Received my Bigbox on Thursday last week, and have been assembling it when I get time - last night I moved onto the commissioning stage and almost immediately hit a wall with the X-Axis. Firstly, no matter how much I adjust the endstop screw, I cannot get the right extruder to X=0 on the bed - I even tried removing the screw and the print head physically cannot move that far over before hitting the idler carriage. Is this normal for the non-titan hybrid? The build manual doesn't make this clear and simply says that the right extruder should be at x=0 on the bed. Second, after homing the print head moves to X175/Y100 - except it moves closer to X225/Y100 - displaying 175/100 on the screen - this doesn't appear to be a steps/mm issue as going int steps/moveaxis and trying to zero X, it ends up about 50mm away from the endstop when it reaches 0 - I can only go 38mm below 0, which means I cannot, using the LCD, get X back to the endstop. There are also a few questions I have about the Z-axis. Going down, i get an extremely unpleasant grinding/squealing sound - I've read that this should be solved with lithium grease, but the stuff I have in a spray can doesn't seem to help at all - do I need to be using the thicker stuff from a tub? Out of the box, my Zsteps were set to 400 - this would be fine if I was given the newer rods/nuts, however I had been provided with the old style (8 holes) which resulted in a very long 5-10 minutes of winding the knob on the LCD to get it to 1600 - no longer an issue as the Z-axis now moves correctly, but is there an easier way to do this if I have to flash/update the rumba for any reason? Thanks in advance for any help Sean
Is the actual carriage touching the idler, or is it the wiring? When I first wired mine up the connector for the left hand PT100 kept getting caught between the carriage and the idler preventing it from reaching 0, so I had to tidy up the wiring - it's absolutely crucial for the wires on the left hand side to be as snug as possible to the carriage and well tied down. I also had a very noisy Z axis until I liberally greased it and now it's virtually silent, I definitely found that thicker grease works much better on the leadscrews. The thinner stuff works nicely on the carriage rods. I feel your pain with the adjustment, I had to change my esteps from 417 to 840 and that was bad enough. There is supposed to be an EEPROM editor plugin available through Octoprint which you could try, although I haven't used it myself yet.
@Sean - I can't check my BB at the moment but I believe the Hybrid X-carriage should allow the right hot end to reach 0,0. A photo of the situation would be great. When homing, I'm not sure why you are ending up away from the X end-stop, it should move until the end-stop is triggered and then that becomes 0. The z-axis does need some good thick lithium grease. If you have to flash the firmware again then you can change the z-steps/mm in the code from 400 to 1600 before flashing it.
@Sarah Nicholson The carriage itself is touching the idler - the first thing I did was to make sure that the cables were out of the way, but the right nozzle still ends up somewhere around x=10 on the bed without the X end stop screw (so the carriage can move all the way to the left). I've got some of the thicker grease arriving tomorrow, hopefully that will make the printer a little less painful to calibrate! @PsyVision I'll get some photos tonight, if I have time I'll try and get a video to show what's happening with the re-homing issue too. Thanks Sean
That definitely doesn't sound right, a picture would definitely help to see what's going on. The homing problem may also be dependent on sorting out the endstop, mine definitely didn't home correctly until I fixed the wires that stopped my X endstop from activating.
So, I got back today and sat down to take some pictures... and instantly was able to resolve both of the X-axis issues (Z is still squealing, but the grease arrives tomorrow) I managed to rearrange the wires on the print head to get them completely out of the way of the idler carriage and can now hit X0 on the right extruder - the culprit was the connector for the thermocouple, The X-axis not zeroing looks like an issue with toolheads - when I reach X=0 on the LCD, the left printhead is over X=0 on the bed (after calibrating the endstop screw) - is this correct? Thinking about what the printer should expect is a little confusing. However, now I'm getting to the point where I want to print the benchy and no bueno. I home and level the bed, heat up the extruder and bed and select the GCode - it just sits there doing nothing? The GCode seems to instantly finish as the printer doesn't give me the option to cancel the print. No idea what's happening, I've looked at the GCode and everything looks fairly normal - the calibration GCODE was printing just fine, so I don't think it's the SD card specifically.
Thanks to @PsyVision who spotted this problem in another post, it looks like there is a bug in Marlin where it won't print files that start with a number. Try renaming the benchy gcode file.
Hah, the PT100 connector strikes again. I really like the idea of the connectors but it's rather inconveniently located for the hybrid head with how critical space is on that left hand side. With your new homing issue, have you got the hotends connected up the right way round? If you're using the default hybrid firmware the left hotend should be connected to HE0 and the right hotend to HE1. If you heat up nozzle 1 the left hand nozzle should warm up.
Ah, yes, that explains what's happening with the extruders - I'll get those cables swapped around right away. It looks like I might have misread the wiring instructions - not a major issue. And yes, @PsyVision PMed me about the renaming of the files. After the cabling switch it looks like I should be ready to start printing, but that may be a problem for tomorrow. Thanks for all the help, looks like I'm finally there!
