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Hi guys,

Like most, I'm pretty tired of calibrating this thing. Its such a continual headache, I really wish it was do once, and not touch again like my mendelmax2.

I'm curious about the smoothieboard and in particular, 626pilot's firmware, to maybe help this out, or at least speed up the progress so I can spend more time printing instead of calibrating.

Is the smoothieboard worth it? Aside from the autocalibration, will it improve my prints?

Also, is there a thread or instructions somewhere for a noob to build a zprobe (including material lists etc etc), something that will be compatible with 626pilot's firmware?

Thanks guys!

I'm kind of curious as to what you're doing. The only time I've EVER had to recalibrate any of my machines is when I've changed something on the printer.

g.

Seems like no matter what I'm doing, my calibration goes to crap every 4-6hrs of printing. My current trend is for every 2 hours of printing, I have to calibrate it for an hour. I'm about to throw the machine out the window at this point. Im going to give i one more shot and try to calibrate the towers with a digital angle on order at amazon. Hoping maybe its some weird tower lean that is just messing me up. It looks great with the old metal carpenter angle ruler, but something else is just not right.

I've followed the manual to the letter. I've tried that z-offset calibration of axe-something. Pretty much just pulling out my hair at this point trying to just get something bigger than 1" to print right.

Anyway, I have the smoothieboard on order as well as parts for the hall-o thingy. I hope this will improve my calibration time and accuracy.

Yeah, you've got something mechanical going on. Using a smoothie with 626's auto-cal is only going to mask (maybe) the issue with the machine.

I can't think of anything that would mess with the printer like that on a continuous basis. It's almost like you've got something coming loose.

g.

Just for another point of reference. I too do not have to calibrate my machine unless I change something mechanical like changing the tension on the belts. So your machine is trying to tell you something but too bad we have a hard time speaking it's language.

But I did have trouble getting large ABS objects to stick and print until I really did get the calibration correct and understood that using paper to set the Z 0 height made the height be equal to the thickness of the paper. In my case the paper was .1 mm thick. So what I do now is still use the paper but then adjust the Z position .1 mm lower after getting all the positions to just touch the paper.

One trick I discovered is I can hear when the hot end just touches the paper because the Peek fan becomes louder when amplified by touching the paper. So I first make sure the paper is flat and touching the build plate and then I listen to each calibration position and make them sound the same. At that point I know the bed is level. Next I go to center bed calibration position and use the LCD to adjust the height so that the sound is just starting to be amplified by the paper. You can easily hear the difference. Then I call that the .1 mm height and adjust down .1 mm more and set the Z zero position there.

Dale

i recently upgraded to smoothieboard and implemented 626pilots auto-calibration using FSRs. i highly recommend the FSRs in place of the hall-o, as it removes the need for accurate probe offsets and seems to be a bit more repeatable in my experience. they're very easy to set up rather cheap as well. i believe the best possible solution is any in which the hotend itself is the probe, which is the case with FSRs.

aside from a few issues i've run into with crashing (controller crashing, not the toolhead) when doing the various calibration routines and a bit of weird behavior, it's been awesome. smoothieboard is worth it even without the ability to do things like autocalibration. prints are immediately improved and the workflow is much, much better. config is simply a file on a (mounted) disk. i use a reprappro glcd with the smoothie and just drag and drop gcode to the sd in the smoothie, then kick it off from the lcd. it's really great, and definitely the 'way of the future', no doubt.