I know that is not possible to change easily the heater cartridge from 21W to 40W, because the higher demanded electrical power isn´t supplied by the electronic. So, it would take damage on the supplying electronic to connect it to a 40W cartridge.
What would have to be changed to make it possible?
Hi Heeresflieger,
actually it is not a problem of the electronic of the ‘motherboard’ of the vertex printer. The mosfet’s there are strong enough.
Indeed the 15 Volt supplied by the vertex would lead you to more than 50 Watt, perhaps to much, if the cartridge is designed for 12 Volt.
But you can control this with PWM, wich our firmware can do as described (not tested by me), so it is clocked to 40 Watt.
Blighted is that all by the vertex power supply!
So i suggest: do the same as you do with a heatbed: Use a separate 12 Volt powersupply with 100 Watt (for dual head), very cheap at banggood, and build you two “power-expander” for some Euros (a simple MosFet-switch). To relieve the vertex powersupply is also good, more power for the steppers …
What i have done and worked well now for some weeks (i print the whole day …)
I use a 13,8 Volt 250 Watt powersupply (i had already) to drive two E3D-clone-hotends and my heatbed.
I love my strong and fast hotends with aprox. 50 Watt at 13.8V. But 43,4 Watt at 12V are also very good ;-))
This is all obtained that you also change your hotend, don’t make sense to heat the original hotend with that power !
[quote=“Digi-Bert”]Hi Heeresflieger,
actually it is not a problem of the electronic of the ‘motherboard’ of the vertex printer. The mosfet’s there are strong enough.
Indeed the 15 Volt supplied by the vertex would lead you to more than 50 Watt, perhaps to much, if the cartridge is designed for 12 Volt.
But you can control this with PWM, wich our firmware can do as described (not tested by me), so it is clocked to 40 Watt.
Blighted is that all by the vertex power supply!
So i suggest: do the same as you do with a heatbed: Use a separate 12 Volt powersupply with 100 Watt (for dual head), very cheap at banggood, and build you two “power-expander” for some Euros (a simple MosFet-switch). To relieve the vertex powersupply is also good, more power for the steppers …
What i have done and worked well now for some weeks (i print the whole day …)
I use a 13,8 Volt 250 Watt powersupply (i had already) to drive two E3D-clone-hotends and my heatbed.
I love my strong and fast hotends with aprox. 50 Watt at 13.8V. But 43,4 Watt at 12V are also very good ;-))
This is all obtained that you also change your hotend, don’t make sense to heat the original hotend with that power ![/quote]
Hi Digi-Bert,
thankts for the answer. Yes, I already changed my printer head since more than a year. I don´t have the original Velleman. I have a Mendel Prusa.
you mean a power expander like this one? reprap.me/power-expander.html.
I print with PLA. Till now, I didn´t thought about heating bed. I always thought it is only needed by ABS.
Hi Heeresflieger,
you can take that one or some of the cheap china expanders, they are also suitable.
Or if you can solder, you can build you one for some euros, you need less components than in your example of reprap.me.
(if not, this is a good reason to learn it, it’s easy … ;-))
A heatbed is also useful with PLA, no scratching, parts simply pop away after cooling down from 50 to 30 °C