Maslow 4 - moves in unexpected direction when jogging & unspools belts

Troubleshooting
41

Thanks David… setting it up now…

42

Ideally, it should be ran with the material in place because the additional height of the material causes the belts to angle slightly differently. However, in practice, I don’t think it makes a significant difference and running a calibration on the material is not often practical unless the material is a full-sized sheet. The material has to be large enough to run the full calibration grid, and a 9x9 calibration grid will need nearly a full sheet. I’m usually not cutting full-sized sheets, so I most often run the calibration on the spoilboard and the results still look good.

I think it’s most important to get things up and running and not to worry too much about the positioning during calibration or z-offsets, and you can also go back and play with those finer details later after you have a better feel of the machine.

The best advice I can give for calibration is 1) make sure the bit is out and the z-axis is all the way down and 2) start with a small grid, run the calibration, then use those results to run a calibration with a larger grid. Employing both of those sooner would have saved me a lot of time and failed calibrations.

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43

Thanks Andith! I’m trying with the work piece in place now…

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44

I’ve only ever run calibrations the spoilboard. For my purposes, stock can range from 3/4" to 1/8", and I do not really have the luxury of rerunning calibration every time I switch stock thickness. I think it’s been fine…

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45

David Negaard wrote:

I’ve only ever run calibrations the spoilboard. For my purposes, stock can range from 3/4" to 1/8", and I do not really have the luxury of rerunning calibration every time I switch stock thickness. I think it’s been fine…

once you have a valid calibration, then you can adjust for different material
thickness by just adjusting the Z offsets.

I do plan to add a configuration parameter to make this easier, but there is a
big pile of patches pending already (and there is some bug in the current pile)

when you are doing the calibration, you are letting the machine figure where the
anchors really are, and if you do this with an incorrect distance from the
anchors to the arms (Z direction), it will mis-calculate the anchor points,
which will result in errors being baked in to future movements, no matter what
the workpiece thickness is.

David Lang

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46

Well, Bob’s your uncle. Completed calibration and successfully ran the Maslow gcode with new board/encoders and a large frame.

@dlang looking forward to your work on Z offset!

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