Repper's delight

The Tina2 is a great 3D printer !
It's cute and efficient, but being tiny with an enclosed frame it doesn't allow much light to reach inside it, and makes it difficult to watch after your prints. So I think adding light is a must.

What you will need

Here are the tools you will need if you want to follow up this tutorial :

• low cost led strip (5V or less)
• pair of scisors
• small cutting pliers
• wire stripper
• tape
• some 1.75 filament
• tweezers
• electrical wires (red and black)
• soldering iron and solder

The led strip I bought is a cheap one made out of 30 white leds powered by 3 AA batteries and is 1m long.
A 1m long led strip should let me add light inside two Tina2.

Step 1 : preparing the led strip

Open the AA battery box, cut the electrical wires half way, and remove everything from it. It contains a 26 Ohm resistor and a small switch that I will reuse later in this tutorial.
The box by itself won't be used anymore but I suggest you should keep it for some other project.

Then using scisors cut the led strip half way. There are 30 leds on it so cut it to have 15 leds on each halves.

Then tape the end of the electrical wires to a small piece of 1.75mm filament (20 to 25cm).

Step 2 : integrating the led strip

Introduce the filament in the hole situated at the bottom of the printer, and push it up all the way to the top (following the Z motor wires).

Then with the help of the tweezers, grab the led strip and gently pull it completely inside the printer frame.

Start gluing the led strip to the frame at a 45° angle (pointing toward the center). Proceed by removing the tape paper only small portion by small portion as you go along all the way up.

Keep going all the way round by taking care there won't be any led right at the top middle of the frame because this is where our switch is later going to take place. Also mind to glue the led strip high enough on the frame for the same reason.

Step 3 : connecting the led strip

With the help of a soldering iron, remove the AA battery connector from the switch.

Having a close look at the led strip wires, one of them has small white dots on it (hard to see). This will be the VCC (5V) and the other one will be the GND.
Cut the wire without dots close to the printer frame's corner and solder a small black wire to it. Keep the wire with dots on it longer (don't cut it).

Solder the wire that has dots to the resistor, and a small red wire (5/6cm long) where the AA connector was before we removed it.

Then referring to the following image, plug the red wire to the ISP VCC header (marked "2") and the black wire to the ISP GND header.

At this point it's time to test that it's working well.
Plug in your Tina2 and trigger the switch to check your leds are lighting. If they do, well done. You have succeeded !
If they don't, check back your soldering joints.

Step 4 : switch integration

You have several options here. You could simply tape the switch on the top/middle inside of the frame. Or use some tool like a Dremel to make a little opening in the frame where you will then scew the switch.
Personnaly I prefered not to cut my frame so I designed a small printed part that simply holds the switch in place with the use of double sided tape. This part is available for download : LED Switch holder.

Conclusion

This hack only cost me 2€ per printer. So I guess Weedo could have done it for just a few cents.

I hope you liked this tutorial. And if it's the case, stay tuned for more to come.