needing help to get our prusa i3 printer running.

I bought a Reprap Prusia i3 for myself and my son for xmas 2014.
It was fun to build the hardware, but we ran into some troubles when it came to the software parts.
The Ramps 1.4 board had the firmware already loaded. When we installed Printrun (I think that was the name of the SW) we were able to manually control the XYZ axis, heat up the print head and feed out the plastic. Seems all was well.
At this point we were trying to calibrate things but the stoppers did not seem to work as expected.


After screwing around for some time, we had hit a dead end and thought that there could be a better version of the firmware for the Ramps board out there.
We downloaded and installed. That was where we hit our major deadend!.
We lost the meager manual functionality we had.
The spirit of our project seemed to get knocked out of us at this point, and the project came to a complete halt when school vacations ended.


So now we are back to trying to get this thing running. We installed Ubuntu on an old laptop which we are dedicating to the printer (we were using a Windows 7 box before).


The main question my son and I have is: where do we go from here?
FW for the board? how to find the right one? and maybe how to tweek the fw to get it to work right.

Quote
Masterdon
I bought a Reprap Prusia i3 for myself and my son for xmas 2014.
It was fun to build the hardware, but we ran into some troubles when it came to the software parts.
The Ramps 1.4 board had the firmware already loaded. When we installed Printrun (I think that was the name of the SW) we were able to manually control the XYZ axis, heat up the print head and feed out the plastic. Seems all was well.
At this point we were trying to calibrate things but the stoppers did not seem to work as expected.


After screwing around for some time, we had hit a dead end and thought that there could be a better version of the firmware for the Ramps board out there.
We downloaded and installed. That was where we hit our major deadend!.
We lost the meager manual functionality we had.
The spirit of our project seemed to get knocked out of us at this point, and the project came to a complete halt when school vacations ended.


So now we are back to trying to get this thing running. We installed Ubuntu on an old laptop which we are dedicating to the printer (we were using a Windows 7 box before).


The main question my son and I have is: where do we go from here?
FW for the board? how to find the right one? and maybe how to tweek the fw to get it to work right.

Welcome to the board.

You'll need to describe in more detail the problems you are having. It'd also be really helpful if you can describe or provide photos of the printer and the position your end stops are in.

Take a look at Repetier firmware, over at [www.repetier.com]. It has a lot of good documentation and will lead you through configuration and installation of firmware for your printer.

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[3DKarma.com] - suppliers of quality, affordable 3D printer kits and filament for the UK market.

I just finished building my i3, so it's time I did some posting instead of reading.

Could it be that your endstops are not right?
Are they the switch mounted on a small PCB with a few resistors/LED? (Like mine? Mech Endstop v1.2?)

The endstops were not right in my kit. The legs on the switches used were bent the wrong way so the assembler flipped the switches over and soldered them in upside down. This would be fine if the swapped pins were the NC and NO, the reversal could be fixed in the software settings, but it was the NC and the COM that were swapped and this could not be fixed in software.

So to check: with power on the printer electronics (USB will be enough), operate one (or all) of the switches with your fingers. When you press the switch in, the LED on the Endstop PCB should light, when you let go, it should go out. If it does anything else, you have a problem.
The LEDs on mine would just flicker briefly when I pressed on the switch.

To fix:
I cut the switch legs at the bend with a pair of small side cutters, flipped the switch over and tacked it back in place with a soldering iron. Not the neatest job but now I am printing!!

Let us know how you go.

There are detailed steps in an Instructable I did on a scratch build of an i3.
[www.instructables.com]

Steve

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/23/2015 07:39PM by SteveRoy.

A very useful guide. I referred to it myself on a number of occasions (and also before starting on my build, to get a feel for the complexity of the project).
So, on behalf of all the people that have found it helpful that you never hear from, thanks.

Quote
blabbersnitch
A very useful guide. I referred to it myself on a number of occasions (and also before starting on my build, to get a feel for the complexity of the project).
So, on behalf of all the people that have found it helpful that you never hear from, thanks.

Yep Steve's Instructable is required reading for sure. Well organized and explains how things work.

Hey wow.

Thanks everyone for all the input.
The weekend is rolling around and I think my son and I will give it another go with all this info.

Will keep you posted

Thanks again.