nathanstenzel wrote:There was no miscommunication between me and John. He thought 18awg was fine for the heat bed.
Good news! I figured out what the hell was wrong with my printer! The repetier host calls to the slic3r software resulted in using the preset slic3r settings and not the ones I saved as "default" as per the manual. I am now using slic3r and pronterface (seperately) and there are no problems. My prints look sweeeeeeeeet. Doing another calibration cube now to test the top part of the cube and overhang. The top was not 100% right and may need more support material.
John is correct if that is what he said, 18ga wire is "sufficient" for the job. What people are telling you is that larger wire (smaller AWG number) is more efficient at carrying current and will lower your hot bed temp up cycle times. Which IIRC was the original complaint.
They are two separate pieces of software, the host handles the manual operation of the printer and the communications between the two during printing. Your slic3r settings only matter up until you create your g-code file. Once the g-code is loaded, slic3r handles nothing. The settings in Slic3r only affect the g-code file output, not the base machine settings, which are accessible through Repetier Hosts EEprom function. Your prints look good because of the slic3r settings and/or changes made to the EEprom that are incorrect. It's certainly nothing wrong with the setup as the majority of us use it without issue.
Purple = sarcasm
Please do a board search before posting your question, many have been answered with very time consuming detail already.
I really hate when I forget to change dropdowns in repetier host to the one I was working on in slic3r after I change/create settings. I did that more often than I care to admit to myself until I started using Kisslicer for most of my prints.
nathanstenzel wrote:
Good news! I figured out what the hell was wrong with my printer! The repetier host calls to the slic3r software resulted in using the preset slic3r settings and not the ones I saved as "default" as per the manual. I am now using slic3r and pronterface (seperately) and there are no problems. My prints look sweeeeeeeeet.
It seems this is a known bug on the Linux side lately. I found out via google+ communities.
The dev copy of the firmware seems to have the motors set for a lower current. It seems to cause skipped steps for me so I reverted to the old firmware since my SD card has never really worked for me anyways and I changed to the new firmware for that. The tradeoff is that the motors get a bit to warm after a few hours of printing.....or maybe they would do that under either one....not sure.
I am now experiencing slanted prints. It seems I can't win. I think I reverted some of the files back to the ZIP file contents, so I get to go through the whole calibration again and then try to make myself a backup for the files that I changed. Before I get things recalibrated and all fixed, I may end up with a HOME command on layer changes which would be a simply pathetic attempt to keep the arms from drifting too much, but it should work since the arms drift more and more as time goes on.
Hooked a raspberry pi running OctroPrint and Raspbian (the distro) to my printer. It is currently outside of the printer and powered by a cellphone charger module.
Having trouble getting the webcam stuff going. All online instructions are for something that seems to have become a part of the avconv and avserver project. I can't find instructions for things after that change. I did read a bit from the forums and did alot of other online research. I am not sure why octoprint wants the ffmpeg binary path.
When I set the bed or hotend temperature via OctoPrint, it sometimes obeys and sometimes does not. This might have something to do with using wifi to connect to my router (the raspberry pi is hooked up directly) in a portion of the city with too much wifi pollution (so many signals on one channel sucks for everyone). The target temperature sometimes does not change while the current temperature is definitely going up.
I plan on testing out the OctoPrint and some new Slic3r settings when I get home.
I placed some rubber bands at each end of my 3 sets of arms, so I will probably turn up the jerk setting on my printer to what it was when I got it.
I found out that I accidently set my infill threshold to a measily 5mm^2 instead of the default 20. That correction should help resolve some print defects I had in my bracelets that I was printing.
There seems to be custom settings in OctoPrint for delta style printers. Anyone know where I can find that or care to share a copy of the files that are responsible for it?
Worked on fixing the calibration on my printer some more lately. My X arm has always seemed to not press down as much as the other arms and especially not when the nozzle is away from the X tower.
Some of my towers were leaning in or two the side....or so it seemed. Reviewing things a bit more, it seems that the top circle for the base of my printer was warped down away from the towers for some of the towers. It always seemsed that my prints would change with the weather. I suppose that may literally be the case. The hotter days with more humidity seem to make the warping worse.....or was it better? Not even sure which.
Decided I would see if there was a way to mount the depth sensor I paid too much for. I had the thermister pop out in the process. At least it did not happen for a print or it would be serious trouble. The thermistor didn't want to go back in due to the wire thickness yanking it back. The thermistor lead broke. Lovely. Time for a new thermistor.
I hear some of you guys recommending a thermistor screw in cap. Does that work with the hotend that comes with the Rostock Max? It looks like it would have to go into one of the two holes that we put the heating resistors in. That might cut down the heating power too much. If I swap to a heater cap and a thermistor cap, would I have enough heating power? Alternatives to this headache?
Is there a hotend that I might want to switch to that would let me have 2-3 hotends on my printer? I know space is a concern there. With the current hotend, I would lose almost 2 inches of print height if I add a 2nd extruder or other tool. I believe I can fit 3 tools on this if they are the same size or smaller than the default hotend. The RAMBO only supports 2 extruders, so I may have to disconnect a tool electrically and connect the other tool if I want to do that sort of stuff.
I notice that if I had a slightly bigger effector, I could probably fit 3 of the default hotends (or similar sized tools) without losing print height. That would result in a need for firmware adjustments.
