17/02/2026 :: More Parts

Picking up where I left off in the last post, I got the hotend set up with the thermistor, heating block and extruder stepper. I needed to do a bit of soldering for the fan wires to work with the pinouts on the board, after which I connected all 3 components to the board for testing.

After fiddling with the right pinouts for the thermistor (I connected it to th1 instead of th0 :P) the board started reading a reasonable temperature, meaning the thermistor was ok.

I was running the power supply at 12V 2A, but when I activated the heating element the board basically shut down due to lack of power. I set the power supply to 5A after that (that's the highest it would go) and that seems to have fixed the issue for now, although printers supposedly run at 20-30A when operating at 12V. 5A should be enough for testing in the meantime.

I got the endstops set up as well. I needed to make my own connectors since they were wired all together strangely and I needed them separate.

After plugging one in and triggering it the whole board shut down (I'm noticing a pattern). Turns out I plugged the switch into the wrong 2 pins out of 3, and I was causing a short circuit, triggering the board's safeties. Moving it over a pin fixed the issue. Now running a diagnostic command I saw TRIGGERED when the switch was open and 'open' when the switch was closed. I just enabled endstop inverting to account for this and reflashed the firwmare.

I've fixed up the wiring on the auto-levelling unit which consists of a servo and another endstop, but haven't tested it yet.

Looks like previous owner was diagnosing the servo judging by 2 of the wires being snipped and redirected. I'll see if I have any issues with just plugging it into the board.

All in all, the most crucial bits of the printer are now up and running. While there's some minor additions like the auto levelling attachment still to do, I could leave those until later. Right now my priority is creating an actual body for this printer and get it moving everything correctly. For that I'll need to finally make that design and get some parts for framing as well as the driver belts for the servos.