Recently a friend of the Telegram group, specifically the user Altair, ran into a strange problem in his electronic board MKS Gen L v1.0. The hotend temperatures become completely unstable, oscillating completely and thus preventing the correct regulation of our printer.
It is a hardware problem that occurs in some of these boards, derived from some components, and it is not corrected simply by performing a PID Tuning as it might seem. This problem appears even in completely new boards, so it can be ruled out that it is due to an exhaustive use of our machines.
| MKS Gen L V1.0 |  |
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| MKS Gen L V2.0 | |
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MKS Gen L V1.0: Original boards and clones
Before continuing I would like to clarify that there are false or cloned MKS Gen L V1.0 electronics in the market, as you can imagine. These counterfeits are obviously not manufactured in any way by Makerbase, and it seems that these are where this problem appears.
Although, it is not something strange that manufacturers at some point can make a mistake, but it does not seem to be the case this time, since they themselves informed a user of these fakes after answering a support email.
In the image above you can see both electronics, on the left the original Markerbase board, and on the right the counterfeit board. You will be able to observe several different components, component colors and silkscreen of the same board.
However, the changes can be much more important and may not be limited to that. The very arrangement of the components and the connection between them can ruin any electronics worth its salt.
Returning to the problem in question and according to Altair´s information, in some cases the temperature variations between these two electronics can range from about +/- 2ºC degrees to a whopping +/- 10ºC degrees (in some extreme cases). Something unaffordable no matter where you look at it, and that can greatly affect any of our impressions.
Fixing the Hotend oscillations
To solve the problem, simply you need to replace these 3 electrolytic capacitors in our electronics (see photo above) with the following:
- 2x 100uF 50V LOW ESR
- 1x 1000uF 6.3V LOW ESR
In this way the problem is easily solved. Very important, these components have polarity, so be very careful when replacing them to solder the new ones in their correct position. Otherwise you could damage the electronics.
You can find more information about it in the following links:
https://reprap.org/forum/read.php?13,813311
https://www.reddit.com/r/ender3/comments/akr6fi/upgraded_to_mks_gen_l_marlin_vanilla/
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