Any suggestions on how to resolve my high nozzle position on my heated bed? It is about 20-30 degrees away from the X tower or all over the line coming away from the X tower....according to how I calibrate the towers. I have been actually testing the area away from the towers as well as the center and under the towers. Maybe that is part of my problem. Perhaps the outer regions should be adjusted by the concavity setting. Perhaps the math is wonky too, but I don't care to study it close enough to find out. All other towers seem to be about fine. My concavity is currently a little off with the nozzle a little high in the center though.
I talked with Geneb and he told me how I would go about installing an M3 screw in thermistor module. I need more tools. Go figure. I still took notes and stored them on my phone. Maybe later.
I talked with SeeMeCNC and he suggested that my endstop wire might be getting interference. I did not consider that. I saw Guano having such problems before and I still didn't consider that.
My heating resistor started having a loose connection lately. It failed during a print and the hotend was pretending to print in mid air. The hotend was cold. There was a hole chewed into the filament. I got fed up with it, removed as much of the kapton tape as I could, removed the heating resistors, burned my thumb (dumbass move after heating it up to extract the filament) and put in one of the heater cartridges that I had bought a month or so ago.
Although I had failed to calibrate the hotend afterwords, it printed this one owl nicely. The slicing was done by Slic3r since Cura has been failing me miserably. The print was a bit slow at about 4-6 hours for this owl of slightly under 6" tall.
I have another hotend on the way and plan on installing a heating cartridge instead of a set of heating resistors when I put it together.
I hope to test Cura again and find out if it was really Cura failing or if it was the wiring of the hotend that caused some of the problems.
nathanstenzel wrote:My heating resistor started having a loose connection lately. It failed during a print and the hotend was pretending to print in mid air. The hotend was cold. There was a hole chewed into the filament. I got fed up with it, removed as much of the kapton tape as I could, removed the heating resistors, burned my thumb (dumbass move after heating it up to extract the filament) and put in one of the heater cartridges that I had bought a month or so ago.
Although I had failed to calibrate the hotend afterwords, it printed this one owl nicely. The slicing was done by Slic3r since Cura has been failing me miserably. The print was a bit slow at about 4-6 hours for this owl of slightly under 6" tall.
I have another hotend on the way and plan on installing a heating cartridge instead of a set of heating resistors when I put it together.
I hope to test Cura again and find out if it was really Cura failing or if it was the wiring of the hotend that caused some of the problems.
You are truly a 3d print master now! One of the requirements is to get at least one burn from a heated hotend.
You will like the cartridge much better but you really should tune the hotend when you get a chance.
Those thread in thermistors are the cat's meow as long as you have a 3mm tap to install them. No more thermistors pulling out.
Eaglezsoar wrote:
Those thread in thermistors are the cat's meow as long as you have a 3mm tap to install them. No more thermistors pulling out.
I don't think I should have to worry about the heater cartridge or thermistor pulling out. I wrapped the assembled hotend in kapton tape for 3-4 rounds.
My new hotend came in. I just have one problem. I have not decided on an extruder that I could manage to make myself and the appropriate mounting options. My spools are on top of my printer and I am currently thinking about mounting spool spinners to the 3 sets of 4 slits on the top with the filament coming through the center hole and mounting the motors and extruders pointing towards the hole. I am not sure where to source some of the parts though. I may just have to bite the bullet, try and struggle for a bit.
A week or so ago, I hooked up my 2nd hotend just to see what I could do for temperature control.
The LCD screen was seemingly not letting me change the 2nd extruder's temperature and today I found out that the firmware that I had included a bug that displayed EXT2's temperature setting in the EXT1's temperature setting spot.
The pins.h was wrong and the LCD screen was reporting ludicous temperatures that could not be right or my hotend would have melted way before it got to that temperature. It had the -1 instead of 7 for the pin for the heater for extruder 2. I tried setting it for pin 7 today with no luck. I tried setting pin 8 with no luck. I was actually testing a heater cartridge's leads against the pins to see if it was going to a different set of pins with no luck. At this point in time, I am thinking that whatever the weird behavior was the last time that maybe the mosfets for some of my extruder and fan slots died from it. It seems like it would be a big pain to disconnect this rambo board and try board #2. Is there a fuse that I should check?
I don't think anything changed in firmware or wiring, but my 2nd extruder will now heat up and hold a somewhat stable (+-2C) temperature. I also learned that my 2nd extruder will not heat unless the 1st extruder has a temperature else than 0 set. Maybe there was a short in the wiring or something. I dunno. It looks like that is working though.
As for the heat bed, I put a little bit of aluminum foil underneath the Onyx heating bed and it now heats faster. I should probably retest the bed to make sure it is level, but I did not get around to that.
Well, I have gotten a number of parts that I like out of my printer, but I still have some nagging issues.
Parts that are supposed to fit together like a raspberry pi case or a puzzle do not quite fit. It seems the part expands out on all walls (not scale). I thought the walls were supposed to go inward and not outward.
The tower to the left of the display always test high both under the tower and away from the tower while the other two towers test fine. It is kind of like my Onyx bed is warped, but it does not matter even if I turn it. I have to wonder if my towers are at angles or something. I felt along the edges of the slotted metal extrusion and it almost seems like some of the towers are twisted to the side half a degree or something. I keep having such trouble with the angles of towers because there is no simple way to make sure they are perpendicular to the build plate. It about seems like the whole printer might as well be off by a fraction of a degree cascading in weird taco shaped warping. This taco warp crap makes me wish I bought a cartesion.
