How To Connect the 2nd Thermistor - For Dummies
Now that I have an excellent heated build platform, I needed to get the second thermistor hooked up. The easiest and cleanest way would be to buy the Temperature Sensor v2.0 Kit from MakerBot. That kit is now available as an option with MakerGear's platform kit, but wasn't when I bought it. The other option would be to follow Zaggo's instructions on how to make your own adapter. However if you're a novice like me, you probably find this schematic kinda scary and his picture kind of vague.
I happened to have the resistor (4.7 kΩ), capacitor (10 µF), and 2 screw terminal needed. You might wonder why if I'm a novice, how I had a resistor, capacitor and screw terminal laying around... well believe it or not, my wife bought me "Electronics Projects For Dummies" a while back and I bought a bunch of parts to try some of them. I never did get around to trying those projects, but I'm glad I bought a bunch of spare parts. :) So the first thing I did was figure out that schematic on a breadboard.
This worked, however it wasn't very secure and kept falling appart on me. However now that I understood what goes where, I figured I'd try to solder it together. I wrapped one end of the resistor onto the positive/longer lead on the capacitor as you can see in the next picture.
Then soldered the wires and leads onto the pins on the screw terminal. I used the black wire for ground since all I had was red and black wire.
Then I used one of the 3 pin connectors that came with the MakerBot opto endstops, since I'm not using the endstops. Note in the next picture how the red wires are crossed.
Then I put some electrical tape around it all to strengthen it and now it plugs in quite well. It should hold together and it's nice and clean.
Then on the software side all you have to do is make sure you're running at least version 0013 of ReplicatorG.
Upgrade your extruder controller firmware to at least v1.8 with heated platform support. To do this, you unplug your makerbot, unplug the cat5 cable from the extruder, unplug the usb cable from the motherboard and plug it into the extruder board (pay attention to the color label on board, green wire should be on bottom). Select Machine -> Upload New Firmware -> Extruder Controller -> v1.8 with heated platform support. Reset everything and plug it back in like normal.
Then select Machine -> Driver -> Cupcake CNC w/ heated build platform.
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