Geeetech A10 LED Hotend light holder

thingiverse

Inspired by a YouTube Video of Thomas Sanladerer where he shows different ways to illuminate 3D-Printers, I designed my own light. For this project, I used an 12V LED ring with an inner diameter of 80mm, a Step Down Converter 24V -> 12V, zip ties, wires and some express glue. The power came from the LED pins in the top right corner of the mainboard. My printer uses the GT2560 V3 Board, I'm not sure if previous boards have this feature. The LED ring got a tight snug fit in the holder but I secured it with a drop of express glue. Update1: How to guide and pictures to help wiring and finding the right pins on your board ----Wiring guide for the V3.0 Board---- 1. Power off the printer. 2. Open the mainboard cover. 3. Look for the led pins in the top right corner. 4. Power on the printer. 5. Use a multimeter to check the polarity of the pins and write it down. 6. Power off the printer. 7. Solder breakaway pins on the step-down converter (2 input, 2 output) and connect the INPUT pins with the led-pins on the mainboard. I used dupont/jumper-wires. 8. Connect the OUTPUT wires to a multimeter, power on the printer and adjust the potentiometer screw to set the output-voltage to 12V. 9. Power off the printer. 10. On my LED-ring, I had to solder dupont/jumper-wires; I used 75cm long ones. 11. Mount the LED-ring to the hotend. 12. Connect the dupont/jumper-wires from the LED-ring to the OUTPUT pins on the step-down converter. 13. Make sure you used the right polarity. 14. With zip-ties, you can fix the wires to the existing ones or for a cleaner look through the sleeve. 15. From now on, the LED's will go on and off when you turn on/off the printer. ----Wiring guide for Boards BELOW the V3.0---- 1. Power off the printer. 2. Open the mainboard cover. 3. Look for the 3 FAN-Pins (use the pictures to find the pins) and take an unused pin or build yourself a Y-Connector to power the fan and led's with one output. You can also use the PWM Pin, but I wouldn't recommend it. 4. At this step, you can go on with No. 4 from the guide for the V3.0 Board.