thanks for clarifying that out, didn’t get it, hoping for third party solutions, i guess the target customer base isn‘t that high so it will be a wish only.
This is true only if you use DC current rectified from the mains supply as heater power. AC works just as well as DC for resistance heating applications. Had they split the supplies, one AC for heating and one DC for everything else, they could have (1) downsized the DC capacity significantly, saving money on that component, and (2) used a zero-crossing switch on the AC supply to regulate current. It would have had only modest cost consequences, and might even have been cheaper.
Of course that would increase the cost and complexity of the heater and rule out the inexpensive PCB heater typically used on cheap beds as well as introducing regional variants
It would increase the complexity. I don’t think it would affect the system cost much. It would not rule out the PCB heater at all. You need either (1) a small step down transformer to lower the voltage or (2) a higher quality cable to handle switched mains voltage; neither is particularly expensive.
My bet is that it’s the extra analog circuitry that was the real limitation. My surmise is that there’s no one on SM staff that can design anything more than a rudimentary analog circuit. They’ve gone too far down the “digital” rabbit hole to understand that you need to pay attention to the non-digital aspects of a physical machine, like analog behavior and machine tolerance.
My contribution of exploding two glass panels dicking around?
Would be good idea raising the supply voltage of the Snapmaker, but someone has to look into the Datasheets and see if the Voltage Regulators are fine with that, see if the heat bed is fine with dissipating more and the circuitboard is fine with transfering more power. The last one is unlikely, just wanted to point that out before someone says that its circuit board startet to burn. For the first two: I don’t think that we can find the datasheets for the bed and voltage regulators, so it’s probably easier to add an external amplifier circuit in some way.
What you’re describing is tantamount to a complete system redesign, which is also what the last part of the sentence you quoted of mine says - complete power supply replacement. Changing the voltage is wildly impractical
As @brent113 has described, a major redesign and change over to much more expensive components would be required. The current stepper drivers have a maximum operating voltage of 29v, so when you include a safe operating margin, 24v is the maximum voltage that you can use. Some of these components would be more than double the price of the existing components, which Snapmaker has talked about in the past and would result in a completely different machine.
SM does something economically inefficient in absolute terms: running a heater with regulated DC power. They did it to avoid including a second power supply circuit for the heated bed itself.
There’s no reason, though, why the heated bed needs to run on DC. It’ll run just fine on AC. You could separately heat the bed with an external PID controller. Chinese clones of industrial 1/16 DIN form factor PID temperature controllers can be had for $40 these days. They’re available with thermistor inputs IIRC. You might want to run on a 48 V step-down transformer to avoid full mains voltage. You’ll have to manually and externally set the bed temperature, since it won’t be integrated with the controller, but that’s the price of not spending months of your life dealing with tighter integration.
I belive you can also change the firmware to use bang bang style temp control and set up an external ac power relay (weather 48vac or mains) and fire the relay from an output pin on the controller. This would allow you to still set the temp through the software like normal but still get high temps with quicker heat up times. Also this process has been done many times before on other marlin based 3d printers so there is plenty of online documentation to help you through the process. The main disadvantage to this control scheme is that bang bang mode will result in reduced temp stepiblity. So it is recomwnded to use a build plate with a lower thermal coefficient (such as glass) to offset that issue.
No need, it already is.
In that case just run the signal that powers the 24vdc bed to a 24vdc volt relay to controll the ac bed and your good to go