I have a question about my kossel mini printer, it is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. Mid print it decided to drop in the Z about 3 to 4 mm and bury itself. This happened twice in different locations on the part. I am using simplify3d and the printer was working fine. I checked the part for flipped normals and to see if it was manifold which all checked out. I’m wondering if it’s a ramps heat issue or something because the machine almost seems to twitch as it’s doing it. Any ideas?
It dropped all 3 arms? Or did one arm slip?
Second time I watched it and it looked like all 3, not in unison though kinda like they all pulsed on one at a time real quick.
Check for a wire shorting the 12v. I had an LED strip inside of my vslot frame that was shorting my 12v supply pins, (beside the x stepper driver), causing erratic homing behavior mid 6 hour print.
The only time this happened to me was a bad usb cable with yhe crc check turned off. Back to old cable fixed but crc is good anyway.
I will double check my wiring when I get a chance and I will try using it with usb, i’ve been using the sd card reader so I could free up my pc. Maybe its just a junky sd slot or card causing the issue.
Huh. I’ve seen the head plunge to the build plate on telling my delta to move outside its printable area, but not in the middle of the build plate.
Ya it is definitely the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen in my whole time messing with 3d printers. I’ve seen an industrial automation machine do something similar when it had a faulty communication device.
I had 2 printers do the same thing, both with led strips.
They would be a couple hours in, and out of no where, they would start to home, REALLY SLOWLY, digging across the print, and would hit the limit switches but motors would just keep thudding away, about 1 step per 4 seconds.
I changed out sd cards, LCD screens, ramps, everything.
After a few weeks, I noticed they were the only two in my printer farm 10 strong, that had Led strips. On occasion, they would finish a big print, but have slight misalignments in the x and y axis, so vertical edges would wobble several mm’s out of position. I realized the short was just barely occurring, and would only temporarily disable the x or y motor, causing it to lose a micro step every few minutes. As the print climbed, a v wheel would press on the led strip and cause the short to be more significant, and that would cause the slow auto home procedure.
I pulled the led strips about 2 months ago, and have about 200 hours on those printers, without any further issue.
There are a ton of places where a wire could short out on the frame, or simply across two wires.
Just my experience.
Awesome advice everyone I flipped the printer over to check the wiring real quick and I didn’t see anything obvious so I tried the same print again. This time I ran it from the laptop and I eliminated my battery backup incase it was somehow causing a brownout situation on the AC side of things without me noticing it. The print made it to completion without any issue. I monitored the thermisistors to make sure that somewhere along the line they weren’t getting false info and messing something up, they stayed rock solid for the whole print. If it is a thermal issue then it should show up again after about 3 hours of printing, so more trial and error I guess. I’m just glad I got it up and printing again thanks for the help everyone, your experiences steered me down the right road…hopefully lol.