Continuing with my mission this week to actually finish the electrics on my DIY Prusa i3 MK2 3D Printer, in this video I make some modifications to the RAMPS board and the Arduino.
On the RAMPS I need to remove the 4 pin power connector. Now that the RAMPS board is not carrying the current to the heated bed it isn’t really a safety issue (although it might be if yours is carrying heated bed power…) but it just simply takes up too much space for how I want to mount it. And a soldered connection is more reliable that a connector, well usually!
I am also junking the polyfuses. Again not so much a safety issue now as there is only a little current going through them, but even so the 5 Amp one still feeds everything apart from the heated bed so they have to go. Replacing them with a simple blade fuse holder and fuses – you know, like off of cars n stuff 🙂
In the last video I created a separate MOSFET board to handle power to the heated bed. The gate of the MOSFET is driven high by pin D8 of the Arduino, so I also add a signal wire from D8 that can then attach to my off-board MOSFET.
Lastly, I remove the DC jack on the Arduino. It isn’t being used or causing any issues, but I just don’t like it… well no, it got in the way of my board mounts.
That just leaves fixing the corrupted garbage that appears on the LCD after a couple of minutes. After quite a lot of time spent (more than quite a lot..), I have fixed it. That will be the subject of my next video.