ESP32 audio experiments or Make a very small low cost and portable webradio

Because yesterday was a black wednesday for the open source community the next project I made is hosted on gitlab. You can find the sources for this special dirty low cost internetradio here.

Some days ago I found a new ESP32 device on aliexpress:

TTGO TAudio V1.0 or also known as TTGO-T9 v1.0

A wm8978 audio codec from Cirrus Logic can be found on this ESP audio board.

The sad thing about this device first: On their  github site they only will provide you with binaries for using the audio codec. That’s not nice. So I thought it is a good idea to make live happier and deleted my old github account, opened a new account on gitlab.com and posted a very basic example to get the audio codec running on this device.

You can find the sources here: https://gitlab.com/chlorisdroid/TTGO-T9-RGB_LED-WM8978

This is written in a quick and dirty way and will be polished in the next few hours.

Have fun

 

Old Prusa printing new humanoid InMoov

With some further updates the print quality on the Prusa I3 B pro is now acceptable.

Updates in detail

  • ESP3D for WiFi printing on an ESP8266 (in AP mode)
  • Improved SaintFlint extruder (stabilized)
  • J-Head v6
  • Some Neopixel for showing the printer status and some more light
  • Filament runout sensor for more security (not shown in the video
  • Marlin 1.7 with automatic bed leveling
  • Reverted to Marlin 1.6 with automatic bed leveling because of unresolved issues with Z height after auto leveling during printing. (See also https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/Marlin/issues/8831) This brought me into trouble with reproducible layer shifting when nearly reaching the end of a print. That should be a „no go“ in a stable release, but …
  • …and reverted to Marlin 1.7 again. I have to apologize. It simply was a mechanical issue in my case: A broken belt pulley during update. Yesterday with Marlin 1.6 the pulley still worked. Just at the point of updating to Marlin 1.7 it BROKE INTO PIECES INSIDE. So it was not really obvious for me to find the cause of that level shifting . Sorry again for my mistake.
Broken belt pulley
Broken belt pulley

Marlin 1.7 comes with a whole bunch of new features which are really good improvements for your printer robots.

Most important (for me) are the features concerning the stepper motor drivers (especially TMC 2130) which allows you now to set some params for these nice Trinamic stepper motor drivers.

So:  Merry X-mas and a happy new year to all of you.
Have fun.

 

Pimp my prusa – part2

Today  two more upgrades for my good Prusa I3 B.

No 1: Infrared filament monitor. Detect filament blocking with routines to stop/pause 3D printer and let the user interact to solve the problem. This is an alpha development thing connected to an Arduino mini pro. It detects the movements of the little wheel and can count the movements (meters) the filament made.

No 2: Bracket for Saintflint bowden extruder including a holder for a 40mm fan.

Works with one old (discontinued) Pololu QTR-1A Reflectance Sensor.

Filament monitor
Filament monitor

Extruder fan
Extruder fan
SaintFlintExtruder mount
SaintFlintExtruder mount
Extruder bracket
Extruder bracket

Pimp my prusa

After I got some magic smoke from my good old GT2650 board from the modded Prusa I3 B pro (which is a dual extruding I3C pro version now) there had to be made some decisions:
Replace the old board with a new one or take a more recent faster version? Replace the old MK8 direct drive extrudes with some more reliable ones? Two stepper motors plus extrudres are heavy weight and make the x-axis very slow. So the decision was made quickly and all parts have been updated now.

My Prusa is running with Smartramps for Due now -> http://www.reprap.org/wiki/SMART_RAMPS

The old MK8 direct drive extrudes have been replaced with two of these great Saint flint extruders from here -> https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:979113 and actually I am experimenting with the brand new Carboinoid 4 color filament switch from here -> https://github.com/grainiac/Carbonoid/tree/master/fila_switch

Fila switch
Fila switch

If that all is going to work  as it should, my Prusa is ready to print more parts for the InMOOV project with much higher quality 😉

Thanks a lot to all those who developed these parts and put the sources online!