Things to do first with a new J1

Snapmaker J1/J1s
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Let me answer the second question first: no, that works well and others already did that.

When it comes to what lubricant Snapmaker uses: I had asked that myself, but the Snapmaker team never cared to answer. :roll_eyes:
Thus, I had to rely on what the different linear guide rail manufacturers noted in their manuals when I chose what I tested and suggested here.

3 Likes
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Why the unpin? This article is extremely helpful and provided help to many beginners like myself, without it I would have had a much harder time setting up and troubleshoot.

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Because they donā€™t want articles at the top that contain negative opinions of the equipment.
And it has probably drifted away from the title subject.

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Well, while the list on top is something I still would check, Snapmaker has improved their build quality as war as I can see. Thus, my hope is that maybe some of these hints I noted on top that were an absolute necessity in the beginning might not be as critical on newer machines.

And I am personally not too often here any more. Since I upgraded my J1 with a Duet 3 MB6HC controller and sold the original electronics to another user who needed it, I have significantly less to contribute here - but also much less to complain about. While a Duet is much more of an ā€œindustrial workhorseā€ than a designerā€™s piece and therefore does not offer the nice graphic beginner support on its display that the J1 team has created, the printerā€¦ just works :grin:
And if I happen to have an issue, I have to go to to the Duet forum anyway.

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how hard is it to swap out? would it then interface with Octaprint? Seems like an Octaprint interface would offset any of the degradation due to the interface.

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No need for Octoprint - a Duet controller has its own and very good web interface right out of the box: Duet Web Control Manual | Duet3D Documentation

The main work with swapping was four things:

  1. metal work: getting a hole for the Wifi antenna and the cooling fan into the side of the printer. That one frightened me the most, but it was easier than expected.
  2. soldering adapter cables for all those custom J1 connectors and to figure out where some additional capacitors were due was what took me the longest apart from getting the config and calibration macros done
  3. the wiring of the cooling fan on the J1 is ā€œcommon ground, PWM positiveā€ - which is incompatible to pretty much anything else. Changing this requires unsoldering the fan connector on the hotend PCBs that are behind the extruder steppers, isolating one pin and reconnecting it to a 24V connector plate that is close to the connector
  4. and lastly, I went for the most complicated possible way to get the analogue (those things spit out a sawtooth voltage each 360Ā°!) filament sensors of the J1 to run with the Duet and completely rebuilt those. The easier way would be to read them out by an Arduino or such and send the digital pulses to the Duetā€¦ or to switch to other filament sensors.

If you want, search www.mechanotronikum.de for the ā€œJ1ā€ tag for a more detailed explanation. If you see an error message, write me a PM that I can allow acces for your country (currently, I only allow access for european countries to minimise spam).

Alternatively, someone here mentioned he got a Klipper board into his J1.

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Do you really need to swap the board to use the J1 with Klipper? Couldnā€™t you just flash the stock board with Klipper firmware and hook a raspberry pi to the USB port?

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Hm, my guess would be it might be quite tricky to achieve that since this is a very customised board - and neither the firmware/app running on the display nor the communication of the board with the display app is Open Source.

Thus, I think you might get one out of two results when trying thisā€¦ either you are unlucky and it will not run at all - or you are lucky and you will get Klipper running on the controller. But even in this case, some custom software bits such as the ability to read the analogue filament sensors might be missing. And probably the display communication will not work at all since you have no chance of getting the display switched to Klipper.