One of those days
My Mini+ is situated where I struggle to get the USB stick into the socket. So I decided I would print the excellent base and move the USB socket and power switch to the front. This would also free up some room as the filament would now be underneath. All good I though. But this is where I started to make some mistakes.
First I found a roll of E-Sun PETG. In my mind PETG is PETG, so I just used the Gcode supplied in the downloads to print the first component. Now I know, I should have tested. It appears that E-Sun PETG prints really poorly with the settings for Prusa PETG, a stringy mess, poor detail and really hard to remove supports. Fortunatel this was the rear right leg so with a little work I can live with it. Some testing later and the profile for FilamentWorld PETG works really well with ESUN PETG. So on to the next leg.
The things started to go south at the supplied memory stick decided to curl its toes up. I tried the usual repairs in windows but to no avail, this was terminal. So into the drawer and I pulled out a Kingstone 32gb stick. Now Windows 11 became my foe as it would not give me the option to format this stick with FAT32. Eventually I managed to do it after deleting the partition in disk manager and formatting. Now it was formatted to FAT32, but whatever files I put on there the Mini would not see them. I realised the stick must be formatted to GPT and now getting grumpy I searched high and low in windows 11 for a way to convert it. Then I remembered the old DOS tool, diskpart, and fortunately that is still available via the command line. It has been a very long time since I used that but I remembered how and converted the memory stick to MBR. Back on the printer and though, I may as well upgrade the firmware while I am at it. So I kicked that off and came back half an hour later to see it was not updating the bootloader, just flashing between two messages. So I just left it, went shopping and came back in the hope that magically it will have fixed itself. Reluctantly I rebooted the machine and the bootloader begun installing. Phew, all was good and the printer was back up and running. So I started the next rear leg and it printed superbly. Only problem was in all the kerfuffle I had put the sprung steel sheet on instead of the textured sheet. The print was stuck fast to the sheet and light damage ensued in its removal. To get the last bits off I fired up a heat gun and managed to cleanly remove the remnants of support material.
So I have ordered a new sheet and the rest of the legs are now printed well. Bad day behind me I now have the printer on its new stand and am just printing some squash ball feet to temper the noise. Great design there, but took me a very long time to get done.