extruder LED strip bracket Anet A6

thingiverse

I needed good illumination near my print close to the nozzle, especially to watch the printing of the first layers. The extruder itself creates a shadow when you have light from above, so I wanted a light underneath the extruder. So I designed a simple bracket for a piece of LED strip. This bracket grips around the edges of a standard Anet A6 extruder. For the LED strip, you can use any kind, but make sure it is 10 cm long and has as many LEDs as possible on this short length. (Note that this bracket is only 10mm wide.) I have 7 LEDs which gives me more than enough light. This piece of LED strip needs a voltage source to work. The easiest way is to use a 12V LED strip since the little 12V 40x40 extruder fan works continually on 12V, making it sensible to use the same voltage for feeding the LED strip. You need to cut the fan wires somewhere and make a solder connection. Some decent isolation over the solder joints is necessary (crimp tube). A 12V LED strip is easy to use, but I only had a 5V (USB) LED strip laying around. To use this 5V strip, I needed to apply a little 12V DC to 5V DC converter. I made this the easy way with a simple 7805 voltage regulator. Unfortunately, a little bit of heat will be generated this way. Schematics can be found all over the web. This regulator can be mounted on a little piece of breadboard which then can be attached to the backside of the bracket. The bracket has a little side plate with a 3mm hole for this purpose. Later, I designed an improved model #2 which has a better fastening by means of two finger grips that have some spring tension. Also, the overall dimensions are better (less narrow) and it is a bit stronger. This second one is made of PETG which is a little bit better than PLA in this area of hot air.