MatterControl: Extruder only moves incrementally

[Motopreserve]

Hey folks. It’s been a long time since I’ve used my printer (Max V2, Marlin/reprap 091S) or posted here. Finally back at it and I’ve encountered some trouble. I did some searching here - but no luck.

Last use of printer: 1 year ago on older Mac (OS 10.6?) running MatterControl. MC had always been solid for me so I stuck with it. Toward the end I would sometimes have issues when priming the hot end. It would sometimes extrude less than the 10mm (using the MC button) and occasionally stop responding completely. Restart typically fixed the issue.

Fast forward: New Mac laptop running 10.13.6 High Sierra. Realized that MC may not be updated for the current Mac OS. SEEMECNC sales support suggested using Cura, which wouldn’t even recognize the printer (can’t believe I didn't find a connect button!). Installed fresh download of MC, fiddled a bit, and bam! It somehow loaded. Seemed to be reading my old settings in the eeprom etc. Control over the machine worked immediately. Thought I was in business again... Did a quick e-stop/printer cal (is it ever really "quick?"), and prepped to calibrate the extruder.

Made a mark, got my calipers and hit the 100mm extrude button. The extruder started, stopped, started, stopped... roughly 13 times. I tried several times (with full restarts) and it always seemed to be 13 times (or close). It also only extruded approximately 84mm total (semi-consistently).

For sh*ts and giggles, at one point I used 84 in the calculations for step/mm, and the next attempt at 100mm produced about 175mm of extrusion. Ugh!

So my questions are:

1. Has anyone heard of this start/stop thing happening? Bad motor?
2. Should I be updating the Rambo board with newer firmware (have never messed with it since I got it - it always worked fine)?
3. Lastly, is there a better software solution for me since I am running the newer Mac OS (Cura didn't seem to be the ticket)?

Sorry for being so long winded. Any help would be much appreciated.

Scott

[geneb]

Cura is primarily a slicing tool. It only offers machine control for UltiMaker (and maybe some others) printers. You slice your model in Cura and save it to the SD card, and then print from that. Printing from USB isn't recommended anyway - as soon as your computer goes to sleep, there goes your print job.

g.

[Motopreserve]

Thanks so much for the response. I had gotten the impression that Cura was not exactly what I was looking for - but I monkey'd around with it since SeeMeCNC had suggested it when I asked for an MC replacement.

Can you recommend a program that has features/controls like MC that can speak to the machine (for eeprom adjustments, controlling machine for calibrations etc)?

Also, I am wondering if there is an advantage to updating my Rambo board. Not sure if it's necessary since the machine seemed to run fairly well before all this mess.

Appreciate the help.

[geneb]

You can continue to use MC for calibration, etc. but I'd use Cura for slicing. Just print via the SD card.

As far as the extruder goes, I don't think you've got a hardware or firmware issue - I would suspect MC doing weirdness. Can you try an older version?

g.

[rootboy]

In the interest of full disclosure I haven't tried this on my printer (it's busy at the moment).


I'm suspecting that your Mac is the problem. To see if this is the case, you can send a "raw" extrusion command that won't get interfered by either MC or your Mac.

And I really doubt that MC is the problem provided that you have tried extruding without a model loaded (clear the bed first). MC will lag terribly with a large model loaded into it, but even then I haven't seen it cause the print to become erratic.

What this test will do is to see if the controller is responding to G codes without lagging. I suspect that MC is sending out the extrusion commands incrementally, and that the Mac OS is giving your serial port a low priority. See the note at the end of this post for more on that.


So, first disconnect the bowden tube from the hotend.

Then run this from your G code console:

M302

And make note of the temperature that it returns, we will want to reset M302 back to that when we finish (I'm using 170 below as a default).

Then either run each line (without the comments) from the console, or put this in a "extrude_100mm.gcode" file:

M302 P1 ; Allow cold extrusion
G92 E0 ; Set extruder position to 0
G0 E100 ; Extrude 100mm
M302 S170 ; Allow extrusion starting from 170°C (Put your extrusion temperature back to where we found it)


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