Starting work on an Online Calibration Wizard, need pictures of your fails and faults

Hi Guys,

Apologies if this has been done before, or done in a different way, but for my own sanity and to try and help those out there (like me) who want an easy life when commissioning a printer, I’m beginning work on an easy online calibration wizard for the RepRap or similar printers.

I want to have a run through visual wizard to do with all the standard bed levelling, nozzle spacing, firmware calibration etc, but also I want to have a section on improving printing quality. I'll make it as open and contribution based as I possibly can, but I want the focus to be on a simple interface.

What I'm asking here is for any kind hearted souls out there who have had problems with prints to contribute pictures of their parts, and the solution to their problem. Then I can create a visual guide where users can pick a picture that corresponds to the problems they are having, and present possible solutions based on their selections.

There's an incredible amount of knowledge and skill in this forum, I'm just trying to make a tool for people like me who are just starting out, and want to maximise their print quality right out of the box.

I think it will also help us new users begin to learn and understand some of the terms and concepts you guys are so used to

I'll post the concept page up when I get to that stage, unless of course someone tells me its a none starter.

Many Thanks

Great idea, check out the printing forum section, and we have a Art of print failure flickr group with a similar idea.

Getting to good quality printing is always harder than it seems.

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[richrap.blogspot.com]

Ah, Rich beat me to it, here's the link in case you don't have it.... [www.flickr.com]

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garyhodgson.com/reprap | reprap.development-tracker.info | thingtracker.net

That's really great guys, thanks so much for this.

I see many of the photos are uploaded by yourselves, would you mind if I used / reproduced them? I may make some exaggerated 3d cad-esque examples and use the pictures as further real-world examples with your permission?

I think it would be great if people could compare their prints with yours and click through the wizard to probem solving steps and tips, although I appreciate some of this is in the flickr account

Thanks again

Hi,

Flickr doesn't appear to allow groups to force a specific license - so each uploader chooses their license, and furthermore, sadly, the default license seems to be None, i.e. All Rights Reserved, which flies in the face of the RepRap philosophy! Saying that I imagine most people will happily make them available to you if you ask, but sadly I think you will have to contact then individually. Or you could post on the group discussion on Flickr itself, but I don't know whether people will see it soon enough for you.

Cheers,
Gary

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garyhodgson.com/reprap | reprap.development-tracker.info | thingtracker.net

Great project - I'm a real fan of guided fault finding rather than stab & try.
The Flickr collection is a real useful resource - which would be made even more useful if organised into related groups etc - which tends to involve an individual taking it on...

Folks are amazingly good here at patiently responding to what are often repeated similar queries, and a comprehensive guide where they can help with steadily refining a centralised set of answers would make best use of that knowledge.

I've just moved from fixing "Gross errors" (unusable output) on my newly completed Prusa into "Usable but ugly" needing more fine tuning..
So look forward to the emergence of the Wizard

Feel free to use any of my pics they are under the Robosprout name. Next time I am in my flickr account I will be sure to switch all my photos so that anyone can use them...that is what they are there for. I have more I should put up.

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www.Robosprout.com RepRap Mendel parts and accessories.
Message if there is anything you need...I have more than what is listed on my site.
Located in the Spokane, WA / Coeur d'Alene, ID area.
Contact: Robosprout@gmail.com Flickr: [www.flickr.com]

Thanks for all the assistance guys, your help is very much appreciated. I'm very wary of all the licensng restrictions, I'm new to all this and I'm scared I'm gonna tread over the wrong line at some point, it seems a bit of an impossible mindfield.

I'm away on business for a week so I'm hoping to have some progress made on this while I'm sat in hotel rooms of an evening with lttle else to do, I'll see how it goes.

Thanks again for the help.
Andy

Great idea, check out the attachment in this post: [forums.reprap.org]
caused by possibly too hot hotend that needed to compensate for the fan blowing on it.

Hows progress?
Have you decided what mechanism you'll be using - e,g, Wiki pages, or a program written to handle the questions...?

Andy-net did you ever progress this? It would be great to have pictures with solutions to compare all my failures to

I started this In asp.net c#, but then I got so put off by all the red tape around picture licensing etc. I thought maybe when I had time I would make some exaggerated cad models and use those. I sorta realised im doomed to make someone unhappy with this so was it worth it? Maybe it is, I don't know?

I think it's a great idea. I'm still at the stage of getting my machine to print a calibration object satisfactorily and wondering what I need to tweak to solve each issue - a page in the wikki with pictures and "increase x" would save me time and (when my patience wears thin) save me asking questions on here that have probably been answered loads of times already.

Machine calibration is the weak spot of RepRap. One can watch the community for years now how difficult it is to follow simple geometric relations. There's a printed track width and there's axis scaling and one has to get these two, both right. Two parameters is one parameter too much for "quick questions".

Sorry, my tone is a bit sarcastic today.

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Generation 7 Electronics	Teacup Firmware	RepRap DIY

Ok, so I registered a domain, and got a concept graphic up.

[www.reprapdoctor.com]

It links back here so people can register their interest. If I get enough of a push and some good suggestions for common problems I'll turn the concept into a real page.

I think this has good potential for the 3D printing community, and would hopefully cut down the amount of repetition in the forums for the basic problems people have.

I'll leave it to you guys to tell me if its a go-er or not.

Andy, You'll see I've posted in this forum about a print problem I'm having (with a photograph). I'm guessing this is a problem thats been seen lots of times and if there was catalogue of photos I'd be able to scroll though and recognise what I have and then read up on the issues and solutions.

go andy go - great idea - just what we newbies need
roger

I think making a calibration/troubleshooting wizard is a great idea!
Actually, if you have all required parts, it is not too complicated to build a RepRap, and it can be done pretty fast.
But make it print reliable, with high quality and fast takes more time, and it's not really straightforward.

A couple of suggestions from me:
First, it woul be great to have something like a parameters database (I'm talking about parameters directly affecting print quality and speed, like layer height for example).
I think it's not too much such parameters, maybe about 20-30.
It might be a table containing a brief description of each parameter, a "safe value", and a "optimal value".
The idea is when you finished building printer, you configure parameters to the "safe value", and you can try to print something.
So, the "safe values" might be far from optimal values, but it should be better to get initial results and diagnose problems using these values.
Something like this:

Parameter: layer height
Description: .....
Safe value: (nozzle diameter) * 0.8
Optimal value: (nozzle diameter) * 0.5. Shoult be multiple of Z steps. Example: ...

And a second suggestion:
I don't know how are you planning to implement wizard, but it would be great to have something like a simple expert system based on contributions from user.
You can take a look at Akinator.

Good luck!