Qidi Plus 4 Front 5015 Fan + Beacon / Carto Mount

UPDATE March 5th 

There are some issues with the Unimount™(Beacon / Carto mount). On my printer it was hitting the PEI wiper over the purge area very slightly. Other users haven't had this problem. Please be extremely careful and diligent if you use this mod. I am working on another revision to avoid this problem. 

Read This Section first! 
 

but why?

This page's write up got rather long… so please read this section to figure out if this is for you.

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What is this? 

A mod for the Qidi Plus 4 that relocates the part cooling fan to the front of the printer.  The front cover is redesigned to house a 5015 and a new part cooling duct was designed. The part cooling duct is CFD tested. 

I want to give Stew a huge shout out as this mount was based on his Beacon mount. He did a lot of the heavy lifting to get make an easy to work with mount for all this. 

This mod is aimed towards intermediate or advanced 3D printer users. This might be a little challenging if you are a beginner. 

Why would I want to do this? 

The stock part cooling works well on the Plus 4, so why would you want to relocate the part cooling fan to the front of the printer? 

1. Improved Cooling with a flow optimized cooling duct.  See “Performance” section
2. To make room for a Beacon / Cartographer Probe
3. Improve the working life of the 5015 fan, since it is not getting cooked by the heated bed.
4. Ability to use other standard 5015 fans (see Caveats below).
5. Looks cool?? 

Alright, what about the down sides?

1. Blocks a large part of your view of the nozzle
2. Longer fan cable
3. Front cover shroud does not fit
4. Not compatible with stock inductive probe, you need Beacon / Carto

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Hardware required

5015 Fan Mount / Part Cooling Duct

• 4 X Heatset Inserts M3x4x5 (Voron spec) 
• 2 X M3X8 mm SHCS or BHCS
• 2 X M3X14 mm SHCS or BHCS
• Extension Cable for stock fan (see details below) or new 5015 Fan

Unimount™

• 2 X Heatset Inserts M3x4x5 (Voron spec) OR 2 X M3 Square Nuts
• 2 X Low profile M3 screws (the ones that come with Beacon / Carto)
• Beacon or Cartographer. All work expect 90° Cartographer.

Fan Choice

The stock fan is a 24V 5015 fan. It's a bit special because it's a ‘width mouth’ variant, which is not very common. You can reuse the stock fan and actually it's somewhat decent. GDStime makes a good replacement fan if you are looking to upgrade. 

Some people may wish to use a “small outlet” fan as it is more common and there are lots of high quality options out there. 

Either choice you make, be aware the “wide outlet” has been performance.  I have tried to optimize the duct design as a much as possible for each style of fan. But after a lot of CFD testing a “small outlet” 5015 is not as ideal since airflow is greatly reduced from it. Turns out, you can only force so much air through a smaller outlet. You can judge for yourself in the CFD tests. 

Fan Wiring

Since the fan is now in the front and the port is in the back, we'll need to accommodate this change. 

1. Reusing Stock Fan

If you are reusing the stock fan, then a A JST extension cable similar to this will be needed. If you are reusing the stock fan, then also reuse the port it uses stock. 

2. Replacement Fan

If you are buying a fan new, then the cable should be long enough to reach the back. 

Qidi has blessed the toolboard on the back of the toolhead with an over abundance of fan ports. Stock there are two 2 pin fan headers that are not being used. This means you do not need to find a 4 pin PWM fan like the stock fan, it can be a ‘normal’ two pin fan if you want. This is an example config in printer.cfg if you use “FAN 3” (outlined in Red)

fan_generic cooling_fan]
pin:PB4
max_power: 1.0
shutdown_speed:0
cycle_time: 0.010
hardware_pwm: False
kick_start_time: 0.100
off_below: 0.0

Then comment out or replace your stock cooling fan config.

Unimount™

Unimount™ is a universal mount for Beacon and Cartographer probes. It mounts where the stock fan goes, now that you have the fan mounted to the front, why not mount an eddy current scanner? All models fit on the same mount with the correct distance from the nozzle. Your choice of square nut or heat set inserts version. 

For Beacon or Carto the X offset is 0 and the Y offset 20 is. 

That means Z_tilt points are: 

points:
   50, 150.8
   255, 150.8

And Bed mesh min max are:

mesh_min:10,35
mesh_max:280,285

Important Note

Unimount places Beacon / Carto close to the little on the Z axis to the PEI wiper in the purge area. It should not hit, but please manually test to confirm after install by moving the toolhead over the purge area.  I suggest using Stew's nozzle CLEAR_NOZZLE and then setting PEI_WIPE=0. and/or Stew's Slanted PEI wiper

Printing

General settings: 

• 0.2mm layer height, 0.4mm nozzle
• Print in the orientation shown in the pictures
• Use NORMAL supports. 

