'BCM' mode, identifying the pins by the logic name instead of the more common 'Board' mode since it seems to be slightly more reliable. For the hat I'm using, the relays are on BCM pins 4, 6, 22, and 26. Setting up is just a matter of putting in the number for the relay in use, 4 in my case, and setting the logic to inverted since I've wired the printer as 'normally closed' and the plugin assumes the more common and generally safer 'normally open' logic by default. That concludes my follow up on this subject, next time its going to be looking modernizing an old relic from the early days of RepRap based printing.

Remote power control with Octoprint

10A relay module

     Over the last couple months I've been working on a bunch of secret stuff and workshop upgrades, more on those later in the year, but one project I can share is converting the Mega Kossel to full remote control via the attached Octoprint node. Out of the box Octoprint allows for the attached printer to be monitored via USB and an optional webcam, but there isn't any means of switching the printer on or off remotely, resulting in a lot of wasted electricity to maintain it in a state of 'ready to print'. The solution for this problem requires a bit of hardware modification along with installing an optional plugin for Octoprint called 'PSU Control'. I'm going to start with the suprisingly simple hardware addition first.

Tools and parts for remote power control upgrade

      The primary addition needed to control the power state of the 3D printer, (North America only), is a common 10A relay of the type found in a lot of hobby electronics kits, I'm using this one from Amazon, but there are lots of variations to chose from, it just needs to have 5V switching logic for compatibility with the Raspberry Pi. The rest of the tools and supplies are some 16/18 gauge wire, 3 DuPoint jumper lines, a couple female spade connectors, a wire-crimp/striper tool, and a couple screwdrivers, #0 and #1 Philips in my case. I've also printed a case for the specific relay module, but any electronics project enclosure will work, this is a key safety precaution since the relay will be switching mains power and the terminal block does have exposed metal on the top and front, so this modification is at your own risk.

Inside of power socket/switch with target wire removed.

     The first step is to unplug the printer and unscrew the power switch/socket assembly, this usually is just taking 2 screws out from the top and bottom holes. Once the socket is out, there are a bunch of wires that lead to the power supply, we want to remove the short section of wire that leads from the fuse to the power switch, this is going to be replaced with some leads to the relay. 

Relay polarity wiring

     Wiring the relay is fairly simple, we want it connected in the normally closed (NC) position. This allows the printer to still be used normally if the Octoprint node is offline for any reason. The other end of the 18-gauge wires should be crimped with the spade connectors, then one goes on each exposed blade in the power switch assembly.

Final Relay to Pi wiring

     On the OctoPi side, we're connecting to the 5V, 3.3V, GND, and one of the data pins on the Pi's GPIO, so you will need a 15W power block for the pi to prevent performance issues when the relay is active. Firstly I've pulled the coloured jumper and am using the relay board in isolated mode to prevent damage to the Pi's 3.3V logic systems. Full pinout is pin 2(5V) to JD_VCC, pin 1(3.3V) to VCC, pin 6(GND) to GND, and pin 13(GPIO) to IN1/Control. Of these, the only one you'll need to note down is which pin the control line is on. We'll need this number to configure the plugin in the next step.

Octoprint Settings with PSU Control installed

     Installing the PSU Control plugin is fairly standard for Octoprint, just searching 'PSU' in the plugin manager brings it up, after that it's just clicking 'install' and follow the prompts. Once the plugin is loaded, scroll down to the page shown above and switch the switching mode to 'GPIO', then enter '13' in the box below. After that scroll down to 'Power On Options' and enable 'Connect when powered on' with a 10 second delay and you're done for basic configuration. There's also a couple options to automatically shut-down the printer when idle or finished printing. These make it so the printer will stay completely dormant when not in use, ideal for when doing long prints that finish at odd hours.

Completed install before testing