Posted 11/25/2015

In my last episode of “The Perils of Pauline” (aka Printrbot Simple Metal Glass Print Bed Issues), I described a set of measurements and print tests that ultimately led exactly nowhere, except maybe to the conclusion that Printrbot’s vaunted ‘Auto-leveling’ (more accurately ‘bed tilt correction’) wasn’t all that effective, and might even be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

So, in this episode, I decided  to manually level the glass print bed with painter’s tape shims, to see if I could get better prints that way.  To do this, I used the existing Z-axis probe, the G29 ‘auto-level’ command, and the G30 ‘Z-axis probe here’ command.  The G29 command tells the Printrbot to probe the Z-axis at three pre-configured points ( (10, 150), (10,10) and (150,10) in my case), and the G30 command tells it to probe the Z-axis wherever it happens to be (I used this to probe the bed at (150,10) – the rear right corner).  Between these two commands, I could measure the print bed surface height at all 4 corners and adjust accordingly.

From previous measurements I knew that the bed tilted upwards from the rear to the front, and from left to right.  Therefore I started out by moving the single layer tape shim from the front edge, and adding a single layer shim along the left edge.  After three or four iterations, I wound up with two tape layers on the left and rear edges, and the resulting probe measurements were within 0.2mm everywhere. It’s hard to get much closer than that, due to variations in the probe results.

After getting the bed as level as I could, I ran another set of test prints.  As shown in the photo below, all 5 positions printed successfully.  I also noticed that the Z-axis worm gear moved noticeably less during print operations, providing an additional indication that the print bed was in fact pretty darned level.

 

When I removed the test prints from the bed, I noticed that the near-right (Position 5) print was less well attached than the others, and in fact the attachment quality improved as I went from Position 5 to 4 and then to 3.  Positions 3, 2, and 1 (all in the same vertical line) seemed to all be nicely attached.  So, the actual print results indicate that the extruder tip is getting farther away from the print bed as it progresses to the right, but the Z-axis probe measurements indicate the exact opposite situation – the print bed actually gets  higher as it goes from left to right!  How can this be?  Well, based on everything I have learned to date, I now strongly suspect that the answer is that the tilt correction algorithm is correcting the wrong way somehow.  Maybe the fact that the Printrbot’s ‘home’ position is at (Xmin, Ymax) rather than (Xmin, Ymin) is causing a sign error somewhere, and this is causing the Printrbot to correct the Z-axis  up for movements in the positive X and negative Y directions  when it should be correcting it  down.  This theory tracks with what I have experienced so far, as it would imply that the closer I can get the plate to absolute level, the smaller the error  would be, ultimately going to zero error for a perfectly flat plate. Of course, if I’m right, I should be able to somehow track down and correct this sign issue, and therefore convert what is now a force for evil into a force for good – arggghhhh!!!!

Late addition:  After posting this to the ‘Printrbot Talk’ forum, I got a note from ‘Retiree Jay’ to the effect that I could disable the tilt correction function entirely by omitting the ‘G29’ command from the startup script, leaving only the ‘G28 X0 Y0 Z0’ command. So, I did this and ran another series of test prints as shown in the following photo.  As you can see, all prints were successful, even the added Position at the right rear of the print bed.  And even better, Retiree Jay was correct in that the Z-axis motor did not run at all (up or down) during prints of a specific layer (since I printed only one layer for each position, this means that the Z-axis motor didn’t run at all during the entire print series.  This pretty much proves that my new glass plate  is flat across the entire print area; “Tilt Correction?  We don’t need no stinkin Tilt Correction!” ;-))

Stay tuned,

Frank

 

 

Posted 11/24/2015

A few days ago I posted a long account of my attempt to add a glass plate printing surface to my Printrbot Simple Metal, to address printing problems due to  non-planar warping issues with the original print bed.  As described in the post, I was able to satisfy myself that the glass plate was much flatter than the original bed, but I still couldn’t get consistent prints except in a very small area – printing the same part at the same Z-axis offset resulted in either a print that wouldn’t adhere, or gouges in the painter’s tape.  My conclusion at the time was that maybe the vaunted ‘auto-leveling’ feature (actually just 3-point tilt correction) has been inadvertently disabled in my firmware version, or maybe it wasn’t ever functional in the first place.

So, in this post I describe my efforts to manually level the glass plate print bed.  Based on the results from the previous post, I know that the bed must slope downward from the back to the front, as the print was more or less OK at the back, but became separated from the bed as the print positions progressed toward the front.  So, I put down a layer of painter’s tape underneath the glass plate at the front edge of the original print bed, and then ran the same series of prints, starting at the rear right corner as before.

