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GRBL and legs

A project log for Mr Pancake

Making a pancake printer with no planning ahead whatsoever

nikolai-ovesenNikolai Ovesen 02/12/2017 at 23:320 Comments

today I got the belt for the second axis mounted, i cut some aluminium extrusions to a carefully guessed length and put some legs on the machine and all of a sudden it looks a lot more serious, mostly because it just looks huge....

I flashed the Arduino with GRBL and started feeding the machine with gcode, I haven't made any tweaks to the max acceleration or anything yet, just fired up a gcode sender and made the thing move, it works but the stepper struggles with the x axis, after trying things at random it seems like the gears aren't meshing properly, most likely due to some inaccuracies with the printing, i'm not sure my design regarding driving this axis is the best... But i think the gears might wear down and thus mesh better if I let them run for a while, i disconnected the belts and hooked a drill right onto the driveshaft and ran it for a minute and there was a positive change, i'll also most likely need to get some better controllers for the steppers(or at least adjust the ones I found in a random box).

On the positive side i've now reached a stage where I can parallelize tasks and print and fiddle with software at the same time instead of printing and drinking beer and/or play pinball while I wait.

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