LitePlacer.com forums

Has anybody else had problems with thermal runaway on the A-axis NEMA14 motor? I've killed two of them now. The first one went up in smoke before I started pushing the envelope on motor wiring (using Cat5-STP) so that doesn't explain it. The motor works fine but it gets really warm. If I run for a f...

It might be a nice design change for Juha to consider: Just make the carriage plates a bit higher so the Z-motor moves up a tiny bit and leaves enough room for a chain. Use different screws for V-wheels as Adam did. At the same time, the top plate could be slightly adjusted to have mounting bracket...

I've never been too happy with how the liteplacer dragchains fly through the air, supported only by their own plastic joints. Malte flipped his Y-axis dragchain to be the "conventional" orientation, and I copied that on my build. Recently I've figured out how to flip the X-axis dragchain a...

mrandt wrote: On my LitePlacer, I use a small inline filter from Misumi (article number BDFL6):

Ah, fantastic, just the ticket.

Mark, I'll definitely keep that scouring pad trick in mind! Probably works well for desoldering vacs, which chew through filters like there's no tomorrow....

Definitely agree with everything Malte said. In addition, I built mine as an "alpha" version following Juha's CAD plans even before the kit became available - so of course it took me much longer than any usual customer. I think with Juha's kit, you can build the machine in a few afternoons...

Pressure sensor averaging - because of the possibility of erroneous values coming from the ADC due to the immense filth in the powerlines the software takes 10 readings and averages the value. This will soon be replaced with a median routine instead so i can weed out values that are obviously wrong...

But honestly, all this feeder nonsense is strictly for ultimate speed, which is something the liteplacer is not meant for. The liteplacer is never going to win speed competitions, so why fool around with complicated mechanisms whose only purpose is speed? ... Feeders are a waste of time for this ma...

Both pump and solenoid are controlled by a microcontroller using following simple algorithm: - measure (negative) pressure - if above desired pressure + hysteresis (-> not enough vacuum), activate pump and actuate solenoid valve - if below desired pressure - hysteresis, deactiviate solenoid and pum...

I recently discovered why I've been killing so many solenoids: occasionally a tiny 0402 or 0603 gets sucked up into the air line while I'm using a BGA-sized tip. Obviously I should try not to let this happen, but nobody's perfect. Is there some sort of filter or guard I can put in the air line betwe...

Hrm, I get it, but I don't have anything like Knas' "swiss cheese" HDPE, nor a 3D printer (*) Ah, got it now. Found a tiny set-screw and inserted it into a plastic tube, inserted the plastic tube into the nozzle holder, everything works nicely now. The metal part of whatever you put into ...