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woferry's Robo 3D R1plus

Discussion in 'Show and Tell' started by woferry, Jan 14, 2016.

  1. woferry

    woferry Member

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    Hi all. Finally decided to jump into the 3D printing universe. Learned about the Robo 3D R1 at a local Fry's, they listed it for $699 and I liked the build area size, when I tried to pick one up they were out of stock, turns out they've discontinued carrying this printer. One store showed as having stock, so I dropped by there on Saturday and it turned out the reason why they still had one is because it was a return. So I decided to skip that and wound up ordering an R1plus from The 3D Printer Guy that evening (free shipping). Showed up on Tuesday and so far things are going okay, not great.

    First off, I'm a bit confused on the various changes Robo has made to the printer and just what vintage I have. Of course I didn't order direct from them so I don't know how long this might have been sitting on a shelf. It doesn't seem to be too long as the two visible stepper motors have dates from September 2015 on them. But I expected to see the X axis stop switch on the traveler and mine has the set screw on the traveler and the switch on the Z axis carrier. All of the other 'goodies' seem to be there, including the case rings for the Z axis shafts and the exterior ribbon cable for the heated bed. The pictures I saw online showed these cylinders (couplers?) on the Z axis threaded rods, mine doesn't have these, it appears the threaded rods go straight into the steppers? Is this the "Z axis upgrade"? Also when I fed in the provided blue filament the first time some red filament came out, could this printer have been used or is that just what is used at the factory that I'm seeing? The inner "pretty" box was only sealed with one strip of packing tape and the "24/7 customer support" sticker on the top was already broken, so it had me wondering if this may have been opened previously. Everything inside looked new, the PLA was sealed, etc.

    I will note that the provided USB-to-micro-SD adapter is junk, the card fits poorly in it and it wouldn't stay mounted on my Mac for more than a few seconds. Thankfully I have a USB-to-SD adapter and a SD-to-micro-SD converter from cameras I use, that worked great.

    On the software front MatterControl really does seem to be crap, I couldn't even get it to launch. I installed v1.4 on my Mac (Yosemite) and the first launch didn't open any windows for over a minute so I wound up force-quitting it. After that any attempt to launch it resulted in an immediate crash. After deleting the ~/.local/share/MatterControl/ folder and trying launching it from Terminal where I could see the console output (and enable debug logging) it's throwing a ton of exceptions and eventually (minutes later) crashes without ever having opened a window/etc. So I gave up on that and downloaded Cura (15.04.4) and was doing my first print of it's little robot dude within minutes. Print came out pretty well, the antenna on the top was totally botched but the rest was pretty good.

    Next up was a spool holder (thingiverse #188820, not supposed to post links for my first 3 posts) since the provided one really does suck (sadly it seems to me all it needs is a flange near the arm to keep the spool from flopping over onto the support arm, yet I guess Robo hasn't figured out that simple tweak. In fact I had a ring I blue-taped to act as that flange and got through the first prints fine). The 4 pieces I printed came out okay, one of the vertical pieces started to lift at the top but my hair spray may have been light/missing in that corner. And the text on the vertical pieces didn't come out clean, there's a good bit of 'fuzz' as the head moved around between the letters. I printed this from the SD card since Cura said it was going to take ~4 hours and I wanted my computer back, that part worked great and was the end of my first day with the printer.

    Last night I printed the Make 2015 3D Printer Shoot Out Test Models (thingiverse #533472). Some things did better than I expected, others worse. Haven't tallied the score yet as I didn't inspect the last few parts yet. Again I was hoping not to tie-up my computer all night so I threw the first G-Code file onto the SD card with the same name I used for the first night's automated print, but when I put the SD card back in the printer and turned it on it just sat there, 15 minutes later it wasn't even heating the bed. So it seems I got one automatic print out of the SD card but that's it? I tried using auto1.g as well as auto0.g (thinking maybe the firmware tracks the last file used to ensure it doesn't print the same thing twice), no difference.

    The issues I've noticed so far are:

    1) The print area doesn't seem to line up with the heated portion. When the printer does the auto-leveling the "boogers" it leaves on the bed are all shifted back a bit, so the front touches are about a half-inch inside the heated area, and the carrier tries to go past its limits when it prints the back row (the gears grind when it does that), and those touches are past the heated bed markings on the glass. So I'm not sure what that's about or if anything can be done to adjust it, I can hear the limit switch click when it zero's so there's no grinding there.

    2) As I mentioned in #1 the nozzle oozes while doing the leveling, so all 10 touches leave boogers/strings behind, the first touch is much worse than the rest but they all do it. Since that first touch is near the center it tends to get in the way of the actual print. It seems to me it would be better to do the leveling before heating the extruder, though of course you'd have to ensure the tip was clean so solid leftovers from the last print wouldn't affect the leveling. The extruder does retract at the end of the previous print, yet there's still this stuff that oozes out once the heating cycle finishes. When the printer finally starts printing it takes a few inches before any material actually shows up because of the previous retraction.

    3) Flow control is definitely a bit shaky. It's good for the most part, but occasionally it just seems to miss a bit, or spit out more than it should leaving a blob. Is this just to be expected with the original "hexagon" extruder and why so many people seem to go with the E3D v6 instead, or is there some other reason?

    4) The Z axis squeals like crazy. The unit came with some "Tube Lube", is this meant for things like the gears or should I pick up 3-in-1 oil for that? If it's not for the gears what is the Tube Lube for?

