Transcript:
What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of modern hobbyist today. I’m going to be showing you how to calibrate the Stepper. Motors on your 3d printer. Let’s get started [Music] [Music]! Welcome back, everybody. I’m Charlie with modern hobbyist before we get started. Make sure you subscribe to my channel and click that Bell icon, So you get notified every time I upload a new video today. I’m going to be showing you how to calibrate your stepper motors on your 3d printers, so you can get better and more accurate prints. Essentially, your printer has a stored value for each Stepper motor that tells it how many steps to take to move one millimeter. This includes the X Y Z and the extruder motor after calibrating the stepper motors on my printer. I was blown away by how inaccurate they were out of the box. I found that my extruder motor was under extruding by almost 7 millimeters, which explains a lot of the issues. I was having with my prints. If you’re seeing issues with accuracy over extrusion or under extrusion in your prints, then calibrating your Stepper. Motors might be a great starting point for you. You can easily check the value that your printer has stored for each Stepper motor by sending the EM 5:03 command to your printer. Most slicers have a built-in terminal that allows you to send G-code commands to your printer and view the response. Now I usually slice with Kuro, which allows you to send commands to your printer, but you’re not able to review the response which you have to do in order to calibrate your printers so to get around this. I decided to use octoprint. Instead, so within octoprint I head over to the terminal tab and send the command. M 503 which will just list the current settings for your printer. The Command M 501 will do almost the exact same thing as M 503 with the exception that M 501 returns the settings that are saved in a EEPROM. Since I’m not printing anything right now, and I just booted my printer Up. M 503 and M 501 are both gonna return the same settings So either command is gonna work here in any case. Once the printer responds with the settings, look for the line beginning with M 92 The m92 line will state the current steps per millimeter for each of the motors on your printer. There should be one for each motor X y&z as well as one for the extruder designated with a capital E. Once you have, those values copied down, Let’s get started calibrating the extruder motor first to calibrate the extruder. I’m going to mark off a section of filament. That’s 120 millimeters long, and then I’m going to tell the printer to extrude a hundred millimeters of filament. I’ll repeat this process a few times and take an average of the amount of filament that’s left with the target being 20 millimeters. If you have a Bowden tube on your printer, you can remove it from the hot end and then just measure the amount of filament that comes out the end of the tube, but in my case. I have about an tube on my printer, but I was unable to get it out of the hot end, so I ended up just heating up the hot end and pushing the filament through that way. If you have a direct-drive extruder, this is the way you’re gonna have to do it anyways. So it worked out in the end for me to mark the filament. I measured it out with a caliper to 120 millimeters and then used a small piece of a post-i’t note to mark the place. Normally I would use a Sharpie to mark the spot, but since I’m using black filament, I kind of had to improvise with a 120 millimeter section marked off on your filament, go ahead and tell your printer to extrude 100 millimeters of that by either using Octa prints interface or by sending the command. G 1 e 100 F 100 [Music] Once the extrusion is finished, measure the amount of filament remaining Remember the target is to have 20 millimeters of filament remaining If you only have 15 millimeters remaining, that means your printer extruded a hundred and five millimeters. And you’re over extruding. If you have 25 millimeters of filament remaining your printer only extruded 95 and your under extruding repeat this extrusion process a few more times so that you can get a good average of how much your printer is. Extruding will use these averages later on to calculate the new steps per millimeter to calibrate your printer. The new E value will be equal to the target extruded amount divided by the average actual extruded amount And then we’ll multiply that percentage by the current eval you. So, for example, we’ll take 100 divided by a hundred and 2.3 then multiply that percentage by the current eval. You with the new evaluate add, we need to tell your printer to start using it by sending it to the printer with the m92 command. Use the command. M 92 space e followed by the new number that we calculated to make sure that you sent the command correctly to the printer. Send an M 503 command and check the output of the m92 line again. If it worked, right, you should see that the. East steps have updated to the new evaluate it earlier. If after updating your evaluators extruding the right amount of filament go ahead and save it to a EEPROM with the command M 500 this way. The next time, your printer boots up. It’ll use the new eval you to set the steps per millimeter. If you find that after updating the value, it’s still not quite calibrated. Go ahead and repeat this process as many times as you need to, but be sure to use the new evaluate, calculate the extent to be calibrated, and you’ve saved it with the m500 command. Then it’s time to get started calibrating the movement motors to calibrate the movement motors. Download the calibration cube that’s linked in the description and open it in your slicer. We want this print to be as accurate as possible, so make sure to slow down the print speed and reduce the layer height. This print will produce a 20 millimeter cube with a letter marking each of the three axes once the print has completed. Grab your set of calipers again. And measure each of the three axes on the cube in multiple different places, take an average for each axis and jot those numbers down with the average dimensions for each axis on the cube written down, we’re going to use the same equation as the extruder to calibrate the new steps per millimeter for each movement axis. The new value will be equal to the target, divided by the average actual value, and that percentage is then multiplied by the current steps per millimeter for the axis in question, calculate the new steps for all three movement axes XY and Z and send them to the printer Using the same m92 command we did for the extruder rather than sending each value to the printer. Individually, we can send all three to the printer at the same time by denoting the axis that the value corresponds to with the values updated on your printer, go ahead and reprint the calibration cube to make sure that your print is more accurate. Now, if it’s accurate, and you’re happy with the way it turned out, then save those values to EE prom by sending the m500 command restart your printer and send an M 501 command to make sure that the values were safe correctly [Music]. If everything looks good, then you’re done. You’ve successfully calibrated all of the Stepper motors on your 3d printer. If you ever find that, you’re unhappy With one of your calibration values, you can always recalibrate it, but make sure to use the current steps per millimeter. In the new calculation. It might be a good idea to write down the original settings for your printer. So if you screw something up or something’s not calibrating, right, you can always return your printer to square one, but otherwise, that is it. That is how you can calibrate the Stepper Motors on your 3d printer to get more accurate and better looking prints. Let me know in the comments below what you thought of this video, or if you have any video ideas for me to make also be sure to smash that, like button and subscribe. So you don’t miss any of my future videos. Otherwise, that’s all for now, Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you guys in the next one [Music].