I’ve had my A1 for about a month and it’s been working perfectly. Today, however, I returned to the room it runs in and noticed a burning plastic smell, more so than usual.
It turned out the case on the left hand side under the purge wiper had distorted and was very hot. I have a poop bin there so that obviously doesn’t help with cooling, but it’s not been a problem with multi-hour prints until now.
I believe that’s where the power supply is although I’ve not found a diagram or image showing the innards.
Not sure if it’s relevant but I upgraded the firmware to 01.07.01.00 this morning so the first thing I’ll try is reverting to an earlier version to see if that stops it.
Can’t see anything in the forum here mentioning this as a problem, but have others experienced it?
Yes many many, there are entire youtube videos about it. There is a current limiting device that is getting too warm. Your next symptom might be it stops working entirely and the part unsolders itself and falls into the case.
Capacitors act as an energy buffer and smooth phase transitions. They charge and discharge rapidly leading to them wearing much faster. They fail like that when the dielectric is not consitent or does not have full coverage. Dielectric will warp and become unstable with too much heat.
The printer is a gonner. Small faults like that can easily damage other components. The extent is how long it ran after the board failed.
Yeah, when you can’t see a number or value (like uF, etc) and the board is not marked a lot of components look similar (like some inductors and resistors).
I have seen some pretty big MOV’s (sacraficial power protector that diverts something like a power spike to ground) that look similar to the exploded part but again, with no identifier it was a guess on my part.
May be because there are 2 boards with the new one apparently getting rid off several components including that capacitor. Strange that a 1 mth old A1 has the old board (or is the wiki to be understood as 2 suppliers and different boards still installed randomly?).
I looked again, OP’s is actually the new board, his is missing the double caps to the right in the wiki pic. Not sure about the wire vs component, maybe one is a 240v board? Further down in the replacement wiki it shows a new board and it has the component also, it’s just covered by a connector wire.
Hopefully last time contridicting myself…
OP board IS older version, It has the ground wire (green/yellow) attached.
Nothing like using pictures of horses and zebras when talking about gender…
LOL, yeah, I have NO idea what they are doing with the pictures.
My best stupid guess would be mixing 120.240 boards.
I mean, the LUG IS STILL THERE, is there just no trace going to it?
Edit: It looks like they are just “mentioning” the new board in passing. The “newer” A1 doesn’t have the intermediant connector on the ground wire. Since they don’t mention changing out the ground wire (that I saw) I’m not sure what would happen if you put the “new” version of the board in an older A1 and connected the ground lug.
So you are saying there needs to be another QC after the first QC?
Looking closer I guess you are right. And it wouldn’t be the first time I see electronics from Chinese brands where the PCDs had been manually soldered after production, some even add extra wired components (like resistors, capacitors) across the PCBs.
At least I hope they used a no-clean flux because obviously they didn’t clean it afterwards.
