Why Did I Get A New 3D Printer? Ender 3 Pro | Voltlog #312

If you would like to hear why I switched from the Creality CR10 to a Creality Ender 3 pro join me in this video, I’ll share the reasons for which I made the switch as well as talk about the improvements Creality made to the standard Ender 3 to become the Ender 3 pro. But first, let’s do the unboxing.

Inside the box everything is well packaged and protected with foam but compared to the CR10, the Ender 3 is less assembled to say so, there is more assembly work for us to do, if you are in a hurry that might be an issue but for me I actually like doing a bit of assembly work on a new gadget.

While doing the assembly I took a look at the supplied sd card and I also found an assembly video with english captions, it was well made and easy to follow. There are two extra steps I did during the assembly, #1 was to take off the power supply protection cover and made sure all connections are nice & tight and the voltage selection switch is in the right position #2, the lead screw comes already greased but in my experience with the CR10 that type of grease will attract dust on the lead screw which will turn into this black gunk over time. So I cleaned the existing grease with some isopropyl alcohol and a toothbrush and at the end I applied some dry PTFE lube to the lead screw which in my opinion is better suited for this application.

Voltlog #266 – How To Check If Your Raspberry Pi 4 Is Throttling CPU

Welcome to a new Voltlog, today my raspberry pi 4 is again in the spotlight because I want to show you the different scenarios where the board could be throttling down the CPU frequency and how you can identify those. Because it might be a case where your raspberry pi is running slow on a particular task and you don’t know why because there is no built-in mechanism to let you know when the board is throttling down. There are logs which you can check but let’s be honest, few people actually check the logs for something like this.

Throttling of the cpu frequency occurs for good reasons, to protect the board or the cpu from overheating or to prevent any errors from occurring in the case of an under-voltage scenario which may lead to data loss or corruption. Luckily there is a way to check if your system is under one of these conditions, you can run this command on your raspberry pi.

Voltlog #264 – Passive Heatsink Cooling For The Raspberry Pi 4

Welcome to a new Voltlog, here is my raspberry pi 4 which I got a few months ago when they released it and if you have one you might have noticed it gets quite hot especially when it has to do some processing. This newer processor, will get hot quick and the board alone cannot cope with all of this heat so what does it do? Well when the CPU temperature reaches 80 degrees Celsius it will start throttling down the CPU as a way of protecting itself from overheating and this will result in a loss of performance.

The Raspberry Pi 4 has a 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A72 CPU, that’s roughly three times the performance of the raspberry pi 3 cpu. That inevitably generates more heat. In the original plastic case just sitting idle, connected to a network, doing pretty much nothing, the raspberry pi4 when compared to a raspberry pi3 runs about 12 degrees hotter.

Voltlog #103 – InTheMail

Today we are taking a look at my electronics related mail, I’ve got a bunch of random stuff and links for all of them are provided below the video.

Voltlog #62 – Rigol DS1054Z Fan Replacement

Everybody knows this is a great scope for the money but as usual test equipment doesn’t use the best solutions in terms of cooling fans and associated hardware. They care mostly about keeping the unit cool and not about the noise the unit makes because usually these are used in environments where multiple equipment is run at the same time, the noise level is already high so it doesn’t matter much if a small 50mm fan is adding noise.

But it’s a totally different story for us hobbyists that are using these pieces of test equipment indoor, in our homes. We usually want units with passive cooling or with silent fans.

Voltlog #57 – InTheMail

Another InTheMail video because I know you like seeing these electronics items from China.

Here is a list with the items shown in this video:

  • Prototyping PCBs
  • Carbide PCB Micro Drill Bits Set
  • 1W 3W 5W 6x LED Aluminium Printed Circuit Board
  • 1W 3W 5W Star Shaped LED PCB
  • 20W Waterproof IP67 LED Driver
  • EL Panel 10cm x 10cm
  • 3V Flat Vibration Motor
  • High Voltage Boost 400KV Step-Up Module
  • Small Plastic Bottle With Needle
  • Gelid Silent 5 Cooling Fan Replacement for Rigol DS1054Z
  • 18650 Battery Storage Case
  • Small Plastic Project Box Black
  • 3P4T Rotary Selection Switch
  • NodeMCU ESP8266 Module with CP2102 USB to Serial
  • LM2596 DC-DC Step Down Module
  • HC-SR501 PIR Motion Detection Sensor Module
  • 2000W SCR Motor Speed Controller
  • LT1083 Power Supply Kit
  • Maiwo K104 USB 3.0 to 2.5 Inch Sata Hard Drive Cable Interface

As usual links for these items will be posted in the video description.