More printer drama. Having printed out a good flat square the other day, it's now gone nuts again
It doesn't make much sense , because on one hand the print is to high, so suggests it's over extruding. But OTOH , there are gaps like a line down the left side or in the corners which suggest under extrusion. I haven't touched the bed, but did later fiddle with that which seems to have made things worse
I calibrated the extruder again and it was 15mm to short on a 100mm runs.. Hmm.. So I calibrated it.. And it was still out by the same amount. It's the point that now it seems to be massively over-extruding. But repeated tests showed inconsistent lengths
last thing I did was to swap the whole extruder for my original hack job and that is now giving consistent flow rates but the odd gaps in the print still persist.
For a while I have thought the belt is missing bits or the motor is slipping. But on something like a 100mm square, it doesn't make sense that it misses a whole line on the Y axis.. Same place each time.
At one point something really bonkers happened. The print seemed to scale by itself to like 75%! It wasn't the slicer or options either. But it gets better, it totally missed the right side of the print. Like it hit a invisable wall and wouldn't behave. After I turned the printer off and on again, that issue went away.
I've also had odd issues like when I was trying the gcode for finished print music. It like played 10 notes then nothing. Next time it was more like 5 notes, then it stopped doing anything at all.
I had some other odd issues where I changed the USB cable and lowered the baud rate and it seemed to help. But in light off all these problems I think the actual board is buggered somehow. It decided it didn't have flash anymore, so I had to send all the calibration codes before each print.
I have a smoothie board. I may see if I can get that going. The docs say you can do new comfigs without having to compile the firmware. So that sounds like a good thing as I can't get vstudio to behave anyway.
Overall I'm wondering to just ditch this printer and buy something else. Though I want to start a voron build maybe after Xmas , like
@Icky's giant panda. So I'm not sure it's worth buying a small printer again, though it depends how long it will take to build the voron. At the speeds I get things done....
But I will give the smoothie board a try I think first. Hopefully it won't take much to get going. My theory is the current flashforge board is "losing" print codes, like it just can't process the codes fast enough and it trips up at the same points in the print and misses lines.
But also I now un-forgot the extruder motor was sometimes running backwards. I think that was the cable / baud rate as not seem that happen since. But again I wonder if other data isn't just missing, but getting corrupted. So it over extrudes sometimes then not others. I think it's why I seem to be going around in circles all the time with settings. It's like it works mostly fine one day, then the next day it's like gremlins have messed with it overnight and I have to mess with all the settings again..
It's possible there's problems with the belt or even the motors. But they are not exactly quick to change, but that's getting to the point of a total rebuild and after like 3 weeks of messing with it now.. I'll try the smoothie board and see if anything changes, for the better that is.
