Uneven print bed?

[TruckerGeek]

I am having a problem with my prints. I have included the picture below (which is supposed to be a 150mm square). It appears that the upper left corner of the bed is too high, so the extruder is dragging along the glass preventing any of the PLA from being extruded (also happens with ABS). In the front right corner, it appears the print head is too low and the filament is not adhering (printing in the air above the print bed), which causes the plastic to warp and mess up the print at the corner.

I have considered printing a raft, but have not tried it on any print. I have tried enclosing my printer with and without a heater. I have tried print bed temperatures as high as 100C and with the bed unheated and a variety of temps in between (I have only recently tried PLA, most of my prints have been with ABS).

Is there a way to tell the firmware (or MatterControl) to compensate for that corner being high? Is it simply that the heating plate is not level? I have tried flipping and rotating the glass. I am calibrating using the V3 heat to auto-calibrate.

I have the ROSTOCK V2 with the extruder from the V3 (HE280).

Suggestions are greatly appreciated.

[IMBoring25]

Is the calibration procedure not in the build manual anymore? There should be a section involving four macros, one that goes to Z = 0 at plate center and one that goes to Z= 0 adjacent to each tower. You need to unscrew the set screw on the Y Cheapskate (or make a corresponding endstop offset adjustment in the firmware) and iterate until all those macros put the nozzle on the glass without preload.

[TruckerGeek]

Yes that is in the manual. However, with the upgrade extruder (HE280), it does this same calibration automatically.

[Xenocrates]

In theory the HE280 should compensate for it. Right now it looks like an intermittent math error in the Rambo, and there's a firmware update in beta meant to address it. What you could do is mess around with the endstop screws to level it properly (probably shorten the one opposite the thin spot). You could also use the Mattercontrol bed compensation to try and deal with it. Please note that if you take the endstop screw option, you'll need to repeat it after every auto-calibration (At least until a firmware update to fix the issue comes along). Mattercontrol's compensation is it's own kettle of fish, and it may work, but I've also heard it's rather finicky.

[Turpinator]

For the software leveling in matter control... I used it numerous times on large prints when I thought my bed wasn't level. (turns out I just didn't calibrate the horiz radius and stuff enough) But anyway, it worked well, the only disadvantage being I had to use matter controller (which I don't care for).

[TruckerGeek]

I thought with the auto calibration with the HE280, I did not need to manually adjust the screws on the cheapskates. Boy was I wrong. I also discovered that one of my cheapskates broke AGAIN. The cover was very loose (the two halves not coming together and flopping loose) and when I took it apart to examine, I discovered the back side of the screw hole broke loose. Fortunately, I had a couple of spares from the last time the cheapskate broke.

Now that the screws are more properly aligned and the cheapskate repaired, I am printing much more "level". I just needed to adjust the Z offset by .2mm (the skirt and first layer were barely printing because the extruder was right on the glass. I am now printing the same test print and getting a much more level print (no gaps or hanging filament).

I will be upgrading the Rambo firmware, as soon as it is available.

Thanks for the assistance everyone!

[mhackney]

TruckerGeek, the auto calibration built into the HE280 works very well for MOST users. However, it turns out there is an issue for some of us. You can read my many recent posts about it. SeeMeCNC is working on updated firmware to fix the issue and it was made available for some of us to test on Friday. It has been working very well for me. I understand there will be an update to this also.

The issue that some of us have observed is exactly what you show. After calibration, then bed is not level. So you can either level it manually using the endstop screws or programmatically by editing the X/Y/Z tower offsets in the EEPROM. Most novice users will find adjusting the endstop screws to be more logical.