Transcript:
Today I’ve got for you a new way to calibrate your 3d printer and trust me. It’s never been easier to get great prints. [music] this week, I’ve been really busy. Creating something. I think is the significant step forward for the 3d printing community. I’m really excited about it. So let me explain a little. While ago I had a request from one of my patrons to do a video. On 3d printer calibration. Now, I’ve already done several videos in the past going through various procedures, but it’s hard not to agree that searching for an old video and then looking for a specific snippet in that is not the most efficient way, particularly when you’ve done a modification and you don’t even know which video that you need to refer to, so today, we have a new video but rather than just rehashing old content and taking the easy way out, I decided to push myself and come up with something that I hope is a game changer. Previously, if you wanted to test something like retraction, temperature or acceleration, it involved printing a test tower. The trouble is that to create a tower like this. You need to be pretty handy at manipulating your slicer, setting up different segments for different settings or you needed to do it manually by editing the g-code in a text editor. My new method makes that a thing of the past. I’ve built a website with step-by-step instructions for all of these procedures. You can follow them in order to calibrate your printer, or if you think you want to do just one. Each page has an aim as well as a description as to when that tuning method is required. Most importantly, all of these tuning towers are automated, simply put in the details for your printer. Some settings around the parameter that you’ll be testing and click the button to download the g-code. Everything is dynamically updated to suit your particular printer, and there’s also examples of how to interpret the results as well as calculators to help you compute the correct values. Now that you know what’s on offer? Let me take you step by step through this new calibration procedure. Here is the website, and as you can see, it’s hosted for free on Github, and that means it’s also completely open source. The idea is that you work through the tabs in order to calibrate your printer on the introduction page is a copy of this video and a very important warning. Basically, it explains that there’s always risk in running someone else’s pre-sliced g-code and that you should be present and aware of your printer. When using the g-code generated by this site. I’ve done everything I can to test it and make sure it’s working, but there are always anomalies, So please take care with that out of the way. Let’s move over to the first tab the frame. Check the aim of checking. The frame is to ensure there’s no underlying problems with the 3d printer before we go on to further calibration and I would recommend doing this as soon as you get the printer or anytime you’ve disassembled or replaced significant parts now, anywhere where it’s relevant on this website, I’ve embedded a previous video if it covers the topic in more detail for checking the frame. A lot of this is covered in my guide to your first 3d printer and at the bottom of the page is also embedded a video on 3d printer maintenance. I’d recommend working your way step by step through the headings. This will guide you to various parts of the printer to check over with some being less obvious than others and where relevant this diagram is included to help out beginners for procedures such as bed leveling. This moves us on to our first actual procedure. Which is a pid auto tune. The aim of this is to make sure the heating of the 3d printer nozzle and the bed are safe, stable and consistent. It’s worth doing this as soon as you got your printer, But it’s particularly important. If you change any components around the hot end, and that can include little things like adding a silicon sock or altering your part cooling fan or ducts now. I do have a full video on this in the past, but fortunately, the procedure is very simple. All we need to do is enter an m303 command in the terminal. The firmware will then go through cycles of heating and cooling the nozzle. And if you include u1 in the command, the results of the test can be immediately saved by entering m500 for tuning the bed. You need to have pid. Temp bed enabled in the firmware, but then after that the procedure is quite similar. The heaters on a 3d printer are the most dangerous part, so we want to keep them stable and predictable with these basics out of the way we’re going to complete a baseline print. I recommend doing such a print before you undertake any major modifications. The print that we’re going to do is the 20 millimeter calibration cube by idig 3d printing, It’s quick to print and use as minimal filament. This gives us the first chance to look at one of my g-code generators for any of the tests on this website. It should take less than 30 seconds to generate the g-code. All we need to do is work through the headings and input the correct settings for our printer. If I was printing for an Ender 3 I would enter a bed Dimension of 235 