Solved New Printer, Not Sure What's Broken, Need General Help

Hi all,

I brought my printer home at about this time last week. After encountering some problems, I created this thread in the troubleshooting section of the Robo3D homepage. I can't seem to summarize any of that very well; if you'd like to help, I think you just need to read my original post and both of my first replies to it. Any of that information may important to figuring out what is currently going wrong.

Since that point, I have been completely unable to get an autocalibrate to work. The closest I have come to printing is by doing it without the autocalibrate, but as I said there was a weird issue with the filament. Just today I managed to install the RoBo3DR1AUTOV3 or "6-10" firmware onto the machine (I have not been able to acquire the suggested V4 by any means, including the email address that Jerry suggested to another user needing the same thing).

Now:

• The autocalibrate is still failing. It always begins by getting the print head as low as it can go and then attempting to go further. Now I am smart enough to immediately put a piece of paper underneath because otherwise it makes a horrible sound as it does this. I now suspect that it's not actually trying to go an inch below the plate - I think that the motor isn't doing something right. Whether it's related to the tape I put on the rods, the tape that's holding the limit switches in place, or something else, I'm not sure. But without the tape on the rods, it just keeps spinning. If there's also no tape on the limit switches, then those get spun around until the wire stops them. But even with all the tape in place, it always seems to become "disconnected" on one side or another, no matter how much I push the rod into the tape beforehand. If I reach in and fiddle with the rods as they spin, they will eventually "reconnect" and I can continue the autocalibration. I don't think it's really working as a calibration though because I have to continually restick the rods in order to progress, and I'm sure that's giving it bad data. If I try to continue despite that, it gets to the 3rd point and then only has the Cancel option.
• I can no longer attempt to print without autocalibrate, because every time I try it pops up the autocalibrate window.

Others on these forums have encountered the Cancel issue with autocalibrate, but (of the ones I found, anyway) one of them installed a version that apparently required re-wires and the other had nonstandard wiring to start with. I tried installing Marlin_2_4_14.zip but get the same just-the-cancel-button issue.

All of that is probably a moot point, anyway. There's clearly something wrong with the way the rods are connected to those motors. After getting the first point, it spins a bunch without accomplishing anything and I've just realized that it's almost certainly trying to raise the extruder. Why that doesn't work when I've just been raising and lowering it with the Z+ and Z- buttons, I don't know, but it doesn't make sense that it's supposed to travel to the second point along the heat bed at "ground level" which is what it does... because then if the bed's not level it would be scratching it (and probably would be if it weren't for the piece of paper it drags along with it).

So I guess my MAIN question is: What can I do about these rods? Am I right in trying to make them stick inside those motors, or do they need to come out sometimes? I mean, if they're always supposed to stay then I could use super-glue or something, maybe.

I'm also worried that I've done something wrong with the limit switches.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

Hi! Thanks for the reply.

I must be looking at the couplers, then. Do you think that I should try superglue, or ask for a replacement part?

Thanks again.

 

Okay, I put superglue on it and that seems to have worked. (Thanks!) Then I put the v3 firmware on (I had temporarily tried out v2) and noticed that Matter Control was finally giving me a chance to update. I did, and now it says it's on v5.

Matter Control still fails to autocalibrate, but at least it's back to letting me attempt a print anyway. The extruding isn't working quite right and the layers aren't being put on top of each other, but this is still major progress.

Repetier Host did a full "print" and all of the positioning looked exactly right, except that there was no extruding at all. I think I might have had the temperature wrong or something... after going away from the project for a few hours and then coming back to it, I was easily able to get it to extrude manually. Then I tried another print, but unfortunately during this time I had taken the tape off of the limit switches, thinking they might be causing issues. This was another mistake, because once again they started spinning and this time the wires ripped off on the upper-left side. I don't know which wire to put back into which place, and I don't even own a soldering gun, so I am torn between thinking 1) I came SO CLOSE to getting this thing to print something and I can't give up now, and 2) maybe this is still too bleeding-edge for me. I won't be able to work on this much tomorrow and then Monday is the last day to return it.

I'm going to bed. Maybe things will look brighter in the morning.

 

Just a quick update for anyone who is curious. I have declared my intent to return the printer if it can't be made to work, however I do intend to work with Robo3D to get it printing. I'm pretty sure that now I've declared that intent, I should be safe to keep trying for another 20ish days. I have purchased a soldering iron, solder, and a multimeter and made an appointment with their support team via the scheduling thing on the website. (This is a new feature, right? I had looked around for support and didn't find this, so I'd rather think that it's new than that I missed it...)

 

Hey all. Total thread necro, I know, but I feel guilty for not updating on this, because Robo did totally come through for me. They met with me via Skype and spent an hour or so going through the various mechanical issues (the rods, the wires that had come look) and the firmware (which they mailed me as we talked) and I was soon printing.

The next day I got very sick and that's why I didn't update this immediately... after that I guess I just felt guilty. Anyway, I haven't been hanging out on the forums to know whether this is news or not, but that new 1-on-1-with-a-tech thing seems to work pretty well.