7th June, 2:30PM, Making & Tinkering Lab
Shawn, Kang Hao, Xinhui
We built up the skeleton of the Ender 3 Printer with the help of Tony and Qi Jie 🙂 as there were no manuals. The process was similar to a Lego building with different motors and controllers set up. We had a lot of fun experimenting with it to get working, so we decided to put up a video of us building it and step-by-step procedures for future students!
Steps:
- Build up the entire structure of the 3D Printer by securing the aluminium profiles.
- Secure the controller and Arduino onto a holder which can be screwed onto the aluminium profiles ( We made a mistake in doing this as the last step, you can learn from us, hahaha!)
- Afterwards, the three x, y, and z motors controlling the printer’s movement can be attached to the aluminium profiles with the stoppers.
X-motor 
Y-motor 
Z-motor - The x, y, and z motors require each a stepper motor and switch cable. Connect them to the controller which needs to be tested with the Marlin firmware later on. Look out for X, Y, and Z in the middle in the schematics and end stops at the top right corner.
- Lastly, the belt and the moving roller for the extruder can be finally attached to the x-axis. Then, all the physical work of the 3D Printer is done!
X-axis belt & roller - For the 3D Printer, Marlin firmware and Arduino are required to boot up the printer. The Marlin firmware is uploaded to the Arduino Mega through the Arduino IDE, procedures can be found on their open-source site. Pronterface can also be used to control the 3D Printer.
- Some of the settings were changed in configuration.h file to fit our project so understand which areas you are required to change. Have fun!