Part Cooling Duct

• PA / PET or similar with high softening temp, it's close to the nozzle so use your best judgement.
• CF / GF filament highly recommended.
• 4 bottom layers, 4 top layers 
• 2 walls, 20% infill
• Support and oriented as show in screenshot

Fan Mount

• ABS / ASA / PC / PA / PET will work. It's close to the hotend and heated bed, so no PLA or PETG. 
• Anneal PA to prevent cold flow
• 7 bottom layers, 8 top layers 
• 4 walls, 20% honeycomb infill
• CF / GF filament highly recommended.
• Support and oriented as show in screenshot

UniMount™

• ABS / ASA / PC / PA / PET will work. It's close to the hotend and heated bed, so no PLA or PETG. 
• 4 bottom layers, 4 top layers 
• 4 walls, 20% honeycomb infill
• CF / GF filament highly recommended.
• Support and oriented as show in screenshot
• The screw holes are pretty delegate, use care.

Install

1. Print a part cooling duct, 5105 fan mount, and Unimount™
   1. Install heat set inserts / square nuts 
   2. Install Beacon / Carto onto Unimount™
2. Remove the front cover
3. Remove the inductive probe, and hotend fan (save screws).
4. Remove Stock part cooling fan (save screws).
5. Remove hotend fan from stock mount and install on the the 5015 fan mount.
6. Screw 5015 fan mount to toolhead using the inductive probe and hotend fan screws.
   • A word of warning: The screws for the inductive probe and the hotend fan are easy to strip out, only install and remove as many times as needed
7. Attach 5015 fan to 5015 Fan mount. Do not fully tighten yet.
8. Attach part cooling duct to 5015 fan mount. Do not fully tighen yet.
9. Make sure part cooling duct is seated correctly in to 5015 and there are no gaps. Fully tighten all 4 screws. 
10. Install Unimount™ using stock part cooling fan screws. Route USB cable accordingly.
11. Done! 

Post install

• It would be a good idea to run a PID tune on the hotend with the fan around 50% speed. The duct is optimized to not to blow on nozzle or hotend, but a little bit of a air will always hit it. 
• Run Input Shaper
• While Beacon / Carto will not hit the PEI wiper during nozzle clear, it gets very close. The PEI wiper during nozzle clear is very hard on the nozzle and has been known to break the ceramic heatbreak. For this reason, I suggest using Stew's nozzle CLEAR_NOZZLE and then setting PEI_WIPE=0. This avoids the problem all together. 
• Install Stew's slanted PEI wiper

CFD Testing
 

What now? Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a computer simulation for air flow (amount other things). I have used this to test the performance of this part cooling duct to ensure air is directed on the right area of the print. If you're curious about the detailed performance of this part cooling duct vs. the stock one, see the following picture and link. 
I've run around 30 flow simulations to get to V1 release, each simulation takes around 4 hours so in total this part cooling duct has taken 120 hours of simulation time to produce. 😅 The air better go where it's supposed to! 

TL;DR: The part cooling duct performs better than the stock part cooling duct with the same fan because of a better design.

You can see the final results of the simulation here.

Performance

Alright, let's talk about cooling performance. This duct can do overhangs up to 75°, but it's really pushing the limits of FFF, 70° and 65° are probably doing to be the limit. In general at normal printing speeds, this duct keeps up with most things you can throw at it. 

The flow of air is optimized for higher speed printing as well, Comparison video between stock and front part cooling duct: 

First Print - Stock

Second Print - Front 5015 

Slicer settings: 10K acceleration, 500 mm/s on all features, no slow down for overhangs. 

Material: PLA @ 220C. 

If you know your slicer settings, you know this is crazy fast and crazy to not slow down for overhangs. The front 5015 mod performs better than the stock fan and can keep up with these crazy speeds while printing very tough overhangs. 

So if you want better cooling at higher speeds, this design should deliver. 

Input Shaper

What about Input Shaper and vibrations? Have you destroyed the perfectly balanced toolhead on the Plus 4?!

Nope.

Pipeline

• Collect user feedback & Iterate 🎉
• CPAP version 
• Improve stock cooling duct (maybe)

Oh.. you're still reading this? Here's some music while you're waiting for your prints.