The following two photos show the painter’s tape shim installation

With this setup, I started by printing the 20mm cal cube at the extreme left rear corner of the print area, what I’m calling ‘Position 1’.  The first print failed partway through when the piece detached from the bed, indicating the Z-axis offset was too high, at Z = -1.1.  This was interesting all by itself, as Z = -1.1 was the offset I used for the entire first experiment a few days ago; I speculate that the addition of the painter’s tape shim may have lowered the plate very slightly at the back corner.  I changed the offset to Z = -1.2, and this gave me a good Position 1 print, as shown below.

Then I moved on to Position 2 (still at extreme left edge, but midway from back to front) and tried again.  As shown in the following photo, I got a good print here as well.

From there I moved on to Position 3 (extreme front left  corner of the print area), and Position 4 (front edge, midway from left to right).  As shown in the following photo, I got a very good print at Position 3, but the Position 4  print detached immediately.

So, it appears at the moment like I have the plate leveled in the front-to-back direction, but not in the left-to-right direction.  Next I’m going to try adding a layer of tape from front to back at the extreme right edge and see what this does.  Note in all this that Printrbot’s ‘Auto-level’ feature  should already be compensating, but it appears to be AWOL.

With  one layer of tape added, I was still getting very poor results in the X (left to right) direction, so I added a second layer of tape.  After this, I was able to get all 5 prints to stick, although as the photo below shows,  the last two were ‘iffy’

So, I added a third layer of tape, and ran another print series, and got almost identical results!  How can this be?  I’ve added three layers of tape, and I’m still not able to print in the near right-hand corner – this just doesn’t make any sense.

OK, the only possible way it could make any sense at all, is if the Printrbot ’tilt-correction’ algorithm  IS enabled, but not functioning correctly, either due to the algorithm itself, or due to incorrect Z-axis sensor readings from the probe.  So  did another test print, but this time I concentrated solely on the Z-axis servo worm gear.  At first I simply put my fingers on the worm gear so I could feel if there was any Z-axis movement during lateral head moves, and sure-nuff, there was some!  Then I put a painter’s tape ‘flag’ on the worm gear and I can easily see Z-axis movement during even small lateral head moves.  The clear indication is that the tilt-correction algorithm is working, but for prints near the right-hand edge of the print bed, the correction is wrong.  I wonder if the errors are due to scaling based on inaccurate print bed dimensions in the printer setup dialogs; this would seem inconceivable, but what do I know?

On a recent print at the near right edge, with 3 layers of tape, the probe measurements were:

(10,143,1.46),  (10,10,1.79),  (143,10,2.32)

with the tape removed, the measurements are

(10,143,1.35),  (10,10,1.59),  (143,10,1.94).

This seems to indicate that positive Z is ‘up’ and that lower positive Z values indicate a surface that is actually closer to the bottom of the printrbot.  This, in turn, should mean that I could achieve what I want by putting tape under the  left edge, not the right, even though the print performance indicated just the opposite! Oh, I have a headache!

with the right-edge 3-layer tape shim removed entirely, I re-ran the original test print series.  Instead of the mess I got the first time, printing at all 5 positions succeeded as shown in the following photo – huh?????

OK, so this just should  not be happening!  When I started this post, with no shimming at all, I could print to position 1, 2 & 3 (along the left edge, from rear to front), but not positions 4 or 5 (along the front edge, from left to right).  This behavior is what led me to shim along the right edge, but although I thought I was making the situation better, increasing the shim height from 2 to 3 layers  didn’t  help at all, and now I find that with  no shim layers I get really nice prints at all 5 positions – what gives?

Thinking back through everything I did this evening, I realized there was one thing I did that could maybe have affected the situation – I changed the printer extents via the Repetier ‘Printer Settings’ dialog.  This  should not affect tilt correction calculations at all, since the Printrbot already knows the absolute coordinates for all three Z-axis probe points, so why would it care (or even  know) what extents have been set in Repetier?

As a test of this wild and zany idea, I set the Y-Max value in Repetier  to 350, basically twice what it should be, and set up for another print series.  When the probe results came in, they were:

(10,143,-1.06),  (10,10,-0.85),  (143,10,-0.5) – whoa!  How can that possibly be?  Clearly there is some coupling from the values set in Repetier’s Printer Settings dialog, but why?

For  position 2, the Z-axis probe reports (10,143,1.42),  (10,10,1.56),  (143,10,1.90)

– Oh, now I have an even  bigger headache!  How can this be?  Negative values one time, and positive values the next – with exactly the same hardware and software configuration (including the same – bogus – Y Max value)??

