Hiya Now that I’ve fixed the printing circles like ovals I’ve tried printing "print in one’ designs like the nasal wrench etc., but still getting movable parts fusing together. Now I believe I need to calibrate my feeder due to over extruding. I need to know how I can cold feed a certain amount of filament to see how much or little it is out by, but cant seem to find anything under rep g or makerware to start the calibration like every forum is saying to do. Ive tried repitier and others like but it will not connect to my CTC over com3 I’ve tried different baud rates too to try but cannot Evan start this calibration. Is there any help out there to get this calibrated please thank you
It’d be cool if you cold fed it into some kind of caliper guage.
Just got some today, for measuring the filament its around 1.8, 1.7. I’ve managed now to setup a pi with octoprint and enter in a command to feed through 100mm and then re measure what was left, the only thing now is where can I find the extruder feeding steps setting under makerware and or rep g, by the way can I use cura with this printer if yes please let me know how to set it up, im not spending 150quid on simply 3d. Thanks again
The short version:-
You can’t change this*.
The long version:-
All replicator clones work in steps, and have no concept of steps per unit. That is handled either in your slicer, or in the post-processor GPX that many slicers use to convert from GCODE to X3G for the printer. When GPX sees a GCODE telling it to extrude a certain length of filament, it does the sums with it’s internal steps-per-mm and outputs an X3G code which tells the printer how many steps to run the extruder motor.
* is technically a lie. You could make your own build of gpx with a new steps per mm, but really there is no point.
The solution:
Your slicer knows what volume of plastic it needs to extrude for a given move. It uses the filament diameter you’ve entered to do some sums to turn that into a length of filament to extrude. And that is the given GCODE. All slicers (somewhere) have an option to apply a factor to the amount to correct for over/under extrusion. Often it’s set to 1.0. In Simplify3D and Slic3r it’s called “extrusion multiplier”. You’ll have to find it in whatever software you are using. But change it a bit and see if that helps your problem. For PLA you might need to go down as low as 0.9.
A good way to select a value is to print some test cubes and set the extrusion multiplier as low as you can where you still get solid top layers
