Will Other Heater Cartridges Work on a Mini?  

RE: Will Other Heater Cartridges Work on a Mini?

Posted by: @boatbuilder

My Mini is suddenly not heating the nozzle past 170*C and I have been in contact via Chat with Support, but it is like pulling teeth to get answers - they are so busy with BF and Christmas sales I just get incomplete answers and have to repeatedly ask clarifying questions and wait minutes for another partial answer.  Finally, they asked that I send a video of the control screen showing the failure to heat to their email address.  I figured out how to use gdrive to do that and have sent them a link to the shared 37 Mb file.  Once they decide what to do (I assume it is the MINDA that is bad) they will send a replacement.  Meanwhile my printer just sits there and mocks me!

After it is back in service, which may takes multiple weeks,  I am going to get some spare parts so if the likely suspects (the MINDA and heater cartridge) ever go out again, I can get the printer back working quickly.

With that in mind, I noticed that Amazon has heater cartridges with their typical fast delivery.  Is there anything special about the Mini heater cartridge or will any of them with the proper wattage work as a replacement?

 

Before you invest money and do much rebuilding, I would first do a factory reset and install the latest firmware. I don't think the heater cartridge is defective, because then the 170 degrees C. would not be reached. The heater cartrdige works with 24V/40watts.

RE: Will Other Heater Cartridges Work on a Mini?

I believe that the mini does a two stage warm up, the first stage is 170C, when the printer completes mesh bed levelling it then heats fully

here is the start gcode

M104 S170 ; set extruder temp for bed leveling
M140 S[first_layer_bed_temperature] ; set bed temp
M109 R170 ; wait for bed leveling extruder temp
M190 S[first_layer_bed_temperature] ; wait for bed temp
G28 ; home all without mesh bed level
G29 ; mesh bed leveling
M104 S[first_layer_temperature] ; set extruder temp
G92 E0.0
G1 Y-2.0 X179 F2400
G1 Z3 F720
M109 S[first_layer_temperature] ; wait for extruder temp

; intro line

the three lines marked red, relate to the extruder temperature, the first is hard coded to the lower temperature to reduce stringing during Mesh Bed Levelling, the second one uses a variable so that what ever temperature you or the profile choose, is used. after mesh bed levelling and the third prevents the printer starting the actual  print until the correct temperature is reached, 

regards Joan

RE: Will Other Heater Cartridges Work on a Mini?

to answer your hopefully now redundant question, 
Yes you can use other heater cartridges but please ensure they are 24 volt  40 watt heaters
Accidental use of a 12 volt heater will try to draw 160 watts, and may do damage... 
 regards Joan

RE: Will Other Heater Cartridges Work on a Mini?

@joantabb

Thank you, Joan. That is the information I was looking for.  I did not change any of the g-code in the slicer between a successful print and the first failed one, but I will go back and check it.   

karl’s suggestion has merit but I’ll wait until Support suggests it, or determines it is a MINDA problem, which from other posts is the likely culprit.  

Unrelated to my present problem, I read another post that suggested keeping a  spare hot end fan around in addition to a spare MINDA and heater cartridge to prevent downtime. Do you agree with that those are the most common sources of failure?

RE: Will Other Heater Cartridges Work on a Mini?

I have a bunch of 40, 50, and 60 watt cartridges.  They are 24 volt.  Would they damage the Mini?

RE: Will Other Heater Cartridges Work on a Mini?

@cwbullet

I don't have a mini, but I understand that the mini uses a modest external power brick, 

I have no idea whether 24v 50Watt or  24v 60 watt would overload the printer power supply I would like to think not! similarly I would hope that the onboard mosfet and connections would be ok at these values... but I have no experience... 

 another manufacturers 24v 40watt heater should be fine as long as it is dimensionally equivalent to the original heater

regards Joan

RE: Will Other Heater Cartridges Work on a Mini?

Probably not worth trying.

RE: Will Other Heater Cartridges Work on a Mini?

@cwbullet

not if you already have 40watt spares... 

Joan

RE: Will Other Heater Cartridges Work on a Mini?

@cwbullet

The Mini works with a 160Watt power supply. Up to 115Watt can pull the heater of the printing plate, 40Watt the hotend. There is not much left for other components, let alone for an additionally installed Raspberry 3 or 4.

A 40Watt heating cartridge is usually completely sufficient for printing conventional filaments. Only on the MK3 I have installed a 50Watt version, because I print PEEK with it.

As already reported, I installed the original MK3 hotend (original E3D V6) on the Mini, which works fine (hundreds of hours of practical testing with different filament types like ASA, ABS, PETG, 3dkTOP, XT-CF20 etc.), because the Mini uses the same thermistotable entries.

RE: Will Other Heater Cartridges Work on a Mini?

@karl-herbert

Thanks.