Need to Slice/print a single line

Hi all.

Currently in the process of getting my P3Steel up and running. Been a project ive been working on for more than 6 months. about a month ago I blew one of the stepper drivers on the extruder. Unfortunately the drivers are at a heavily inflated price locally so i have ordered some in from china and they have still not arrived.

To let me carry on working on the printer id like to carry on printing on only 2 axis. Yes i know this will only print a line or a single layer on the printer but i would like to get all my settings mostly correct and work out any of the filament feeding issues while i cant do anything else.

I tired to slice an object in cura that was exactly 0.4mm but it just came up blank. I would like to start working with Slic3r.

Any help would be appreciated.

Take anything that you want to print, slice it as you normally would, then look at the g-code. Delete anything after the first layer up until you reach your end gcode. Search for "Z.2" or whatever your first layer or slicing height is to easily find the end of the first layer.

Cura seems to be stupid with thin walls. It either wants 2 lines, or 0 lines. Slic3r seems to do thin walls better. That really sucks that your driver blew up though. Can you use an unused extruder channel as an axis?

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cdru
Take anything that you want to print, slice it as you normally would, then look at the g-code. Delete anything after the first layer up until you reach your end gcode. Search for "Z.2" or whatever your first layer or slicing height is to easily find the end of the first layer.

This would prolly work. I know Cura has the ability to cut at xx layer. However i know that the printer works well on the XY planes. Printed out a test square and it was damn close to perfect. However there were gaps going up vertically every now and then. I think it had something to do with the extruder not being clamped down hard enough.

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iamdarkyoshi
Cura seems to be stupid with thin walls. It either wants 2 lines, or 0 lines. Slic3r seems to do thin walls better.

I'm going to give Slic3r another shot. I like Cura's GUI but hey its not that important. I thought i had tried it with Slic3r but will give it a test and if it works I'll report back.

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iamdarkyoshi
That really sucks that your driver blew up though. Can you use an unused extruder channel as an axis?

I wish that the spare one worked when it arrived Ordered 2 RAMPS boards, One is mine the other went to my uncle. I tried his board and the one driver module didn't work so I swapped it with mine thinking that ill never need all 5 drivers. Now look where I am

On the plus side I have one package of 4 drivers which should have arrived about a month ago and another pack of 10 that I ordered a couple days back. I should have a good few spare in case they pop again.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/23/2015 10:48AM by wes1007.

I hope I dont pop my drivers... my entire printer is run off of one board. Granted, I do know how to do surface mount soldering. My drivers never have to do much work, and they are always cooled with a fan. My goal with electronics is to keep temperatures well below their maximum reccomended temps. If it is too hot to touch, it is too hot. What caused the driver to pop anyway?

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iamdarkyoshi
I hope I dont pop my drivers... my entire printer is run off of one board. Granted, I do know how to do surface mount soldering. My drivers never have to do much work, and they are always cooled with a fan. My goal with electronics is to keep temperatures well below their maximum reccomended temps. If it is too hot to touch, it is too hot. What caused the driver to pop anyway?

Thats my thinking as well. Cant remember if i was running a fan on it. at the time though.

I think it was because I had just bumped the current limit up on the driver. The stepper seemed to be skipping steps but after i had burnt it out it seemed to have actually been slipping a little.

Im guessing you have one of those melzi boards?

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wes1007
Im guessing you have one of those melzi boards?

I am actually using a printrboard clone. Got it with a 280$ printer.

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iamdarkyoshi

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wes1007
Im guessing you have one of those melzi boards?

I am actually using a printrboard clone. Got it with a 280$ printer.

Very cool little board that. Its both a good and a bad thing that its all one piece.

I havent had any issues with it, and the driver chips have overcurrent/overheating protection (or they are supposed to. Dont want to test this). This board contains 0% heatsink. My main complaint is that the cpu couldnt run a delta printer. Not enough horsepower. But the board will run anywhere between like 10-20 volts, so you could use a 16v power supply and the heaters would warm up faster. Also, something to point out: you can theoretically increase the amount of strength a motor can output by increasing the dissipated POWER when using a current-limited chip. Power (watts) = Volts X Amps, and say you are using a motor running at 1A, 3V. Say the max current on this driver is 1A. This means that this motor is driven at a max of 3 watts. However, if you use a motor that runs at, say 9v but still only draws one amp, then the power is now 9w. Same load on the drivers, but 3x the power. This is why scanners (which generally use 24v steppers) have such tiny cables running the steppers. Hardly any current. If driven at a full 24v, and designed to consume 1 watt, then the wires and driver would only need to handle ~40mA. Thats as much CURRENT as 2 typical LEDs! So to reduce load on the drivers, you could put motors of a higher resistance on it. My extruder is about 12 ohms. So at say, 1 watt, I would be looking at about .28 amps on the driver. Hope this wall of text helps, or is atleast interesting.
Also, incase you get lazy: [www.rapidtables.com]

I think you are taking the wrong approach, it is better to calibrate everything else first, and then work with extrusion. You might have a perfect line, but once printer is operational the rest of the print is crap because of misalignments in the frame, and all that work goes to the trash can.

Mount a pen or pencil in the carriage and a piece of paper in the bed, allow the pen to slice up and down so when z goes up the pen will still touch the paper. If line moves away from previous one you can calibrate you axis.

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ggherbaz
I think you are taking the wrong approach, it is better to calibrate everything else first, and then work with extrusion. You might have a perfect line, but once printer is operational the rest of the print is crap because of misalignments in the frame, and all that work goes to the trash can.

Mount a pen or pencil in the carriage and a piece of paper in the bed, allow the pen to slice up and down so when z goes up the pen will still touch the paper. If line moves away from previous one you can calibrate you axis.

I managed to get a test cube printed off before the drivers popped, Looking at the test cube it was laying down pretty consistent lines and their was not an awful lot of deviation. The problem I had with the test cube was that the layers had some cavities in them which I would think was an extrusion problem. Ill see if i can find my test print or at least an image of it and post it.

So I managed to order some new drivers locally and this topic is now irrelevant. My best bet would have been running the drivers in XY and E making sure i can print 1 layer fine. Then moving on to the print with say X and Z.