3D Printer Woes

I'll do my best not to get into the technical weeds here.

I was upgrading my first printer to the 2.5 version. It's not a difficult upgrade (as far as upgrades go) and the Prusa site is really good with instructions. Except for one thing they made a video for some reason but I digress.

I had put it off for a while because I didn't have the table clear for the upgrade and the printer was working. But then the plastic cover on the print bed started getting damaged and I had this other, working, upgraded printer so my excuses ran thin.

Especially thin because I had cleared enough space to fix the second printer when I bought it and even did a minor R2 to R3 upgrade at the same time.

I went through the instructions and only have one thing where I screwed it up. It doesn't matter that one of the motors is rotated by 90 degrees. There's replacement motors that have to be rotated so the writing is sideways and the wiring isn't stretched. I won't even see it much.

When I had it back together I started to test and calibrate it. It didn't pass the second test. One of the fans wasn't working. It worked before the upgrade! And now it didn't work!

Thanks to help from some really smart people online I checked everything and it turns out there's no power going to the pins that connect the fan. This is bad. This is expensive. This means that the controller board had something go wrong. Since the box that houses it got replaced I did have to move the board around but I was darn careful.

After confirming that everything worked except the fan (that I can tell) I contacted support. My printer is out of warranty so the person on chat couldn't just send me a replacement board, even though it went bad during the upgrade I did buy and should be in warranty. However he said to send an email and they would see what they could do.

The really smart people are now suggesting that I see if there's a solder break between the connectors and the rest of the board. So that's what I'm going to do when I'm less clumsy than I'm feeling today. That means unplugging the nest of cables and taking the board out. The cables are more of an annoyance than the 4 screws holding the board. But there's a good chance I can simply touch the soldering iron to one of the pins and let the heat do the work to resolder the join.

Luckily I know how to solder. And also luckily I've got really smart people who are willing to talk me through things like how to use the multi meter to check if there's power going to the connection. This was my first time working inside a live system and didn't want to do anything bad since it's connected to power. That's one fear down. Or at least minimized now.

I'm also taking this time to reprint some of the parts because I printed the first set on the not-upgraded printer and I'm not happy with how some of the nuts and bolts fit into it. I did a test and think that the upgraded printer gives a better result. Those are printing now.

Yes. You print parts to use on the printer. Even the upgrade comes with one printed part (high temp plastic that most people don't print at home due to it being fussy and having fume issues) and a spool of the kind of plastic the rest of the parts need. The instructions have the link to the parts files. Which means you need a working printer (or a friend with one) to upgrade your printer. It's a little wacky.

The upshot of this is that the second printer I bought is still doing all the work and the first printer decided to hiccup while I was upgrading it. Since the board isn't working anyway I can't hurt much by trying to reconnect the fan pins with a soldering iron. And it makes me want to learn more so I can help other people fix their printers too.