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Biqu B1 - Not heating the hotend
(sh.itjust.works)
Hi
A couple of days ago the hotend wouldn't heat up and i got a couple of errorcodes/warnings in the display. The bed heats up just fine, so i ordered a new hotend parts (heater, thermistor and a new aluminum block). Changed all of this, but still the same error. I can se that the thermistor works because it changes values in the display when touching the thermistor-end. Any good ideas why the heater doesn't heat?
out of curiosity, why would you not have gone with an Ender 3 over this non-brand thing? Or if you have Bambu money, that or another quality brand? It sounds like a recipe for pain and it's not cheaper than the super well (community) supported Enders.
I'm a totally noob in the 3D printing scene. My brother has a Biqu B1 and I've printed some small things on his printer. Found a used Biqu B1 for sale for about $80. Yeah, not good research from my side... But, I've printed a well printed fucktopus before it died...
Honestly $80 sounds like an absolute bargain, you straight up can't build one yourself for that price, a mainboard and like 2-3 steppers would go over that and everything I've seen about that printer says it's a very capable, budget friendly option. It looks like that's using a btt mainboard which I totally swear by, straight up shorted a fan header on an octopus pro and it's still chugging along just fine, anecdotally they're pretty hard to kill.
I'd totally check your wiring before replacing a board, a break or bad crimp could totally be your culprit here, and those are a heck of a lot less work to remedy, thermal protection does totally get tripped if there's an intermittent fault with the thermistor (including cabling), I had it happen on a prusa where it'd kick out but not have anything obvious temp wise on the display, only noticeable in a temp plot.
The thermistor temperature reacts to me touching the thermistor-end. This shows in the display- So i believe this is not the problem here..
Fair, a wire break can be annoying though, often they're intermittent, and the display often doesn't respond fast enough to show that, but thermal protection will.
I'd totally consider taking a look at the connectors to the board for the heater cartridge, see if there's good contact being made, check for any signs of things like scorching check end-end continuity. Looking at the schematics for that mainboard Btt skr 1.4 it looks like there are LEDs on all of the MOSFETs, it will give you a visual indicator of the board state, to help narrow down your troubleshooting.
Thanks for the links. Can't see any scorching, and everything I've measured seems OK. If there are LED's on the mainboard, i don't know how to light them. As of now there are no lights on the motherboard, but everything beyond that heater works..
$80 makes it reasonable. At normal MSRP... Ender.
Good luck and make upgrades slowly and as needed.
Haha, slowly it goes.. Changing the SKR v1.4 to a SKR MINI V3 isn't straight forward on the Biqu B1.
Because I'm dumb. I don't have bambu money and a couple of years ago I didn't even knew about it. I read somewhere that biqu b1 was better and had less problems than the Ender and was noob enough to fall for it. I'm used to resin printer so I didn't knew enough about fdm and just went with biqu. Horrible decision
It's not easy trying to research which 3d printer to buy, there is more click bait and marketing than impartial reviews out there, and search engines tend to promote the garbage. And without a lot of 3d printing experience, it can be difficult to know if a "review" is paid for by the printer's manufacturer, or just trying to trick you into clicking their affiliate links. There are also no consistently good brands if you're looking for a cheap printer, pretty much all of them have produced a few good printers and others that have more flaws. For example old Ender 3 and Ender 3 Pro were very good at the time, and Creality built up a lot of brand recognition, but then they switched to low quality components and seemingly stopped doing quality control and made a bunch of crap. Now it might be turning around again, as Creality's latest printers are starting to look decent again, although perhaps a little overpriced.
Personally I use this spreadsheet to compare pros and cons of budget printers. It's maintained by a group of users at a 3d printing discord server, and while one cannot know for sure none of them have any ties for example to Sovol (the most recommended budget brand currently), they've seemed quite impartial to me so far.