Hello everybody,
A friend of mine decided he was going to delve into the world of 3D printers and bought himself parts to build a Kossel Mini paid entirely by donating plasma. He's a year into this project and has asked me to wire and program it for him since I have a bit of experience in the area. At this point though, I'm about to hand it back to him uncalibrated because I just cannot get the thing to work right. This is my first time with a 3D printer myself, so if there is anything I am doing wrong with it, please go easy on me.
So far, I have got all the axes to home themselves correctly, and all axes travel in the right direction. I set the manual z home position so when i send it G0 X0 Y0 Z0 it is at the center of the build platform with a paper's distance between the nozzle and platform. This is about as far as I have gotten though. In my attempts to change the Delta Radius by increasing/decreasing the smooth rod offset, I am running into a whole host of problems.
I can get the X axis dialed in near perfect (to the point I can say G0 X80 Y0 Z0 and it is right close to 80 mm to the right of center) but am running into some trouble. After it gets to about 70 mm away, it starts curving towards the Z tower slightly. If i command it to go to 85 mm, it goes that far, pauses for a half second, and then completely runs away from me until the X tower runs into the hard stop at the bottom (and keeps going). I figured it is going past the build platform and knows it, but it gets frustrating having to hurry up and disconnect power to prevent any damage.
The second problem I am running into is with the Y axis. Using the same settings from the X axis, it doesn't dial in anywhere close. In fact, it seems like it shifts the entire Y axis towards -Y for some reason. If i command it to go to +80 on the Y axis, it will move about 60 mm positive. If I command it to go around 65 mm -Y, it runs away completely, crashing into the Arduino.
Any help dialing this thing in would be most appreciated, as I have had this thing for a week now and haven't made any progress.
Specifications: Arduino Mega with RAMPS 1.4, the Marlin firmware (several different revisions of such, all for the deltabot), and Pronterface for the control suite.
Thank you!