HICTOP 3D Desktop Printer - z-axis not working correctly

I have this printer from Amazon...

[www.amazon.com]

It's 100% together, the x and y axis work great, as does the extruder. I can't print yet though, becuase of the issues I am having with the z-axis. It is hard to describe what the issue is, so I took a video of it, it's posted on youtube and the link is here...

[youtu.be]

This is my first 3D build (it was a gift, so I didn't even have a chance to plan/research this), so I'm pretty much a newbie at this whole thing. If anyone has some suggestion on how I can get the z-axis to run smoothly I would appreciate it.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/14/2016 03:23AM by jrd.

There are a couple possible causes:

The most common 2 issues are wiring and your microstepping jumpers (the little black things that go under your stepper drivers). You CAN NOT trust the colors of the wires on the motors, you need to verify that you the motor's wire pairs are in the right spot. Try looking under your stepper drivers, you should see three little black clips under it.

here is a link to a thread with someone who has the same issue.

[forums.reprap.org]

Thanks for the link to the other thread. SteveRoy's post actually had my answer. I set my Vmax z: from 5 to 2 and that seemed to do the trick! First successful print. Only downside is every time I connect my computer to the machine (using Cura) it resents the Vmax z setting and I have to manually go in and set it back. I should figure out how to make it stick.

You can. Change it in your firmware, that will make it permanent. And that way if your arduino dies you have a backup instead of trying to remember all the numbers to put them back in manually.

Good deal. Where is a explanation of how to make the changes in the firmware (again, I apologize for being a total newbie)?

Try [reprap.org] . Marlin is the most common firmware, I personally use Repitier because it has a cool configuration tool and it happened to come with my printer. Here is the link. [www.repetier.com] .

And don't apologize for being a noob. We all have these problems at first.

I did not know you could change driver voltage in the firmware. I have Marlin 1.0.2 and thought I saw every setting, but I'll look for it.

Oh, hold on. I might have miss read something. I thought we were talking about your feed rate, not your driver voltage. Give me a second here to do some googling.

Ok this is where We got confused.

Quote
jrd
Thanks for the link to the other thread. SteveRoy's post actually had my answer. I set my Vmax z: from 5 to 2 and that seemed to do the trick! First successful print. Only downside is every time I connect my computer to the machine (using Cura) it resents the Vmax z setting and I have to manually go in and set it back. I should figure out how to make it stick.

SteveRoy was talking about changing the feedrate, not the vmax. They are two different things. The feedrate tells the printer how fast the motors are allowed to turn. Stepper motors have some strange properties where if you try to drive them too fast or too slow or at multiples of the wrong speed, then they just don't work. Changing the feedrate fixes all that.

the vmax thing that was mentioned in one of the posts on that thread comes in when you are adjusting the physical stepper-drivers on your physical control board. You can measure the voltage you have set with the potentiometer that voltage is then proportional to the amount of current that is supplied to the motors.

Feedrate you set in your firmware, vmax is a physical potentiometer which has to be manually changed. When you said vmax above I think you actually meant feedrate, which is in the firmware.

[wiki.ultimaker.com]

According to this, Vmax is the maximum speed in mm/sec, nothing to do with Voltage.

I'm guessing V for maximum velocity, since Amax is the maximum Acceleration.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/17/2016 04:03PM by jrd.

Wow they use V to mean velocity. We mean it to be Voltage.