by 235 and in the event of a delta. I would simply tick this box to move 0 0 to the middle. I can enter my hot end temperature as well as my bed temperature. I can control how the park Cooling fan works by default. It will come on 100 from Layer 2 but I can also set it to half of this or tell it to not be constantly on. If I’m printing with something like ABS, I can select which version of Abl I’m using. If any, the options are no abl using g29 to probe the bed at the start of the print m420s1 to restore a previously saved mesh, the specific g-code needed for the Prusa Mark 3 and the specific g-code needed for the Prusa Mini. Finally, we can input some basic retraction values. If you’re starting out and you don’t know what these should be. There’s recommendations for distance and speed written on the page. Once you’ve done this. Click on the download G-code Button, dragging this into the g-code preview from simplified 3d shows that it’s sitting perfectly in the middle of the bed. Let’s say I defeated an Ender Extender Kit to this printer and the new bed size was 400 by 400 As soon as I click, download Gcode and preview the file, we can see that the cube has moved into the correct location for that configuration of 3d printer, all of these other settings dynamically update the g-code before it’s downloaded. And I hope it makes this whole thing really convenient. I couldn’t see any fundamental problems on my cube, which means my printer doesn’t have any underlying issues and I’m ready to continue on with the next tab. If yours doesn’t look so hot, I’d recommend coming back to the frame check page and reworking through the headings. There’s a fair chance. Your problem is covered by one of these next up. We’re going to calibrate the e-steps for our extruder and the aim is to determine the correct amount of steps. Mullen firmware needs to center the extruder to make sure the movement is accurate. This is worth doing when you first get a 3d printer, but especially important anytime you update the extruder or hot end to do this, we’re going to need a terminal such as pronterface or octoprint. The page will guide you through how to work out your existing e-step value, and then we take a permanent marker and a ruler and put a mark 120 millimeters from the entry to the extruder. This works the same. Whether you’re using direct drive or a Bowden Tube now we’re going to send g1 E 100 F 100 and watch as 100 millimeters of filament is slowly extruded as it comes to the end, we reintroduce our ruler and measure the distance between the mark and the entry to the extruder. Let’s say that instead of 20 millimeters remaining, I actually had 19 I can put in my old e-steps as well as this measurement and click calculate, it tells me that since 19 was remaining, I therefore extruded 101 My e-steps need to be lower at 92.08 the page then tells you the g-code commands to set this value and store it to eprom. Our e-steps was important to get spot on, but the slicer flow calibration not so much. Our aim is to determine the correct amount of filament to be extruded by the 3d printer as directed by the slicer again. It’s worth doing when you first get the printer, but also any time you’ve changed the extruder or hot end. Now this one, you have to slice yourself because you’re making a change in your slicer and need to compare the before, and after I’ve got a download for a simple cube up the top and then you follow the instructions for your slicer to slice it. So it’s hollow with a single wall on the outside, and you typically make that wall 0.4 millimeters thick. You’ll then need a pretty good set of vernier calipers to measure the thickness of the walls to see if they match the value that you set, it’s important to measure each side and in multiple places and then take an average of that. Let’s say in Cura. Our flow rate was 100 were aiming for 0.4 but we actually measured a fair bit over at 0.45 The calculator tells us to update our flow rate to 88.89 to compensate. In my opinion? You shouldn’t stress too much about this number because what you see in the finished print is more important. Let’s say you calibrated all of this, But there was obvious gaps in your extrusion, telling you that you’re under extruding in this case. Ignore this value and raise the number until the print looks okay. Our next item is tuning the current for our Stepper motor drivers and our aim is to set the correct amount for our particular Stepper, Motors and printer. Now, as it says here, if your 3d printer is running fine and your stepper motors aren’t too hot to touch then. You don’t need to do this step. You really only need to do this if you’re having skipped or missed steps, or if your Stepper Motors are really burning up, You also might visit this page if you’ve made a significant change such as a heavier bed or converting from boating tube to direct drive. The rule of thumb is pretty simple. If you’re missing steps, you need to up the current. If your Stepper motors are burning up, you need to lower it. And if you’re somewhere in the middle then. That value is good enough now. This page covers the two type of Stepper motor drivers, those that need the physical