RUG/Pennsylvania/State College/Trouble Shooting Guide
The contents on this page will help callibrate your printer to help get to the print quality that you desire.
Once you have finished building your printer and can succesfully talk to your printer through a host program, I'm sure you will be dying to start printing. Unless you are extremly lucky, your first print will not be perfect. Using the table below, you can correctly calibrate your printer.
Issue | Possible Problem | Solution |
---|---|---|
Circles are not printing circular |
1. Steps/mm are incorrect in the firm ware 2. Your x carriage and/or y crriage belts have too much slack |
To fix Problem 1: Move the X or Y axis of your printer by 10mm. Measure the distance that the X or Y axis actually travels. Let’s say your Y axis actually moved 5mm. Now divide the 10mm you instructed the printer to move by the 7mm it actually moved. 10/5= 2. You will now need to find the steps/mm vector for the Y axis in the configuration.h file of the firmware. Multiply whatever this value is by the factor that you calculated (in this case 2). Now re-flash your firmware (add link) and try again. For help with flashing visit this link ……….. To fix Problem 2: This is simpler of the 2 problems to fix. All you need to do is tighten the belts to create more tension, ridding the belt of the problematic slack. |
Your object experiences "warping" | row 2, cell 2 | row 2, cell 3 |
Your object has gaps in the layers | row 3, cell 2 | row 3, cell 3 |
Your object is very brittle | row 4, cell 2 | row 4, cell 3 |
Your object has lots of beads on the sides | row 5, cell 2 | row 5, cell 3 |
row 6, cell 1 | row 6, cell 2 | row 6, cell 3 |