The New Hotness

With the platform and extruder starting at the 19.5 °C = 67 °F Basement Laboratory ambient …

The extruder takes 1 minute to reach 175 °C, overshoots to about 180 °C, crosses 175 °C going downward at 1:30, then gets up to 174 °C again at 3:15. I ran a PID tuning session quite a while ago with inconclusive results. Reducing the initial overshoot would probably increase the time-to-get-ready, with no net improvement.

The platform, which isn’t the stock Makergear hardware, requires 3:30 to reach 69 °C, just under the 70 °C target, at which point it’s ready to start. There’s no insulation under the PCB-trace heater, but some previous tinkering implies that running bare doesn’t make much difference, particularly with a fan blowing on the top surface of the glass.

The modified platform runs from a 40 V supply with an initial power of 250-ish W at ambient. A quick measurement at 75 °C during a print:

• 40 V @ 5.8 A = 230 W peak
• 10 s on / 30 s off = 25% duty cycle
• 230 W × 0.25 = 58 W average

Remember that’s with an outboard SSR to unload the RAMBo’s MOSFET.

By and large, the M2 is ready to print in under 5 minutes from a standing start, which is just about enough time to spritz hair spray on the platform, load the G-Code into Pronterface, and so forth and so on.