Which step are you on (in this wiki post) when you say “the chains never got tight”?
I was manually calibrating the machine based on Settings > Calibrate process. It makes you take the chain off of the sled, extend it several times until it latches on the third tooth of the right motor. When you attach it, it has a button that says tighten the chain to measure distance. THAT’S when it said it was good and the measurements worked, BUT the chains were not tight at that time - they sagged. I was going to do it again because I saw a video where the chains looked much tighter. I haven’t tried just manually putting in the measurement as your FAQ quote suggests. I’ll try that next.
What happens is that the left motor is run backward at full speed for a few seconds to take up all the slack. After which, a measurement is made and then the left motor is run forward briefly to add a little slack to make it easy to remove the chain from the right motor. Once the measurement is made, the slack is added so its a very quick process. But if you never see the chain even look tight, maybe you have too much slack to start with and the motor isn’t running backwards long enough. Once you get the chain attached to the right sprocket, use the ‘retract’ button to reel some of the slack back in before you click ‘measure’.
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The video could be old and before the improvement to the calibration routine that added a command to put some slack back to the chain after the measurement was made.
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Could be - however, it never got tight in the first place - it always had some slack. I’ll give it a whirl with that calibration to see if it worked. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try using the 10ft beam measurement you suggested and if that doesn’t work, I’ll try a new calibration (just saw a reply I missed) and then update. Thanks.
Okay - I got through the calibration better this time - for the X/Y axis. The png below shows you how that went. Then, I tried the Z axis and ran into new complications (never being certain the first part was correct either). I’ll show a photo of what happened in the next reply thread.
When I tested the Z-axis, every button kept lowering the sled. Whether it said “raise” or “lower” or “plunge,” it didn’t matter - they all lowered the sled toward the bottom of the board. So, I “skipped” that step. The next step was supposed to make two vertical cuts and a horizontal cut for refined measurements. We were never able to retract the bit so we eyeballed it (perfectly). It cut precisely through the 3/4" plywood without scratching the board behind it. However, it didn’t make horizontal/vertical cuts. It started cutting diagonally like it was going to go off of the board so I stopped the cut. Here is the result:
Does this ever end? I’m about to give up hope on this machine. Thanks.
I suspect your setup is triangular kinematics, not quadrilateral as shown. Did you just buy a new kit? Who’d you buy it from?
I’ve seen people report problems with zaxis only moving in one direction. I don’t know how they ever overcame it, but maybe trying wiping the eeprom. I thinks it under actions, advanced.
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And you don’t want to cut all they way through the board. This machine can’t cut 3/4 inch plywood that deep in a single pass. And for calibration, you only need to cut a shallow groove to make the measurements. Get the zaxis working before trying to calibrate.
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Yes, I just purchased it one month ago and set it up with the Z axis. By the instructions, it is quadrilateral, but by description, I’d think of it as triangular. I bought it from Maker Made - through Maslow’s site.
I’ll try wiping the eeprom and calibrating as triangular, then.
We had no option for bit depth - it wouldn’t adjust to anything we did. We eyeballed 3/4 inch so it wouldn’t go deeper than the board, but the Z axis controls wouldn’t allow us to shorten the bit length as anticipated.
It’s definitely triangular. Can you point to the instructions that say its quadrilateral?
Try wiping the eeprom and make sure you can get the zaxis to move correctly before trying the calibration process. If things seem weird, try ‘define zero’ on the zaxis regardless of where it is and then try to do some up and down moves.
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We chose the setup that is not triangular, however - the one where the chains each make a Z shape and are counterbalanced by a nylon/stretchy cord. Was that a bad call?
I think you are confusing two things. Triangular/Quadrilateral refer to how the chains are attached to the sled. You are using a ring kit, I assume, and that’s triangular.
The original design that used fixed L-brackets mounted to the sled is quadrilateral… only a few stragglers use this.
The “chains each make a Z shape” is related to the slack take up and that’s either ‘top’ or ‘bottom’ chain feed. If your chains are horizontal along the top beam, you are ‘bottom’ feed.
If your chains are vertical along the side, you are ‘top’ feed.
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Okay - we tried recalibrating three times using the triangular system after wiping the eeprom like you suggested. It repeated our original problem: the sled can’t keep up. However, the bit is retracted so it isn’t even touching the board - there’s no way it has any drag so this has to be a computational error.
It also gave the following error, which makes no sense because I manually entered the values that the machine gave us for the last calibration (we carefully measured the other measurements as well):
Also, we’ve never entered the values showing up in the error message and the machine continued to adjust downward regardless of what we told it when we were “adjusting chain lengths” using ground control.
New thoughts?
Thank you for the clarification - we used all of these parameters in our most recent calibrations. We had the same results as I described in my previous reply.
Thanks.
That error message suggests that you aren’t following the calibration procedure correctly, particularly the part where you ‘adjust’ chains after measuring the distance between motors. When you ‘adjust chain lengths’, the sled isn’t attached.
Are you following the wiki post precisely?
First, the sled was attached when we were trying to adjust the chains.
As to following the instructions precisely, the answer is both yes, and no.
- As a for instance, I can’t see the images on the quadralateral versus triangular post so your input on that was helpful. No calibration images load during any stage of the process on Ground Control on my computer.
- As a second for instance, the instructions tell me to change extend chain settings under “Settings > Advanced Settings,” but this is not an available path on my Ground Control. This makes it so I can’t change the “Extend Chain Distance” to 1651. That said, we were able to figure out how to do this in a step during the calibration process - but I didn’t connect the dots until now.
- As a third for instance, it won’t let me adjust the sprockets to vertical position unless I take all of the chains off … and then sometimes, that doesn’t work either. We took all of the chains off a few times and only to find that the buttons do nothing at all. Accordingly, I’ve skipped this step several times because pushing the buttons does nothing with or without the chains. It seems superfluous to waste an extra 15 minutes to take the chains off only for it not to work. Just to be precise in following instructions, I just took the chains off and tried it again but the buttons are doing nothing.
That link would have been uber helpful to have at the beginning of this process, though. Maslow should include that link with information on how to set up the machine. We got two separate sets of instructions from them and one was very different than the other and we haven’t known which one was better and which one was outdated, only by trial and error. Still, the instructions on that link are much better than what we had before.
I’ll update you if I make any progress.
Are you able to point us to the two instruction sets you were given to use?
Also, for the advanced settings, click settings and then click the very top button (I think it says Maslow settings). Took me a long time to figure out that it was a button and not a heading.
Follow the wiki post… hopefully it will get you there.
And as a warning, I never finished the wiki post with how to do the cutting, measurement, and calibration…