For position 3, I get:  (10,143,1.46),  (10,10,1.72),  (143,10,2.03) – print was fully successful

For position 4, I get:  (10,143,1.44),  (10,10,1.70),  (143,10,2.02) – print was successful, but marginal

For position 5, I get:  (10,143,1.44),  (10,10,1.71),  (143,10,2.02) – print fully successful

OK, I give up – I’m officially baffled.  Everything I have done has had either no effect, or an effect opposite to what I expected.  Then returning the experimental setup  to its baseline condition  did not  restore baseline results – WTFO@!!@#$%^&*(

Frank

 

Posted 11/19/2015

A week or so ago I posted an account of my attempt to add a glass plate to my Printrbot Simple Metal print bed.  I thought I had a great idea – place patches of copper foil tape on top of the glass plate at the three points where the Z-axis probe sensor checks for print bed tilt (it’s called auto-leveling, but it is actually more like auto-tilt correction), and everything should be groovy.  Unfortunately, what I thought would happen and what  actually happened were two different things.  It appeared that either tilt correction wasn’t being applied at all, or it  was  being applied, but in the wrong direction (which doesn’t make any sense either,  because I didn’t change anything except adding the glass plate).

So, I decided to make another run at the problem.  My new approach was three-fold; first, I took some time to thoroughly investigate the flatness of the original Printrbot print bed, and the flatness of the glass plate.  Second, I  decided to cover the entire glass plate with copper foil, not just the small areas used by the Z-axis sensor.  Third, I figured out a way (the ‘G30’ command) to take Z-axis sensor reading at multiple spots on the print plate, rather than just the 3 points used in normal printing, so I could really determine how well the Z-axis sensor itself behaved.

Printrbot print bed and glass plate flatness investigation:

I used two different techniques to evaluate the flatness of both the original Printerbot print bed and the glass plate addition.  The first technique was to place a light source so that it illuminated the bed from the side, and look for light leakage under a straight-edge placed on the bed.  The second technique was to use a piece of printer paper (approx 0.09 mm thickness) to see if there were any areas where the paper would slide freely under the straight edge.  The photos below show the result for both the original print bed and the glass plate.  The first image shows the setup, with an LED flashlight placed so it shines light parallel to the surface, with a steel straight-edge blocking the beam except where the bed is warped.  Subsequent photos show warped areas.

 

Next I did the same thing with the glass plate, as shown in the following images.

The glass plate is clearly  much flatter than the original print bed.  I verified this using the paper technique – I was able to easily slide a piece of 0.09 mm paper under the straight-edge on the original print bed, but not on the glass plate.  So, as far as flatness is concerned, the glass plate is a clear winner.

Z-Axis Probe Measurements

Since I was now convinced that the glass plate was much flatter than the original print bed, this issue could not be the reason I was having so much trouble trying to get reliable prints at different points on the print bed.  So, I turned my attention to the only other possible factor, the Z-axis probe itself.  If it was somehow producing aberrant readings, maybe that would explain why the Z-axis offset required for printing at the near right corner was wildly inappropriate for the same print in the back left corner.  To acquire the data I made use of the G-code ‘G30’ command, which causes a Z-axis probe operation at the current X/Y location.  I recorded Z-axis probe readings at 12 locations on the glass plate, and plotted the results using Excel’s ‘Surface’ plot feature

As can be seen in both the data and the surface plot,  the glass plate is pretty flat – with only a 0.42 mm deviation from one extreme from the other.

 

The same set of measurements were performed on the original Printrbot metal print bed, with the following results:

The data shows that the original print bed is pretty flat too, even though the illumination experiment showed that it exhibits significant warping.  I suspect that the probe measurement locations were too widely spaced to capture the low spots.  In any case, all that can be said for sure at this point is that both surfaces (original print bed and glass plate) are pretty flat, and both exhibit some tilt, with Z-axis probe measurements consistently rising from the left rear corner (0,153) to the front right corner (130,3).

 

Print Trials:

After convincing myself that the glass plate was indeed flat, and that any residual tilt should be well within the Printrbot’s correction range, I decided to do a series of test prints – starting at the rear left corner and moving toward the near right corner.  For the first print, I adjusted the Z-offset for optimum printing – not too close, not too far away.  Then I kept this same Z-offset for all the other prints.  The following photos tell the story.

So, at this point I’m pretty sure of three things:

1. The glass plate print bed is pretty darned flat
2. The Z-axis probe seems to be working correctly
3. The Printrbot tilt correction feature  does not appear to be working properly.

Stay tuned,

Frank