January 31st, DHL knocked on my door and delivered a small package from Hong Kong. It was a TronXY X5SA 3d printer. I think this was one of the first X5SA in the USA. Overall I’m pretty happy with it, but there are a few problems.
The good:
- Powder coated metal Z-axis motor mounts.
- I read a lot of complaints from people who received their X5S with broken acrylic Z mounts. The metal mounts are quite sturdy. Each bracket has two holes for the smooth rods to fit into. Unfortunately, the holes were drilled the exact size of the rods, then powder coated. Made it hard to fit the rods in, but nothing a little persuasion from a hammer couldn’t fix.
- 32-bit control board. Chitu F Mini by cbd-3d.com
- Control board has option of adding filament runout sensor.
- Auto-Leveling with included inductive sensor.
- Touch Screen Interface
- New Mk3a heated bed is 12v/24v capable and warms up quickly
- External MOSFET for heated bed control.
The bad:
- Heated bed was miswired.
- The wiring diagram on the Mk3a heated bed shows that you need to connect terminals 2 & 3 to ground. On my printer, only terminal 2 was connected. That meant only half the heatbed was working. And since the thermistor was on the working half…. it didn’t see anything wrong!
- This caused small prints near the center of the board to succeed, while larger prints that weren’t on the heated portion of the bed would fail.
- I fixed this.
- No documentation of settings or g-code commands accepted.
- Bad touchscreen interface. Let’s hope this is addressed in a firmware update.
- Z-axis only has one driver.
- Control boards with two z-axis drivers can perform left-to-right auto-leveling of the heatbed. Currently, if you crash the hotend into the printhead the Z-axis closest to the hotend will stop moving up, and the other side will continue to move, leading to a sloped bed.
- 32-bit control board is proprietary.
- Repetier-Host doesn’t recognize it, and I’m unsure what “flavor” of g-code I should have cura produce.
- No USB on control board.
- There are 5V TTL pins on the board, so you can buy an add-on module or use a TTL-USB converter
- No WiFi on control board
- There is a socket where you can add a special WiFi module
- No auto resume on power off.
- There is a socket where you can add a special capacitor module
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Hey, where did you buy your printer?
Direct from TRonXY via Alibaba.
hi.
did you know what wifi modul this board supports?
is it a ESP8266 or other?
It supports an ESP8266 with custom firmware
Hooking up a TTL usb adapter kills the SD card reading and I couldn’t get it to respond to anything…
Double check how you have the TTL adapter hooked up. The pins for the SD card are right by the pins for the serial port.
RX TX and GND. Tried swapping TX RX on adapter side and still didn’t work. I meant micro sd card seems to be tied to serial.
On your board, there are two sets of male pin headers near the SD card. On set has 8, the other has 4. The one with 8 is parallel to the long side of the board. You want to connect to the set of 4 pins. What baud rate are you using?
Yeah I hit up the 4 pins header. Definitely not a stranger to hooking up to ttl ports. Tried 115200 (according to what i can find from google about anpther f series board) and 250k something.
And it looks like I did get off by one pin (ended with gound on the sd card pin, tx on ground rx wher tx should have been, Not much room to play with. Repretier is working just fine @1152
no to figure out the z level part. if i increase the number does it get closer or farther away from the bed?
The smaller the number the further away from the printbed.
Thanks!
Have you figured out how to dump the config ?
Unfortunately no. There is a way, but I don’t have access to those M codes.
Yeah – I tried the M503 and M8503 and couldn’t get anything. This board is just way lack luster.
I just got mine running. The touch screen they included was bad but they replaced it. I had the same problem with the mis-wired heatbed but I fixed that. Now I’m having two problems. Using auto-level, the nozzle ends up about 1-2mm too high. I tried adjusting the z offset value but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. So, giving up on that, I manually adjusted the z offset. Then when I try to print the calibration cube it heats the extruder and displays a gcode error in line 161. Not sure what that means. I saw from your video you had similar issues. How did you resolve it?
As for the gcode error…. open your calibration cube file and scroll to line 161. The file is probably corrupted due to a bad SD card….