Welcome to the SeeMeCNC Community

You may want to check this post out:

http://forum.seemecnc.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=4440

That's a good point. I noticed that the spool was binding against the holder quite a bit and may just be the source of the problems. I'll head to the hardware store after work tomorrow and try it out! I have an idea for a ball bearing based holder but first thing's first, it needs to print!

AndThenSome09 wrote:You may want to check this post out:

http://forum.seemecnc.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=4440

Thanks for the tips- I went to the hardware store and purchase similar parts (couldn't find the bearings and in canadian harware stores you'll never find an employee to help you). I set it up and it seemed to solve a few of the problems but not all of them.

I spent a day or so thinking about what could possibly be the problem since I had thought that I'd checked everything however, I never thought to try setting the Vrefs HIGHER than what I'd had

I cranked up the Vrefs on the XYZ steppers to just under what I had my extruder set to. And lo' and behold, magic started happening! You'll see some of the failures on the left, but the crowning achievment is the beautiful PLA blower which I modified to fit onto my effector with the trick laser arms. I'm on the fence onto whether I should go higher or take the Vrefs a bit lower but time will tell I guess. It's kind of funny that somehow I managed to get the Vrefs just high enough to get acceptable motion without comprising its broad strokes positional accuracy too much. Oh well, lesson learned!

Onto the real fun! Thanks guys!

I've been happily printing away since my last post and have been curious to see where printer electronics are headed with newer, faster boards.

I picked up a smoothie enabled board, the Azteeg X5 Mini and am going to be doing a conversion shortly. I've seen a lot of positive reviews of it both on this board and elsewhere. I also really like the IRC community and its dev environment is extremely easy to setup, with easy to comprehend and modify code. Couldn't ask for much more!

I also designed a mount converter for my Arduino holes for the X5, which includes under-board cooling. It's been noted that the heat of the DRV8825s are directed to the bottom of the board and passing air over it is recommended to help keep things cool. Check it out!
I'll be making the mount available on thingiverse once I'm satisfied with it

You'll see some of the failures on the left, but the crowning achievment is the beautiful PLA blower which I modified to fit onto my effector with the trick laser arms.

Would you happen to have the .stl or gcode for this modified pla blower, I have the same problem.
I can understand if you don't have them anymore.

Sure do! Here you go (see attached).

Thanks so much!

Success!
I also changed my heatsinks so that they lay on the bottom of the board. The folks in #smoothieware pointed out that the PCB is designed to direct the DRV8825's heat to the bottom of the PCB. I modified my mounting bracket to support this as well.