Unresolved what's wrong? Z axis? Just got this Robo saturday, 2/28/15

got it on Saturday and any print over say.. 10 mm, turns to crap. i tried to print a few things. First thing was a spool holder. worked OK on medium. then tried to print a business cardholder on medium, see pic. then i tried to print a cup on low just to see of the z was moving up as it should, Not good, see pic. lastly i tried to print same cup on medium, not even as good as low. (or about the same) i did not change any settings and was printing with the included filament. I'm only guessing that its the Z axis because it's not moving up as i think it should.
Tell me what you think is wrong and how i might fix it. BY THE WAY. the printer died on Sunday and tech. support doesn't know whats wrong, so I have a replacement on the way from amazon.
EVEN tho I'm replacing this printer i would like to learn what it was doing wrong.
Many thanks, Jim

 

I had similar results. If this is the blue material that came with the printer, TOSS IT.
I didn't believe that either till I put on a roll of $14. Inland brand PLA from MicroCenter. Night and day results.

Things that I also did: Calibrate the feed (mark the filament, extrude 100mm, adjust till 100mm = 100mm fed), and calibrate the Z axis so that a 10mm high print is 10mm. I would have expected the machine to be closer on setup than it was, but once I did these things, my prints improved a lot.

 

I had those results (with the circles at least) when I was using matter control. The program, makes the Arduino print it's positions and line numbers to the COM port. I noticed that it lagged the most when calculating parabolas. After moving to Cura I noticed most of the problems went away. All the software related problems anyway.

 

Items on the left were in Matter Control, Items on the right were in Cura, IT'S LIKE MAGIC! (More programing and bandwidth really)

 

its not magic.. its just having to put in all new settings.
matter control's biggest flaw is a bug that keeps it from applying new settings. Like it loses write privileges from its own settings file.

 

Well that is true, but if I use the same settings for MC and Cura, Cura wins.

 

Agreed, as long as the printer is in fact printing then you're good!

 

I'm not a cura fan (the actual slicing and interface) but again, with matter control, you never know if your settings are sticking. That is the main glitch. Settings end up not getting written properly.. or more-so, not read properly. Change all day and nothing will actually change when the slicer applies them. Point being, you never know if you copied the actual working settings straight from matter control.