Garden Railway Forum

I don't often fire-up my cheapo kit-built (<£80) 3D printer, but I sometimes bring it into service for small scale, low quality print runs or when I need to mass produce items. I'm in the process of motorising my 20 signals and so wanted to print off a couple more bases for them quickly - and so it it was fired-up.

Now, for the unitiated, layer-shifts occur when for various reasons, the printer gets out of synch when printing a new layer. Usually, it's only a matter of a millimetre or so, but when I went into the workshop this evening to retrieve today's printing, this is what I found...........
I think, I might need to recalibrate something somewhere...............

Rik

ge_rik wrote: ↑Fri Oct 18, 2024 5:57 pm

I think, I might need to recalibrate something somewhere...............

You could be right, but a shift to that degree looks severely mechanical rather than just a calibration issue. Could you have had a drive belt slip off its sprockets and fool the print head into thinking it is a couple of inches sideways from its actual position?

I had a situation a short while ago where my printer tied itself in a knot and the print head crashed into the side frame with a horrible grinding and banging. When I tried to move it, it was jammed against the side and I had to switch it off and send it to the home position before it started to behave again.

Hi Rik

I was printing one of your signal bases a couple of days ago on my Flashforge Dreamer. It got to about where your shift happened and just stopped dead for no apparent reason. I sliced the STL again and it printed fine on the second attempt. I agree with Philip - that shift looks like a mechanical crash (or a filament lock) - either way it is a impressive overhang.

The base is an impressive fit. I am trying to build a couple of signals but using the ATtiny85 MCU in place of the seeduino. It should be adequate but I am struggling to get the servo library working - hope to crack it this weekend (SWMBO permitting undisturbed pondering).

Cheers
Ianm

I had similar results on my old Creality Ender3V2 and it was due to improper bed levelling (it had a low point) after a lot of mucking around I solved it.
Eventually I moved that printer on and bought a V3 which so far I have had no problems.

Ianm,
I have resorted to using ChatGPT to write my computer codes it does it so much faster than me but you do have to give it precise instructions.

I figured the X-axis belt might need tightening. Mind you, if it is a slack belt, I can't figure out why it only slipped once and why so catastrophically.

Rik

I'm a printer newbie so please don't laugh too hard.
I had some weird stuff happening with one of my prints. The robotics guru that gave me my printer told me to delete the file and reload it. It worked.
I'm not an IT guy and not sure how an stl file works for 3 months, then gets corrupted, but it happened to me.
But yours looks mechanicle.... but so did mine......
3d work has been a steep learning curve for me but I love that kinda thing.

GAP wrote: ↑Fri Oct 18, 2024 10:09 pm Ianm,
I have resorted to using ChatGPT to write my computer codes it does it so much faster than me but you do have to give it precise instructions.

Hi Graeme

Ditto - I resort to ChatGPT when exploring myself doesn’t work super quick. I spent a large chunk of today trying various mixes of Board settings and libraries to get the servo working with the ATtiny 85. The Arduino Servo.h doesn’t work with the Tiny85 as the Tiny is 8 bit rather than the larger Arduino processors. Eventually resorted to ChatGPT which offered a solution using ServoTimer2 but that didn’t work for some reason. So I asked ChatGPT to try again with SoftwareServo - it came up with guidance on installation of the library etc. The test.ico code works. Yippee!

Now to modify Rik’s code to work with the ATtiny85 and then cram it all into the signal base. And build the signal too

ChatGPT is fun - I have been amazed (and quietly worried about) how it can construct quite convincing text from quite short prompts. I entered a sentence about the golf group I play with and the scores for our rounds a month or so ago => it output a 600 word report on the game that was remarkably similar to the reports the winner of each outing prepares.

For programming assistance - I agree it’s certainly the easiest and fastest way to generate neat and efficient code; and to learn new stuff.

Cheers