Since I had not followed my own advise after I got my first 3D printer. Who doesn't need another hobby!
I had planned on building a larger printer for some of the projects I have planned. For this printer I ordered a set of motors and electronics through one of the Chinese suppliers. After waiting more than the estimated time for delivery, I contacted the seller and received a full refund. That left me with the decision, order another set from a different supplier or look for a completed printer the size I wanted in a reasonable price range.
After watching a YouTube video by my favorite 'Cyborg', Naomi Wu building the new Creality 'Ender 3' 3D printer. I checked several other videos that showed the assembly and operation of this printer. Reviews were mostly very positive, and it had the specifications I was looking for. From a e-mail flyer I found that Gearbest had them on sale for less than $210 including shipping, so I placed a order. Gearbest now has a warehouse in the US, it only took about a week and a half for it to arrive.
Since I had watched several videos on the assembly, it only took about a hour to get it put together and check the alignment. The first print was the test file that came on the included SD card, the print quality was very nice. After that I visited Thingiverse.com and grabbed some of the accessories such as a fan cover and accessory tray that have been created for the 'Ender 3'. They all turned out quite well, even though I was playing with the slicer settings as I went along.
After I finished them, it was time to get back to what I wanted a larger printer for in the first place. Printing a case for the uBITX, I modified my standard 'clam shell' case design for the size I desired and added a set of mounting posts for the uBITX circuit board. Since I was still playing with some of the slicer settings, I printed the piece at a quite slow speed. So after about 14 hours I had the bottom half of a case for my uBITX. Print quality was fine for what I wanted for the case, but I can still tweek the settings to get even better results. And since this was printed with some generic brand filament I got for $12 a kilogram, I don't know how much that had to do with the minor finish issues I found. The size of the case at 200 x 190 mm takes most of the 230 x 230 mm print area of the printer. I am quite pleased with this printer, and do not think it would be a bad choice for those wanting to try 3D printing without investing a lot of money.
Now that I have the basic display and menu routines working on the ESP32 Test Gadget main frame, it is time to build an actual 'Test Gadget'. The cwtd.org version started with a simple DC voltmeter, so that sounds like a good place for me to start. I could use a simple Analog input pin on the ESP32 to use for the voltmeter, but I wanted more than one channel and also a higher input impedance . This would require a input buffer amplifier on each channel along with some switching to provide several full scale ranges.
I have several ADS1115 16 bit four channel ADC modules that I got to use to add additional analog inputs to a uBITX. They are a very small module that uses I2C to communicate with the processor. This module is also available in a 12 bit version called the ADS1015, and there is a library from Adafruit. They have the capability of being used as four single ended or two differential channels,and also have a programmable gain amplifier that can be used to set the input range. Although they are listed as 16 bit input, one of the bits is used to indicate the sign if used in the differential mode. Therefor the actual resolution is actually 15 bit.
The programmable amplifier has ranges that give +- .25 to +-6.25 volt full scale. The multiplexer has built in protection diodes from each input to VCC, which limits the maximum signal to about .3 volt over the VCC voltage. Powering the module from 3.3 volts, this means I will need to use a voltage divider to raise the maximum voltage that can be measured. Unlike the 10 K ohm input on the ESP32 or a Nano analog pins, the ADS1115 has an input impedance of several Meg ohms. This means I can use a voltage divider that will give me an impedance in the Meg ohm range. I have some 100K and 1 Meg. 1% resistors, so I will use them to give a 1.1 Meg. input divide by 11 voltage divider. If I just wanted a digital readout, the resolution is good enough for better than 1mV. , but since I also wanted simulated analog meters I will use the programmable amplifier to get several ranges. With this divider and the programmable amplifier I can get full scale ranges of a little over 5.5 , 11, and 22 volt ranges, with a maximum safe input voltage around 33 volts.
The first thing I did was to connect the module to one set of the 'Test Gadget' connectors using a wireless breadboard. I loaded a version of the Arduino 'I2C Scanner' and checked to see that the module was found and its base address. After I verified that the I2C communications was working, I loaded one of the example programs that came with the Adafruit ADS1015 library. This just read each channel and output its value to the serial monitor. The only issue I found so far was that there was a little DC off set from zero with the voltage divider, but it is only about 1 mV. I will do a little more testing to see how consistant it is, but I can probably just add an offset in the software to correct for that. If I can just do a simple fixed value, or have to add a 'Zero' option to the manu is still to be determained.
