Voltlog #288 – New BLTouch 3DTouch Plastic Pin Sensor Upgrade

Back in 2018 I installed a Bltouch sensor on my Creality CR10 3d printer and I showed the process in Voltlog #177, that video is one of the most popular videos on the channel and now after using the printer with the upgrade for a couple of years I can clearly say it’s probably one of the best upgrades you can do to your 3d printer and it’s pretty cheap. I won’t go into too much detail about what the sensor does and how to install it because that is discussed in Voltlog #177.

However I did experience a downside after this upgrade, some users are reporting the same problem while others don’t face this issue. It’s important to note I am using a BLtouch clone called 3D touch, purchased from Aliexpress. It’s the type that has a metal push rod through the middle. The issue I’m having is a vibration noise coming from that metal pin vibrating inside the sensor when the printer moves on the Y axis. This issue might or might not be present on a genuine sensor or just another unit which might have tighter tolerances.

Voltlog #238 – Finally Printing Shrink Tube Labels With A Brother Printer

As shown in the previous video I had to trick the printer to accept this type of cartridge by masking some of the micro switches it uses to detect the type of cartridge but that solved one problem and created another one. The text was now mirrored because that works out for regular label tape which gets printed on the inside of a transparent film. However for heatshrink where the label gets printed directly on the tube, it will end up reversed.

I’ve only tried one combination with the 3 micro-switches but some people suggested in the comments that I should try other switch combination and boy were they right because I did find another switch combination which causes the printer to accept the cartridge and mirror the text as well. So this is the right combination to use with my type of printer and this type of cartridge. The two bottom holes need to be opened, and only the single top hole needs to be covered. You can use a small piece of kapton tape like I did here.

Voltlog #237 – Can You Print Shrink Tube Labels With A Cheap Brother Printer?

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today we’ll have just a short video talking about label printers, I’m gonna show you this heat shrink type of label that you can get and it’s pretty useful to label wiring and how the manufacturers of these prevent you from using certain types of label cassettes in lower end printers.

In my case I am using a Brother PT-H107, this is a bottom of the range label printer, it was practically the cheapest I could find around here.

Voltlog #41 – 60W Dummy Load Mod 20mA to 999mA

This video is about the 60W dummy load discussed in episode number #38 and #39 and if you haven’t watched those two videos I recommend you do, there will be links below. In this video I am doing a mod to change the range of the dummy load from 0.2A-9.99A to a new range of 20mA to 999mA.

Voltlog #33 – Ublox 7 GPS USB to UART Conversion Hack

In this video I am hacking this vk-172 cheap usb gps module to use UART instead of USB. The module contains the ublox 7 chipset which is quite nice and it makes it much more useful having an UART interface.

PIO10 > pin 33 controls the hardware pin remapping feature
PIO10 low = UART remapped to PIO15 > pin 36 and PIO16 > pin 37
PIO10 high = UART on standard TX on PIO6 > pin 19 and RX on PIO7 > pin 18