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7. Follow thermalization, you may begin the extrusion temperature preheat. Using the slider set to the desired
temperature.
a) For PLA we recommend 181-187C depending on material grade and ambient conditions.
b) For ABS we recommend 220-230C depending on material grade and ambient conditions.
8. Once the plastic has reached its correct temperature and is correctly flowing out of the nozzle, we can now
set the lower pressure bound back to its default. Enter “pl000050” in the command line, no quotes, and
click “Send command”.
9. Turn on your fan using the slider. This may vary depending on what material you are processing. Essentially,
we want the plastic to be soft enough to start spooling easily. If the plastic is too cool then it will be very
stiff and difficult to begin spooling with.
a) For PLA set to 40.
b) For ABS, keep turned off. ABS will cool quite quickly on its own.
10. Attach your puller wheel idler arm spring if you haven’t already. Set your pull speed slider to ~30-40
depending on material throughput. This will set the puller wheel to spin at a constant speed that is easy to
work with during setup.
11. Use tweezers or needle nose pliers to feed the plastic from the nozzle in between and through the puller
wheels. Be careful! - The nozzle is extremely hot at this point in the startup sequence; follow safety
guidelines to avoid personal injury or harm. Make sure you have engaged the puller wheel idler wheel
spring! See Figure 15 for reference.
12. If spooling is desired, Follow the steps below. If not (because your filament isn’t usable), skip to step 13.
a) Prep a piece of tape to fasten the filament to the spool. Using the yellow handle snips that come
with every ProtoCycler, snip the excess filament that has been extruding off the front side of your
UI.
b) Now feed the filament through the spreader guide. See Figure 16 for reference.
c) Remember that piece of tape we prepped? After feeding the filament through the spreader guide,
stick the piece of tape to the end of the filament (if you need a little more runway, snip the filament
a little more after feeding through the spreader guide before sticking tape to it). Now, stick the
taped filament to the bottom side of your spool. Note, it is best to stick the filament as close to the
front (starting side) of your spooler as possible. See Figure 17 for reference.
d) Once filament is taped to the spool, we are ready to start spooling. To do so, enter the command:
“ss000000” to start spreading the filament evenly across the spool. This is the command for “start
spooling”; hence the “ss” part of the command. Allow the filament to wind around the spool a few
times (2 to 3 should suffice) before increasing your fan speed.
13. Now that extrusion is well underway, increase your fan speed slider to 100% for PLA, or 50% for ABS.
14. Finally, enable diameter control. To do so, slide the diameter slider to the desired filament size (measured
in mm). Note that diameter control may fail irrecoverably if the filament is too far away from the desired
size, if the extrusion flow is too low (or too high), or if any of the parameters are incorrectly set.
Similar to Automatic operation, now is a good time to check how your diameter sensors are doing. In
particular, your nozzle sensor. Depending on the rate of output, you may find that your filament is a little
high or low relative to the diameter sensor. From the alignment process, the nozzle sensor is positioned
approximately half way in its range of motion. In order to check your diameter sensors, you’ll need to be
connected to the PCC software on a computer. Figure 18 shows ideal light sensor positioning. Notice the
two troughs (representing the shadow of the filament) are relatively centred without falling off to either
side. Whereas in Figure 19 we see the filament is too far off one side of the sensor. If you find that your
filament shadow is too far off one side that the sensor can no longer see the full “width” (diameter) of the
filament’s shadow, we can fix this by adjusting the height of the light sensor. Using the thumb screw in the
UI (Figure 11 for reference), loosen and adjust the height of the photoresistor so the shadow is
centred within the range of measurement similar to Figure 18. When you have achieved this positioning,
tighten the thumbscrew to fix position.
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