Just an "fyi" : Got Octoprint up and running on my cbot. Not necessarily cbot directly related, but I did do a slight mod to the camera mount to make it work with the 20x40 extrusions. Anyway, if you've been looking into Octoprint, I have a couple blog posts talking about it, and link to the prints needed to pull it off:
Setting up OctoPrint
Building the C-Bot 3D printer: Part 31 : Setting up Octoprint

 

I will add my endstops in the mix, Carl and I share the Y axis stops. I chose the other orientation switch for my X and Z stops. The Second endstop on my extruder carriage is for future use. After clearing the build plate and cooling down to ambient temp the gantry will cycle to Xmin, I home to Xmax, and shut the power off.

I was also getting the vertical bands in my prints. I had attributed it to a shoddy extruder mount, which should hopefully be solved soon. Although my printer is sidelined at the moment with a blown DC-DC SSR. its was fauxtek, bought from amazon, cheap chinese stuff. I will be switching to a mosfet to control my 12v heated bed with my 24v mightyboard. I may be switching to a 24v bed one of these days, i think that 300mm is just too big for 12v. During a preheat cycle the other night, i left the room to do some chores and said to myself " hmmm, whats that smell". I run downstairs to find my heatbed at 97/70, shutting off the preheat cycle had no effect and the bed still powered up. Big bed, in a cold basement, all by itself on a nice 350watt meanwell 12v pull to many amps, and the smoke inside my SSR decide to quit and let itself out..... bye magic smoke, see you next time! I guess this is where the mandatory safety disclaimer should be said " kids don't try this at home, and if you do, please don't leave your printer unattended"

 

Hi all,

What various print bed mounting and leveling set-ups are people using? I'm planning a 3 leadscrew set-up to support a glass print surface, aluminium heatspreader, silicone heater, cork insulator and possibly a mounting plate underneath all of that with some fixtures to support levelling.

I could do with a bit of inspiration!

Here's a few renders of what I've come up with so far. There's nothing by the way of bed mounting as of yet, thus this post... You can see the build platform on the less recent, un-annodised picture. I modelled it all from scratch, and obviously took a massive inspiration from both the c-bot and the triple-c-bot.

 

Could you provide a link to those endstop switches? I like the smaller form factor.

 

Thanks for the reply. I was eyeballing it and it looked to be a little lower than the nozzle. I have the carriage installed now, but haven't tried installing the fan yet. Will check it out here soon and let you know.

 

@trublu832 here's the link. was posted just a page back also, its a nice tidy switch. I will dig out the cad model of it and post it, makes modeling easy.

@Carl Feniak The slots are still there, but I have a washer over them. Hasn't been an issue yet, but adding eccentrics has been on my long term radar. The bolted on part for the top is a strain relief, my umbilical is supported by two 3mm filament pieces inside the spiral wrap.

Do you use S3d to slice? you could have set a separate process for the head, then a separate process for the eye and mouth level with no support, allowing support for the rest of the models.

 

Is nobody else getting the same vertical artifacts that Joseph and I are getting? I wonder if its somehow related to the Z stage?

 

I haven't seen anything similar in my Cbot. My bot has the Z bed lifted by two centered screws and all of my belts are pretty darn tight. I'm also not pushing the speed/accel/jerk very high.

 

Its strange, the pics are very similar. The cylinder was printed on my Rep1. My accleration is set to 1000/mm/s^2 with a max speed change 15mm/s^2 for X and Y 150/15 for the Z, and I believe those parts were printed in the 70mm/sec ballpark. I am digging through some boxes trying to find another crappy SSR that I have, get me going until the MOSFET arrives.

 

Adam,

Try printing a few large, single-walled cubes (I did 50x50x25 with a single bottom layer, no top, no infill), at both 90 and 45 degrees. That will help figure out where the artifacts are coming from.

I've been playing with acceleration on my newly-converted-to-direct-drive triple-c-bot, and am currently at 900mm/s2 with a max change of 9 to 10 m/s. I'm also needing to tune the K and K2 parameters, but haven't gotten there yet.

I did notice that if I lower the acceleration down to something absurd, like 500mm/s2 and 5m/s, I get severe corner blobbing. But that could be remedied by playing with the K and K2 parameters.. more investigation needed.

I modified some of the Raspberry Pi camera mounts and stuff for V-Slot and it's printing out now. If it works well, I'll post pics and STLs if there's interest ;-)

As far as your heat bed goes, I don't have any experience with anything other than the heatbed in my Rep1 clone and the 110v 18x18in silicone one I'm using in my trip-c-bot. I haven't tried anything hotter than about 70c, but this big silicone one heats up from 20c to 70c in about 90 seconds.

 

I'm not sure if this is what is being talked about with support options by objects, but if you run the slic3r program directly (not through Repetier), there is a way to define sections of your object to be sliced with different options, like higher or lower infill. You can even select slices through the entire object and change layer height. For example, if printing a ball, you can have a very small layer height to start with. As you go up, change to a larger layer size and then back to the smaller one towards the top.

 

Craftware is a new free program i've been slicing with, you can add custom support material as needed

 

Check out this link for how to do this.

 

Did you use washers or shims? There is a difference.

 

Double-check that you've got the right micro-stepping configured for the stepper drivers, and that the firmware matches.

 

Is there a shim between the two bearings in the wheels? that was my problem with my initial gantry installation.

 

Here's a little teaser, I will post some more pics over in the triple C thread.

 

I finally got Fusion360 all updated and figured out how to get it to display my cloud files.. heres the 3D model for the mini end stop. its not 100% complete, but it has, what I thought at least, everything you should need to model around. Remove the .pdf from the .stp file. I can export it in any flavor you need that Fusion supports.