The printer

I have a relatively rare Creality CR-10 Mini which appears not to be sold anymore.

Essential upgrades

The essential upgrades are mainly about reducing the noise, most of which is coming from the poor quality stock fans.

New fans

The stock fans are of poor quality and quickly became unbearably noisy. I bought the following to replace them:

  • 12V Noctua NF-A4x10 (40x40x10mm)
  • Noctua NF-A4x20 FLX Ventilateur PC to replace the control box exhaustion fan.
  • 12V GELID 50x50x15 mm to to replace the control box fan.

Dampeners

Another contributor to the noise were the vibrations produced by the stepper motors. A quick and easy upgrade consisted in mounting dampeners between the chassis and the motors. It really helped reduce the noise levels. I used cheap dampers for Nema17 stepper motors I found on Banggood.

Mirror surface

The mirror surface is an advantageous alternative to the plastic plate that came with the printer. You get a clean, smooth surface for the bottom of your prints and you no longer need to play with glue, provided you have a good level and clean the mirror with an alcoholic solution every 1 or 2 prints. I simply used an IKEA mirror I cut to size with a glass knife.

Convenience upgrades

Octopi

I quickly grew tired of copying .gcode files to the SD card and switched to Octopi. Octopi is a Rapsberry Pi distribution of Octoprint, a webserver from which you can control your 3D printer. All you need is a Raspberry Pi, a SD card and an usb cable to connect the raspberry to 3d printer. You also have the option of mounting a camera but it is not really useful, unless you really want to create timelapses.

Controlled relay

A powerful feature of Octopi is its support of various plugins. One of them is PSU Control which main purpose is, as its name indicates, to control the power supply of the printer. My settings are the following:

  • Switching method :
    • GPIO
    • On/Off GPIO Pin : Whichever you use
  • Power On options: disabled
  • Power Off options:
    • Automatically turn PSU off when idle
    • Idle timeout : 10 minutes

Sources

fdproj