Hesine M-505 3D printer mods

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I have a Hesine M-505 3D printer which is one of the Chinese Prusa i3 clones that came onto the market around 2015. The frame appears to be exactly the same as the Anet A8, however this is a distinct printer. The Anet A8 has developed a reputation for catching fire, and after going over most of the reasons for this, the Hesine printer seems to be much safer out of the box. There are several reasons the A8’s catch fire:

  • Firstly: thermal runaway detection was disabled in their Marlin-based firmware
  • Faulty connectors with wires at the heated bed induce failure of the connectors
  • Poor cable management allows bed wires to break off and short out
  • Because of the above issues, the custom Anet driver board is prone to overheating and burns out, or also catching fire

The Hesine M-505 does not have these issues:

  • Uses the standard and well proven Melzi driver board running Repetier-based firmware
  • State of thermal runaway detection code is unknown as the M-505 firmware is not released as far as I know
  • Heated bed wires come from the factory soldered directly to the heated bed, prevents thermal failure of a connector

All this being said, the Hesine M-505 still has some deficiencies. Namely, the routing of the heated bed wiring is prone to breaking loose due to very poor cable management. There are other smaller issues, but that is the biggest. The acrylic frames on these printers also gets a bad rap, so reducing wobble, namely in the Z axis is also a priority.

Next up is firmware updates for the board. Initially neither the Marlin or Repetier code bases supported the display and 5-button controls on either of these printers. This meant that anyone wanting to update firmware or guarantee thermal runaway protection was in place lost the use of these components. However, 2 years on, this has been resolved in both Marlin and Repetier code bases. Sadly, despite both code bases being GPL V3, often the Chinese printer manufacturers are out of compliance by not releasing the full code which caused this control panel situation for some time. On the up-shot, it's China, and about anything can be had if you know who to ask, which is how I assume the display code finally was obtained and integrated.

Since long print times are the name of the game, i decided I wanted to make my printer as safe as possible. I’ve assembled a number of upgrades to improve safety and also reliability.

Printed upgrades

Todo yet:


Purchased Upgrades

Some of these parts match up with printed parts above, so be mindful if you interchange some of these (like the power switch). The power supply and MOSFET upgrades I deemed fairly important. The thermal fuse is maby a little overkill, but better safe than sorry. After those, everything is a reliability or usability upgrade.

  • 30A power supply Anet/Hesine ships with a 20A and can barely keep up, especially when doing ABS, etc. When my heated bed kicks on, I can hear the fan drop in rpm. This is probably both a supply and main board issue: $20.99
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