So I was thinking of adding USBC PD to my ender 3v2 for a off grid setup. Is it possible or have I gone mad with USBC? I know it’s possible with my old monoprice select mini because of its low power requirements.
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Ender3’s have a 360W rater power supply, necessary for the hot bed and hot end current. A little bit of forum googling says they often use up to 250w.
USB PD supports up to a max of 240w, and even then only in a very specific 48 volt supply mode. So you might get away with it, buts it’s gonna be sketchy, and require more stepping down of the 48v usbPD voltage, and complexity, and cost.
You could theoretically split some of that power from multiple sources though. Run one USB-C line to power the hot end, one to run the bed, and one for the electronics and motors.
Would get pretty complicated pretty quick, but it might work with a LOT of effort.
That would be difficult because you would need to somehow separate the power control MOSFET’s from the driver boards so that the controller can still feed them a PWM signal for temp control, but the power would be provided from a separate dedicated usbPD driver board for each set of MOSFETs. At that point it’s really not worth the effort.
USBC PD could work for my old monoprice select mini v1 https://youtu.be/VehfqrkoXJA
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Could you not just do something similar to what printers with mains heated beds do and run the bed/hotend heater to a relay and different power bank?
Sure, but on these fully DC printers all the power control hardware is integrated into the main board and supplied from a single main power rail. You’d have to basically build a separate power control board with that would allow you to isolate those MOSFET’s on their own power rail and then jump the PWM control signal over to it from the main board. Decent amount of electronics knowledge and skill required to pull that off.
Yeah but why would you need to do that? You’re isolating the second power source behind a relay and switching it using the normal controller.
Not very likely. USBc-PD is 20v/5a . Most printers are either 12 or 24 volt rails, at 40 or more watts of power for the hotnend alone, toss in the stepper motors, the fans, the board running and you’re very close to going anemic on the power supply.
You probably could get away with a resin printer, though, that doesn’t have the massive hot end. Some kind of transparent LCD (laptop screen disassembled? or maybe the old school kindle e-reader LCD’s) and UV led strips/arrays under it should be fairly easy to build and run.
Latest pd spec can do up to 240w at up to 48v (good luck finding a power brick that supports the full spec, though)
You might be able to pull this off if you forgo the heated bed, but it’s probably not worth it.
What USB-PD battery do you plan to use and how long do you expect it to last?
A cursory google search (minimum effort, might be wrong) indicates the Ender 3 v2 requires 350 watts. PD only hits 240W absolute maximum. Some anecdotal data from Reddit indicates you could maybe get away with 240 with a few adaptations but that’s designing for limits, and there is zero wiggle room.
Also the supply to power a 240W PD device would be stupidly expensive since that target is definitely not in widespread use. In fact, they don’t really seem to even exist yet.
PD is not the solution here!
More on PD supply wattages / voltages: https://www.usb.org/usb-charger-pd
Anecdotal power usage data (reddit, sorry!): https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/jpozar/ender_3_v2_power_usage/
