Solved Extruder motor grinding

Figured it wouldn't hurt to have extras. Do the drivers just pull off or is there anything special I need to do? Hoping to switch it out with one in my other printer to get my bigger one back up and running.

 

I would unplug the printer while you are at it. @Nathanfish are you sure the drivers in your other printer are the same type? You want to make sure they are A4988 drivers and you want to make sure they are calibrated for the output needed for the Robo. Just want to keep you from having another bad day and both printers being out of commission.

 

Should be the same. Both r1's. I might just wait until I get the new ones. Is there a certain way to calibrate new ones?

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Oh well you never said you had two R1's...or I forgot that fact. Yeah they will be the same then. Taking the E off of one and putting it on the other should get you in the ballpark. There is a thread on checking stepper driver calibration. Just a multi meter and a small screwdriver needed at the minimum.

http://community.robo3d.com/index.php?threads/stepper-driver-calibration-information.6466/

 

Well i just swapped out stepper drivers and it didn't change anything. extruder motor is still very weak. Any idea where to go from here without having to swap out the whole board?

AHHHH just checked my order and it didn't even go out today! son of a B!

 

Ok got back in there and adjusted the E stepper driver voltage a little bit and now it seems to be working.. Going to recalibrate my extrusion and try a test print i guess. Any suggestions on what to do from here? Feel like i can't really trust to leave it like this now.

Thanks for all the help!

 

Great! Glad to see you are able to calibrate the stepper driver. Very important to do. So... Would the old driver work if adjusted?

Don't leave the printer alone while printing for a bit just to make sure no new noises are anything happens once you start printing again.

Glad to hear you making progress.

 

Well i wouldn't say i calibrated it, just turned it up a little bit per something i googled. Probably not a great idea but wanted to get an idea what it would do. Seems to be working like it was though. I have the old stepper driver on the X axis and it seems to be working just fine. I'm sure i should probably go back and calibrate them correctly. I'm guessing having them calibrated differently will affect the size of my prints, i need to be pretty accurate.

Side note, every time i've calibrated my extruder it shows i need to be at 108-109 extrusion rate but if i go past 101 my prints are completely mushroomed and not square. what gives?

 

so you didn't use a multimeter? Eek! Yeah best to use a mutlimeter to know where you are at and where you went. To high and your steppers will get hot. But your a dare devil I can tell already. haha

when you calibrate the extruder, are you saving the new steps into the firmware, reload, and do an M502 then M500? Or are doing a temp setting into the EEPROM...if you have eeprom write enabled that is? Send an M501 and is it showing you new E steps? Just makes me think you are getting the same results over and over because the setting isn't sticking.

 

Yeah, I'm definitely not as smart as you guys! All i've done when calibrating the extruder is change the extruder percentage in simplify3d. Didn't want to change the firmware until i figured out what i needed to be. The deepest i've dug into the firmware is changing my bed Y limit to 14.5" and changing my acceleration and jerk. That's all i got.

This test cube seems to be printing pretty well. Going to let it finish and measure to see where i'm at.

 

Well...speaking for myself...it has nothing to do with being smart. It is just experience of doing it. You're getting experience and will be just as "smart" as me and probably more so very soon.

Have you watched this? You can get a temporary setting into the firmware to play with it. Probably better than doing a percentage change in simplify3d. That explains why each time you send a command to extrude you are getting the same results.

 

Maybe it's just me being lazy then or my lack of attention to detail. I should really work on that.

I have it back up and running and decided to try a large 2.7lb PET-G print because well, why not. Here's what it looks like at 75%. I'm going to let it finish printing because i think i can save those layers. Would anyone have a suggestions of an epoxy or something i could pour in the honeycomb to give it strength and make sure it doesn't come apart that would bond well with PETG?

 

Weird because the other side of this looks fine so not sure what would cause this.

 

Maybe an issue with the model? Did you design it or download it? Do you put your models through something like Netfabb prior to printing?

 

Didn't think about that. I'll run it back thru simplify and see if I see anything. I designed it in Catia saved as an STL. Haven't had any other problems though so I haven't been using nettfab.