I may have hit gold with the local hackspace, tbh . I think I'm going to get one final design printed off before I see the back of it - something I've been planning to do for a long time.
Well that didn't work out too well. The edge bevels had too much of an overhang, so the print curled away from the bed too much. I got enough printed to work out that my overall design was good however... except for the fact that the D-Pad hole wasn't quite far enough over to the left. I then decided that Tinkercad is a total pain in the balls for precision work, so I started learning Fusion 360: This is miles better, but I've been working on this for.... hours.... now, so I think that's enough for now. Lots to do though: screw posts (threaded, if possible), PCB & LCD supports, and probably more that I can't think of. Need a break!
Enough designing, time to start damn well printing something. Tomorrow, of course, because it's midnight right now... In other news, I visited the local hackspace on their open evening tonight. That place has a hell of a lot more stuff than they used to...
It's not a bed adhesion problem; filament isn't being deposited on parts of the bed properly because of the warp.
That sucks. No bed level calibration on your printer? It looks like the brim is down suggesting it's depositing fine. What's the bed temp? Are you using PLA?
I can adjust the bed height (no auto calibration though), but there's a convex warp in the middle of the bed. So when you level the bed at the corners the nozzle will impact the middle of the bed; if you level the bed further in to try and account for the warp, then you end up with the filament not being deposited on the bed properly - it extrudes just fine but it doesn't stick to the bed if the nozzle is too far from the bed, it just curls and sticks to the side of the nozzle. Sometimes it'll eventually adhere to the bed but as it deposits more layers the print eventually starts to curl away from the bed. I use a 60°C bed for the first layer and then 50°C for all other layers, and yeah, using PLA.
That's frustrating. My printer uses a Duet electronic board and I use 3rd party firmware by a guy who goes by DC42 on the reprap forum. I also use his differential optical distance sensor. The firmware offers a bed level calibration routine which uses the optical sensor to read distance from head at the 4 corners and the centre then adjusts the z axis in real time during prints. Would it be possible to update yours or get some other firmware? Also I use 70 deg first layer and 65 rest for PLA
That bed level calibration basically does the same thing as me doing it manually: it ensures that the nozzle is the optimal height from the bed. The difference is that the automatic calibration is done in software and the software adjusts the height of the nozzle for you, instead of the fiddly process of manual adjusting screws and getting it *juuuuust* right. I can add an inductive sensor and enable automatic bed levelling in Marlin, but that process still can't correct for a bed which bends upwards ever so slightly in the middle. The short answer is that I need to get a flat and level bed - hence needing a glass print bed
Not sure it would correct that. Mine does adjust the z throughout the print so it knows to stay the same height from the bed no matter what x and y are doing. It basically never draws a 2d line it's always the hypotenuse of a triangle (for a straight line) It might work though not sure about the algorithm that takes the 5 point calibration and works out the offsets. I know that it can take even more pointa and should map out the bed pretty accurately. If you get glass on it then it should at least be a single plane even if not flat.
I've spent a lot of time adjusting my firmware, so I don't really want to start poking round in Marlin config files just yet - Marlin does do mesh bed levelling and it is apparently supposed to be able to compensate for non-level beds, but a far simpler solution is to put a piece of glass down.
I just finished making a new top panel for a colleague at work. He wanted a 140mm Fan in the top of one of these for his new mini server. Here is the finished result. I maybe could have made the recess for the screw holes slightly smaller, but overall I am pretty pleased. Printed in PLA on a Wanhao i3-V2.1.
Neat. I found I had a problem where hole diameters would be too small, but it turned out to be an over-extrusion issue.