I already had the analog meter code written, so the next thing I started working on was a menu to allow me to change display type, number of channels,and range. The use of a Joystick makes selecting and changing settings very easy. A vertical movement selects a different menu item, while a horizontal movement makes changes to the selected menu item. Here is part of the menu code to show what I mean.
if (jstickV ) { // vertical movement selects menu item
mnuDCVMSel += jstickV ;
if ( mnuDCVMSel < 0) mnuDCVMSel = 0;
if (mnuDCVMSel >= mnuDCVMNum ) mnuDCVMSel = mnuDCVMNum;
showDCVMMenuItems();
}
// horizontal movement makes changes to selected menu item
if (jstickH ) {
// for values that toggle simple if statements are used
// change between analog and digital display of voltage
if (mnuDCVMSel == 0) { // select analog or digital
if (mnuDCVMItems[0] == " Analog ")
mnuDCVMItems[0] = " Digital ";
else mnuDCVMItems[0] = " Analog ";
showDCVMMenuItems();
jstick = false;
}
// for multiple options I use a switch(value)- case to
// make the selection
if (mnuDCVMSel == 1) { // select number channels to read
numChan += jstickH;
if ( numChan > 4) numChan = 4; // set limits on value
if ( numChan < 1) numChan = 1;
switch (numChan) { // update menu item display
case 1:
mnuDCVMItems[1] = " Chan. = 1 ";
break;
case 2:
mnuDCVMItems[1] = " Chan. = 2 ";
break;
case 3:
mnuDCVMItems[1] = " Chan. = 3 ";
break;
case 4:
mnuDCVMItems[1] = " Chan. = 4 ";
break;
}
showDCVMMenuItems();
jstick = false;
}
Similar code is used to select and modify any additional menu options.
In operation a 'ShortPress' on the Joystick switch brings up the menu, and after selections are completed another 'ShortPress' exits the menu and redraws the screen. This looks similar to a 'pop up' menu on a Windows or Linux system with out much of the overhead associated with a full menu system.
After doing some playing around, I have decided I will not use the programmable gain amplifier for range selection. A fixed gain will give me more resolution than I need for a 1 mV. display resolution. I will instead work on creating a auto range system for the 'Analog' style meter. Hope to update soon.
UPDATE 7/14/2018
I wired up the small adc module on a 4x6 cm proto boar and made a quick 4 channel cable with test clips for normal use. Everything works as expected, except for a little |DC offset from ground. Since it was consistent across all channels, I decided to just take care of it in software. If it would have been significantly different for each channel I would have added a DC zero function to the pop-up menu. I decided to have a digital display of the voltage along with the simulated analog meter. Because of this I kept the manual scaling I had originally tried, maybe some day I will write something to do auto scaling for each individual channel.
The picture shows the completed DCVM test gadget in 4 channel mode measuring the 3 voltages present on the headers used to connect the individual test gadgets. I was running this off of the PC without the 12 volts connected for external power, so I kept the range down to 5 volts.
Since I had watched several videos on the assembly, it only took about a hour to get it put together and check the alignment. The first print was the test file that came on the included SD card, the print quality was very nice. After that I visited Thingiverse.com and grabbed some of the accessories such as a fan cover and accessory tray that have been created for the 'Ender 3'. They all turned out quite well, even though I was playing with the slicer settings as I went along.
After I finished them, it was time to get back to what I wanted a larger printer for in the first place. Printing a case for the uBITX, I modified my standard 'clam shell' case design for the size I desired and added a set of mounting posts for the uBITX circuit board. Since I was still playing with some of the slicer settings, I printed the piece at a quite slow speed. So after about 14 hours I had the bottom half of a case for my uBITX. Print quality was fine for what I wanted for the case, but I can still tweek the settings to get even better results. And since this was printed with some generic brand filament I got for $12 a kilogram, I don't know how much that had to do with the minor finish issues I found. The size of the case at 200 x 190 mm takes most of the 230 x 230 mm print area of the printer. I am quite pleased with this printer, and do not think it would be a bad choice for those wanting to try 3D printing without investing a lot of money.
