Quantum Delta 3D Printer Updates

 Filament Spool Holder

A Lazy Susan style filament spool system seemed like a natural addition to this printer.  The problem was the filament had to go down the center.  This was solved by a nylon bolt with a hole drilled through it.  That bolts a flange bearing to the top. A disk to support the spool is glued onto that.  It then uses a tube attached to a piece on the side to guide the filament from the edge to the bolt.  It also has 2 extra keeper to prevent the filament from a full spool from falling off the edge.

Magnetically attached bed

When a part is firmly attached to the bed, I get a little nervous pulling hard on it when it is attached to the rods and carriages.  The answer was to attach it with a few Neodynium disk magnets.  I used (3) 3/8″ x 1/16″ thick diameter N52 magnets.  The magnets on the end effector are in pockets with 0.75mm thick base.  This means the magnets never actually contact each other.  The bed has them in pockets too, but the pocket is only as deep as the magnet.

LED Lights

 

I added a ring of LEDs.  These LED ring lights are sold for use on cars.  I bought mine on Amazon.com.

RAMPS controllers don’t have  a lot of options for high current I/O so I hooked this to the unused bed heater output.  You can control I/O pins M42 Pn Snnn command where Pn is the output pin number and Snnn is the PWM level.  The bed heater pin is 8 on RAMPS.  The Marlin firmware protects you from messing with “sensitive” IO pins, so you need to remove HEATER_BED_PIN from SENSITIVE_PINS which is defined near the end of the pins.h file.  For some reason “M42 P8 S255” only flashes the LEDs briefly.  All other values below  255 work.  You can put M42 P8 S254 at the beginning of the G-Code of your parts or in a script of the host program.

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8 Responses to “Quantum Delta 3D Printer Updates”


  1. Thanh

    Beautiful build

  2. Thanh

    What software can we use to drive this machine? Thanks

  3. bdring

    Repetier or Marlin firmware. Both are on Github

  4. HAluBot – Part 1 « Anthony VH

    […] One extra feature I want is space to mount filament spools, so I don't need to have extra spool holders taking up space on my desk. For now, I decided to use four short sections of extrusion mounted on the opposite side of the leadscrew. The spools won't interfere with the hotend nor the printbed. If it turns out a second leadscrew is required on this side of the frame, I'll probably create some lazy suzan-style spool holders on top of the frame, a great idea from the folks that made the Quantum delta printer. […]

  5. Rostock Mini « Anthony VH

    […] arms exactly the same length without having to create a special jig. Secondly, I incorporated the lazy suzan spool holder idea from the Quantum Delta printer folks. A piece of teflon tubing, held in place on top of the […]

  6. Rob

    how you are slicing and getting negative Z g-code?

  7. bdring

    It is all standard GCode.

    The machine knows the maximum Z. The machine “zeros” at the maximum, so it goes down at the beginning, triggers the switches and knows it is now at Z100 (or whatever it actually is). The command for the first layer is go to Z0.25 (or whatever) so the table moves up.

  8. @hugobiwan

    This printer is simply full of excellent ideas and beautiful.
    I hope to see one like that one day here in France.

    Best regards.
    @hugobiwan

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