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I want to put in a rotary pot on/off switch to power LED ring lamps with intensity changing capabilities.
The 12VDC AUX on the rambo bd looks like its being used on my Orion to power an internal fan....so...
I guess i could tap into this connection, but there's a lot of open pins on the board that might be a better solution??
Any suggestions?

thx. B.

I don't know about the Rambo connections, but couldn't you just pull the 12V you need from the power supply? Not sure what they leave you there for extra wiring on the Orion.

What Tinyhead said...

I originally tee'd the power off the hot end fan but soon found out the LED's flicker (pulsed) bad enough to really annoy me and give me headaches just looking at it.

When I later replaced the power supply to a 750 watt unit (wow, was it worth it!), I ran a direct 12v line up the tower along with the others and attached the LED ring with JST connectors. The LED ring is now always on when the printer is powered up. I don't really see any reason to need a pot or even a switch, but that's up to you.

hope this helps....

I ran my LEDs in parallel with the hotend fan. To make it work like I wanted I needed to modify the firmware Configuration.h.

I had flickering LEDs too and after setting EXT0_EXTRUDER_COOLER_SPEED to 255 it was better. I also set EXTRUDER_FAN_COOL_TEMP to -40 to have the fan (and LEDs) on all the time.

If you want to run another pair of wires, the RAMBo has a "FAN2" connector which you can use. If you enable firmware support for it you can also turn the light on/off via the LCD menu.

rpress wrote:If you want to run another pair of wires, the RAMBo has a "FAN2" connector which you can use. If you enable firmware support for it you can also turn the light on/off via the LCD menu.

I connected a wire and ran it out from the FAN2 connector on my Rambo v1.3 board. I looked in the Configuration.h file but didn't see a clear reference to enable it.

What setting in firmware or eeprom do i need to change to enable Fan2?

What is the Gcode to turn Fan2 On and Off?

I ran mine directly from the power supply. They do flicker when everything is heating up. I wonder if upgrading the power supply would solve this issue.

Either add a constant current circuit (commonly for battery charging) or put a load on the 5v rail of the ATX supply.

Humm, any recommendation on how to do the constant current circuit? That is just a certain resistor across the leads right?

Two different solutions.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/5A-Constant-Cur ... 1200620645" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004ED ... UTF8&psc=1" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I have LED ring flickering issues as well, and I'm running them directly off a 12V main from the power supply. I had thought to install a capacitor (maybe ~2000uF at 20 volts) across the leads to smooth it out. Would that work okay? I do a lot of stuff with NeoPixel RGB LEDs and one of the "best practices" is to install a capacitor to make sure it doesn't overtax the supply voltage.

I have a little volt meter hooked up to the input of my RAMBO where I hooked up my LED light strips - it bounces between 11.0 and 11.8v(mostly around 11.0-11.3) quite frequently, the hot end doesn't effect it but the heated bed is what draws it down. The main flicker happens when the heated bed is trying to hold a steady temp, not when it ramps up.

A small cap probably won't do much because it will have to smooth out everything - I'm guessing a large capacitor might

A power supply that didn't have a 20% droop under partial load would be even better.

Yup!

If possible, could someone please post a picture of where to connect a 12vdc light connection on an HE280?
I would be very grateful!

There's no real spot for that on the HE280 - no "accessory" power is available there.

g.

Ok. Thanks heaps for your reply.
Cheers,
Mark

That being said, there's no reason you can't run a pair of wires through the whip sleeve to provide the power you need.

g.

That sounds like a better idea.
Thank you!
Mark

You're welcome! Good luck!

g.