I am trying to become friends with my Maslow 4 but it’s giving me a really hard time. I know how to retract and extend belts in the meantime for sure!
Now I am ready to cut my first real piece and after updating to 0.81 (including index.html.gz and maslow.yaml and a subsequiential calibration - just to be sure), I can set my home point!
Initially, Maslow has its home in the centre of the coordinate system. I am able to jog in all direction but when I click “Define Home” - nothing happens. Home is still in the centre.
Strange it just happened to me as well. However, I did the long press and got a confirmation that it was set, but the on-screen position went back to the centre. Now the actual position of the router is not matching the screen position. Any ideas?
Update: I did a restart and tried it again, but this time I see that a couple of the belts are not spooling properly. I tried to jog the machine to the left and it travelled diagonally to the bottom left. Tried to jog it the other direction and it still did the same. The top left and bottom right belts are slack. Any suggestions on the next step to get things back to normal?
Update: Belts have been reset and have tightened fine now. However, after releasing belt tension, it won’t Apply tension now. Is that normal? Or is it necessary to do another cycle of retract/extend?
Okay, good to know. I will try a restart. Do you know how much it matters what function the Maslow is in when you switch back to wifi (or lose connection)? Like does it matter if the belts were tight when you switched or if they were not retracted, etc? Wondering if any of that can cause issues when trying to pickup from where you had last left off.
I powered the M4 today and tried to get the belts to take slack. I wasn’t able to do that, but instead had to retract all the belts. After doing that I noticed that belt offset numbers were not close to 0 as they should be (see logs). Doing another retract and extend confirmed that the belts were tightening with the 0ish offset numbers once again. (I’m not sure if I needed to do a second retract/extend, but without it I couldn’t be sure if the offset numbers would be getting down to 0 again.) And I was able to replicate this entire process after restarting the machine again.
Question 1:
I’m wondering if this is normal behaviour or am I perhaps missing something in the workflow of closing down the M4 properly? Ie. Do I need to retracting the belts each time before pulling the plug (instead of just releasing their tension)?
Question 2:
Is there a link to test g-code file posted somewhere that I could try working with? Loading the one I created shows a mismatch between the onscreen location of the M4 vs the actual position. Not sure if there’s something wrong with the file I created (see attached) or some other issue. This way I can rule out a file issue at least.
You can turn off the maslow in almost any state and not have issues.
It’s just a matter of making sure the belts fully retract before extending them to the anchor points. If you power it on with the belts retracted, you still need to hit retract all at least once so it can give them a tug and know for itself that this has happened.
This is the expected behavior. All the retract belts does is record the amount of belt that was in fact retracted. It is recommended to hit the retract button several times to make sure any belt slack has been removed (hence why subsequent values are typically small, and ideally 0).
Ah okay. So while I was aware of having to hit retract-all even with the belts retracted, I wasn’t aware that you had to make sure that they had to fully retract before extending them to the anchor points. So if ending a session with the belts slack, don’t try to have it take slack and resume. Get them fully in and then bring them out before anchoring. Got it!
That was indeed very helpful. When I did the retraction and got those -1700 offset numbers, I didn’t realize that just clicking on the retract-all button a couple of time was the way in which you could get the numbers reset to 0. I was actually extending the belts fully and then retracting them again to see the 0ish numbers. That was so inefficient and that’s why I was wondering if I was missing a step. Important little distinction. Awesome!
note that if you are having to hit retract-all multiple times, then you are
probably going to have problem calibrating as calibration has the same low
current limit as retraction.
If you cannot reliably retract the belts fully with a single press, then you
should increase the retraction and calibration current limits.
Okay that’s good to know. After retracting the belts (and seeing the negative offset numbers) I basically had to hit retract-all once to get values fairly close to 0 (see attached). And I was able to successfully calibrate earlier (fitness .55) however, its funny you mentioned about possible calibrating problems, because just today I received the following error message and suggestion:
[MSG:ERR: Center point deviation over 15.000mmm, your coordinate system is not accurate, maybe try running calibration again?]
And so I ran it again and got a successful callibration (.56). I’ve saved a copy of that new Maslow.yaml file (and also have a copy of the one from before.) At this point do I need to make any .yaml related updates ?
You shouldn’t, bar is pretty good at letting everyone know when a new .yaml file is needed when he updates the firmware. As has been noted, when that happens, you can copy all the maslow_ variables from your old file and put it in the new one to avoid having to calibrate again.
However, I noticed a couple of odd behaviours. One after the cut and one before. I made a couple of videos to show them if needed (though they’re currently larger than the 8MB file upload limit.
After it stopped cutting, I clicked to move left 50mm. However, it kept going well beyond that and I had to pause it to stop. I tried in the other direction and the same thing happened,
I had just released the belt tension. Then went to move the Z axis up (1mm) and instead, the belts tightened again. (Below where it says Set to comply is where the Release Tension and Tighten Belts happened.)
Jog: Z1
[MSG:INFO: Set to comply]
Jog: Z-1
[MSG:INFO: Set to comply]
Jog: Z1
