Things I’ve learned since making this post… G26. Never heard of it. Keep a log of changes I make to my printer. I completely forgot I had put those hard rubber standoffs. I have a build thread on this site, but it’s quite large.
3) I still dislike Marlin, but at least a lot of the G commands I’m using you can override the default values (G29 H250)
Here’s some pictures of the G26 print. I zoomed in on a few of the spots along the outer edge. They look fairly even to me.
I also discovered I was using Marlin(Legacy) instead of Marlin 2 in OrcaSlicer, although I don’t think that will affect anything here.
I created a 1 layer square most of the size of the bed. I’ll print it tomorrow and see what it looks like.
Testing failed. For some reason when printing my GCODE files, the mesh isn’t being used.
I chased mesh leveling for a long time and it turned out the issue was the Z probe happening before the bed was totally warm. Mine warms unevenly and thus is tacos a little while warming up.
I proved this to myself by running a probe command at multiple intervals and graphed the result. I did it using a script, but you could do it manually. I ended up putting a 6 min warm up before doing the Z probe.
And no printer is perfect. As long as the mesh isn’t compensating for too much, it is well within tolerance of any other printer error. It should be able to lay down a nice first layer.
What’s the start gcode look like i a job that’s failing. Everything in the file up unitl the start of the first layer part body.
I thought about that, but I was out there for 2 hours today with the bed heated while testing various commands. Also, I marked the steppers and you can easily see they don’t move when printing side to side or front to back while printing. You can see them move when running the G26 test.
I’ll go out to the shop and post that tomorrow. It’s cold now.
This is up until the start of the raft.
M73 P0 R69
M201 X1950 Y1950 Z150 E3000
M203 X100 Y100 Z16 E60
M204 P1950 R1000 T0 ; sets acceleration (P, T) and retract acceleration (R), mm/sec^2
M205 X10.00 Y10.00 Z0.40 E5.00 ; sets the jerk limits, mm/sec
M140 S70 ; heat bed
G28 ; home all
G34; level bed
G29 H250; mesh level
M420 Z5; set mesh leveling height
M190 S70 ; heat bed and wait
M109 S210 T0 ; heat extruder and wait
G92 E0
G90
G21
M83 ; use relative distances for extrusion
M106 S0
M117 DASHBOARD_LAYER_INDICATOR 1
M117 INDICATOR-Layer1
M117 DASHBOARD_LAYER_INDICATOR 1
G92 E0
G1 E-.8 F2100
M204 P500
M205 X9 Y9
M204 T500
G1 X10.944 Y13.478 F4800
G1 Z.6
G1 Z.2
G1 E.8 F2100
G1 F3000
G1 X289 Y13.486 E8.09072
G1 X289.926 Y13.647 E.02733
G1 X291.154 Y14.438 E.04253
G1 X291.793 Y15.515 E.03642
G1 X291.954 Y16.44 E.02732
G1 X291.962 Y283.616 E7.77414
G1 X291.824 Y284.444 E.02442
G1 X291.202 Y285.504 E.03577
This work may all be a mute point. I found a spare pi4b not doing anything. I’m going to drop klipper on it this evening and swap out the raspberry Pis on the printer and finally move forward with converting the printer over to that.
I’ll hang on to the marlin Pi in case I need to swap back for some reason. I may temporarily lose my heated chamber while I figure out how to wire that direct to the SKR instead of going through the Pi.
Klipper is on the pi. I have a basic printer.cfg loading. I still need to build and flash the board and then do all the real setup and testing. There’s others running klipper on this site, so I’ll be stealing a lot of their configs. Plus I have my smaller printer running klipper to steal from.