Oops

Doing a new print this morning, the filament stripped not long after the start. Bother, said Pooh. But when I tried to do a cold pull, the filament snapped instead of coming out. That's a bad sign. Then I realized that thing I hadn't been hearing was the extruder fan not running since I had taken out Wire 5 yesterday. Turns out it is in use, just for permanent fanning. It would be better, methinks, to take that from the heater 12V, but that would require redoing the PCB.

In that case, I might as well redo it such that it more directly supports a proximity probe with voltage splitter as well, and get the cable fixed once and for all. This increases the work substantially, but would in the long run make the whole mess of cables be much nicer. And I rather like doing PCBs, the Fritzing app is quite good for that.

In the meanwhile, I'm going to clear out this probably blobbed-out piece of filament the hard way. I just hope it hasn't melted into some of the non-metal pieces, that could get hairy. It struck me that printing the extruder motor holder in a clear filament would make it a lot easier to see what goes on in there. But that's not for now, that holder is difficult to get right.

A quick search finds this already-existing breakout PCB with all manner of things.

Morning-after update: Took apart the hotend again. It's fucked. The e3d heatsink has a piece of filament stuck in it, blobbed out at the top. That can be heated and removed, I'm sure. Worse, a piece of the filament melted near the bottom of the extruder mount, and it might have fused too much to remove - I certainly haven't been able to just push out out from the far side.