[Fab] help with the cupcakes

Rachel McConnell rachel at xtreme.com
Fri Aug 10 22:56:50 UTC 2012


Hi all, I'm at NB now and have not quite been successful in printing out 
a small test object although I feel I'm so close....  Is anyone with 
Makerbot knowledge still in SF and planning to be at NB on Monday or 
Tuesday morning/afternoon, or possibly Sunday evening?  (I'm speaking at 
Dorkbot this Wednesday so have to miss that.)  I know lots of ppl are at 
Toor now so maybe I'll just have to wait another week.

Or if anyone has thoughts on what I should try, here's my current state. 
  I can get a print to print out (with a hack I probably should solve 
better) but it doesn't stick to the platform, it just gums up around the 
nozzle.  With gcode generated with a different option set it doesn't 
extrude at all...

Details:

I successfully installed replicatorG 0027 for Mac as instructed by the 
NB wiki at https://noisebridge.net/wiki/Makerbot.  After that, I had the 
following issues:

* machine on the right end, with "DIY" sticker, produced a "Toolhead 0: 
Not Found" error.  I did some minor messing around, checking cables and 
so forth, but from my research the solution seemed to be to reinstall 
the firmware... so I changed machines to the one marked 
"NBURL.NET/ASSET001" (btw this nburl doesn't exist) which came up in 
ReplicatorG as "NutJob".

* Was able to control the machine through the control panel of 
ReplicatorG, heat up the print head and platform, move the axes around, 
reset to 0, run test extrusions.  I tried a print, and ran into the 
problem where the machine got up to the warm-up position and just 
stopped (I waited more than 7 minutes).  It was exactly as described 
here: http://wiki.makerbot.com/forum/t-373061
I edited the PID settings as recommended on that page but it still hung 
at the same spot.  I tried commenting out the gcode line where it waits 
for the head to heat up (for all my attempts I knew the head and 
platform were hot enough because I checked using the control panel 
immediately before starting the print).  With that line commented out I 
got behavior that looked like it was attempting a print, but the plastic 
would not stick to the platform.  I tried repositioning the Z axis 0 
several times to get the head as close to the platform as possible but 
it never stuck.  I tried a raft... that started to stick a little but 
then it all came up and gummed to the print head.

The gcode I generated using the base profile "SF35-cupcake-ABP".  I'm 
not sure what that means as this is an older version of ReplicatorG and 
the replicat.org site documentation doesn't apply.  I guess the SF35 
refers to SkeinForge3.5 but I don't know about HBP and ABP.  I tried 
generating it using the "SF35-cupcake-HBP" settings instead, and got 
different problems.  After doing a successful test extrusion, the HBP 
version ran through the motions in X, Y, Z axes but without extruding 
anything more.

I might attempt to combine the startup from HBP and the rest from the 
ABP version but not now.  Any advice anyone has is welcomed!

thanks,
Rachel



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