    5) Comparing the left and right Z-axis stop switches only a bit of the nut is visible on the right side and most of it is visible on the left side. But I've tried moving that nut or lifting the assembly so that I could try to re-seat it and it won't budge. I thought the entire X-axis simply floated and could easily be lifted, that's definitely not the case on mine it seems to be riding on the threads or attached somehow to the stop switch parts. They do separate enough to do the limit stop and leveling, and the leveling seems to deal with the offset (I can see the Z axis adjusting itself as the head moves in X during the print), it just doesn't look that good since you can see the mismatch.

    6) Seems more like a Cura issue, but there's something weird about the print speed on layers with little material. There's the default setting in Cura that says to spend at least 7 seconds on each layer, and sometimes you can see that the printer slows down to take that 7 seconds. But it seems like once there's less than a certain amount per-layer it forgets about this and runs at normal speed, finishing that layer in like a second or so and then moving on to the next. This makes a mess out of things, like botching the antennas on the robot guy on my first print, and the stepped cone that is the "dimensional accuracy test" in the Make test parts prints fine up to the top section (the section below it printed slowly to take the 7 seconds per layer), then it blew through the top section so it was all shifted/droopy/bad looking. So I don't know why the 7 seconds minimum-per-layer sometimes works and other times is tossed out the window, but it certainly affects the print quality for small features.

    7) When Cura finishes it extends the bed out the back instead of the front. I'm guessing I just need to tweak the finishing G-Code to fix that, but haven't tried yet.

    8) The provided LEDs that light the interior flicker quite noticeably, even when the printer seems to be idle. I'm not sure if that's the quality of the LED driver, or a sign that my power supply is not regulating well or what, does anyone else notice this? I could understand it perhaps fluctuating a bit during printing as the supply load changes, but this happens even when the printer is just sitting there. It's not a full off/on flash, but it's a very noticeable random fluctuation in the LED brightness.

    I'll make a separate post about the shoot out test results on that thread, not sure if I can attach pictures in my first few posts.

    I would like to try upgraded cooling to help with bridging and maybe help with #6, though it seems most of the dual-fan solutions assume (require?) the E3D extruder, and I'm not sure that I want to rip into my printer that much yet unless it really would address any of the issues above. I'm not seeing any issues with the cable management yet so the chain carrier stuff doesn't seem necessary so far, granted I haven't gone beyond about half of the Z-axis travel in my prints so far. I am thinking about both a LCD screen and the Raspberry Pi 2/OctoPrint server thing so that I can print wirelessly, can both of those things be done on the same printer or would they interact poorly?

    Anyway, long first-post so I'll stop now. I clearly have some things to learn and hopefully a few things to tweak on this printer, things are mostly working. Now I need to get going with some 3D design software!

    EDIT: Oh, I neglected to mention the one change I made in Cura when I got started was to up the extruder temperature from it's default 190C to 210C as recommended by Robo's provided PLA. So my prints should have been at the recommended temperature, not cooler as Cura's default. I didn't touch anything else for the first prints, for the Make test prints I upped the infill to 20% from the default 10%. I haven't touched any other settings so far.
     
  2. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    Yep. That confirms it is an R1+

    Likely from testing.

    Most people add an LCD controller screen and those have a decent full size SD card slot.

    That is an understatement

    The printing on the bed is meaningless. Adjust your print area in the software to center on the heated bed if you need to.

    Yes. Lube it with that or lithium grease.

    They should be close to triggering at the same spot, adjust them if you can (hold one threaded rod while you turn the other).

    We suggest the paper leveling (you can search the forum for details, but you use a sheet of paper to get the X axis close and then the autoleveling works better).
     
  3. woferry

    woferry Member

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    That doesn't seem to be the case, the outline on my bed seems to line up with the heating element underneath. So since the printer isn't lined-up with that it means it wouldn't always be printing on the heated part of the bed if I used a larger print. Is the offset something I can fix in Cura or does it require tweaking of the Robo's firmware?

    Thanks for the other tips, I'll give them a shot later tonight.
     
  4. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    If your printing on the bed accidentally lines up with the heater... good for you :)
    It is not the norm.
     
  5. danzca6

    danzca6 Well-Known Member

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    The heating element isn't as big as the print area.
     
  6. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    If by 'offset' you mean print area size, then yes.. you set that up in whatever slicer you are using (Cura I assume). Every slicer has a section that you use to define the machine parameters (size of printer area and the like). Can't really help you with Cura, but there is a thread dedicated to it here so we have a fair amount of users who can.
     
  7. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    That is pretty much true if you look at the Robo specs the heated bed size is smaller than the total print area.
    Printable area is about 9.6 inches square and the heated area is about 8.2 inches square.

    This is because not all (or even most) filament types require a heated bed and those that do it is often low enough that the heater can accommodate.
     
  8. afat08

    afat08 Member

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    To the OP, I too have a very similar experience. I'm one week in with my printer and have noticed most of the things you mentioned and have been spending the past week familiarizing myself with everything. Trust me, there is more headaches to come!! But if you're at least a little bit mechanically inclined and a problem solver (after reading your post, I am gathering you are), then you should not have too hard of a time. The hardest part for me was in all the researching I've done online, I've noticed that most topics relate to the older version of the ROBO 3D...
     

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