Newbie trying to get Prusa with RAMPS 1.4 working

Hello,
A couple weeks ago my friend introduced me to thingiverse and open source printers and I was immediately sucked in. After a little research I ordered some kits and began assembly.

I have a prusa with RAMPS 1.4 from ultimachine and NEMA 17 stepper motors. I have soldering experience and did the RAMPS assembly.

My first issue has been with firmware. The only one I can successfully compile and upload is RAMPS 5D GCode interpreter and thats using a less than current arduino environment (0021). I've tried sprinter, teacup, marlin and some others I believe. Sprinter seems popular but I can only open it in the latest arduino environment and it will not compile.

So with RAMPS 5D GCode interpreter firmware uploaded, I close the arduino environment and open Replicator G to see if I can move some motors. I'm unable to connect with Replicator G. I would asume my machine selection in Replicator G would be 'Mendel with MEGA/RAMPS electronics' right?

Other symptom of note is that the x motor wines and gets a little warm if I leave the board on for any period of time.

All help welcome and thank you!!

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/02/2011 02:00PM by miro87043.

Alright, so I got full control of all motors with replicator g. I can jog and find home without any problems and I've calibrated my distances.
Now my problem is printing. I've started with the 10mm cube. But when I tell it to print only x and y axis operate. No extrusion or Z movement despite operating fine in the control panel.
Any ideas?

I have a different pipeline (sprinter/mega1280/ramps1.2/skeinforge/pronterface) so not very confident but ...

if you are skeining (slicing) w skeinforge make sure you have dimension activated otherwise no extruder moves will be generated in the gcode. For that matter, please post the first 20 or so lines of gcode here for people to look at - if there are no e or z values thats why they won't move - if there are these values it's something else.

For compiling sprinter (and others) you should be able to trouble shoot by reading error logs. You are opening the pde into arduino and it is pulling in the other files right? (opening them all in sep tabs?).

A little more info on your issues would help people understand what might be up. Hope you've progressed a little since posting :-)

Just occured to me that perhaps your e and z steps per mm are way out in your firmware - but you say you can move them both using the hostware and the calibration seems ok?

evans,
I just saw your response. Thanks!
Coincidently I gave up with ReplicatorG and went with pronterface and sfact. After much tinkering I have gotten pronterface running and have began printing.

I'm now struggling to tune my machine to the best of it's ability. It's occurred to me that going with 1.75mm filament was not the easiest of choices. I've found that the settings that work best for a thin wall object are not ideal for a 100% fill object (I have to increase my layer hight to avoid overfilling). Is the case in your experience?

Thanks

My experience with calibration is pretty rough - seems that you really do need to set up diff settings for each type of print. i haven't really got it sorted out yet either. I've decided to just focus on calbrating for one type of plastic, layer height and fill at a time for now. (ABS, .36mm and 100% - for replacement/new parts). I've tinkered with other things before but think I need to focus on one thing at a time ...

Glad your up and running anyway.

As to the layer height / overfill Im not too sure - I haven't used sfact. Skeinforge has many many more options and you can calibrate the infill and perimeter width over thickness seperately, not sure if sfact is similar or not.

Good luck!

I finished building my prusa yesterday. Starting to work the software side. I'd love to exchange contact info since we are both at such close points in the project. Or just send me a message in facebook. Captn Blynd. Still have to finish my heat core today but the body and electronics are done and I've been playing with repG and repRap host to move it around a bit.

I finished my build and calibration a few weeks ago. I started using Repsnapper for calibration and initial testing, but I later moved to Pronterface plus Skeinforge (I did not realize then SFACT was a simpler version of Skeinforge).

Now I am using Pronterface for printing but Slic3r for gcode generation from STL files. Skeinforge has a lots of parameters to adjust and while more powerful it is difficult to master using it. I am not using raft or support structures at the moment.

misan

evans2481 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> As to the layer height / overfill Im not too sure
> - I haven't used sfact. Skeinforge has many many
> more options and you can calibrate the infill and
> perimeter width over thickness seperately, not
> sure if sfact is similar or not.
>
> Good luck!

There are only two things you need to calibrate to get the right width over thickness ratio: steps per mm for the extruder in the firmware and the feed diameter in Skeinforge. There is another parameter in Skeinforge called Filament Packing Density Ratio that you can leave set to 1.0 if your calibration in the firmware for steps per mm is exact or you can change to compensate for different feeds. But alternatively, the steps per mm can be changed in the firmware for different feeds. The latest versions of Sprinter and Marlin has an M92 command to change the steps per mm to make this easy.

Well... I've spent the last week doing what I thought was calibrating, but it seems the defaults work the best. For the most part...
Sfact is setup for 3mm filament with .5mm nozzle with extrusion height x width of .4 x .6
I'm setup for 1.75mm filament with .35mm nozzle. Obviously I adjusted the filament and nozzle settings in sfact, but I also changed my extrusion to .25 x .45
This seems to work well. However bridging has been less than successful

Well you have changed W/T from 1.5 to 1.8. If you wanted the same bridging performance you should keep it at 1.5, so the width would be 0.375.

Bigger W/T is better for overhangs and vertical resolution. Smaller is better for bridging because there is nothing to squash the filament flat, so trying to make it it wider will just cause it to be longer and sag.

I think it is a big mistake making W and T independent in SFACT. In SF you can change T and everything else scales, so you get the same build characteristics, just a different resolution.

Does SFACT have a nozzle setting? I know Slic3r does, but why? It doesn't appear in my flow rate calculations, it only sets the limits on filament size, but that is specified as W and T.

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