change by twisting a trim pot on top of the driver and those newer ones where we can do it conveniently with gcode. Everything is covered step by step in text and then videos here are pre-cued to the correct snippet that you need to cover the process. The page then goes through the rest of the details that you need for each type of Stepper motor driver at the bottom. We have a short section on how to Set Stepper Motor Current via g-code with newer TMC Stiffers. Finally, all of our basics are tuned and we can get into something that really impacts print quality. And that is retraction. This is worth doing when you first. Get a printer anytime you change the hot end or extruder or even if you’re changing between a different brand or type of filament. If we calibrate our retraction successfully, we’ll be able to remove stringing seen here in what looks like cobwebs on this otherwise nice 3d print. We have a table that explains the three values we’ll be changing as well as where to find those in popular slices, and we also have a section explaining the factors that we can’t include in this particular test. Now we get to the real meat of it. The form to generate the G code and the upper half is exactly what you’ve been used to from the previous test. The real beauty is this part of the form where we set up our back-to-back testing of retraction. Now it is important to change only one of these three options for each print. If we were to vary all three, we’d have no idea what was actually making the difference. If your attraction was currently set to six, you might take the chance to edit these to have values higher and lower either side. It’s always a good idea to preview the g-code and simplify3d is showing that our values are changing up the tower. We then print the tower, which should take comfortably under half an hour and inspect the results. You can see here that as the tower increases in height, each segment introduces more stringing back on the page. I’ve included an image of this as an example as well as the settings. I input for this particular test based on this test. My ideal retraction is actually somewhere around point four to point six millimeters. Currently I’m running one millimeter, which explains why I still see some stringing on some of my prints With this known, I can then come back to the test, put in my preferred retraction distance and then come through and vary my retraction speed. I can download the g-code. Repeat the test. And if I like, do it a third time to fine-tune the extra restart distance you’ll find on this test that by far the most important factor is the retraction distance and these other two won’t affect the results anywhere near as much next up. We have temperature tuning. Our aim is to set the ideal printing temperature for our hot end for any given filament It’s worth doing this when we first get a printer, but it’s especially important anytime we change the hot end, or if we’re trying out a new type or brand of filament, we have a rule of thumb and special notes to read and then another form to generate some g-code this time. The focus is on setting a temperature which we set lower and then rise as the tower gets higher. Be careful in going too low as you could clog your hot end. I found my results quite surprising. There was more of a difference than I expected. The lower segments as well as being duller, definitely show less surface artifacts. I’m not sure if the higher temperature is introducing them or the added, shininess just makes them more obvious, but based on my results here, I probably considered lowering my print temperature for PLA from 200 to 190 degrees as the very last line on the page says appearance isn’t everything so you may wish to do some destructive testing. If interlayer strength is your priority, our second last test is tuning our acceleration and the aim is to find the right compromise between printing speed and quality, specifically related to reducing ghosting or ringing, which is introduced when printing with too much speed and acceleration. Generally, factory settings are pretty good, but it’s still worth this test. When you first get a printer. But it’s particularly important if you make any changes to the motion system, such as a heavier bed or converting from direct drive from Bowdoin Tube now embedded in the page is a detailed video that I’ve previously made with lots of diagrams and animations explaining acceleration. Jerk and junction deviation optionally. You can follow the guide up the top here, and that will help you work out the maximum printing speed. You can have all of the calculators here update in real time and at the bottom. You’ll have the ultimate number that you need your maximum feed rate in millimeters per second. We then get to our custom g-code generator and the first thing we need to do is to enter an m503 which will give us one of these two results. Were looking for the line that says advanced settings m205 and if it lists X Y and Z, it means our printer is running jerk, or if instead at list J, it means we’re running the newer junction deviation. The top of the form looks very familiar, but if we come down, we have two new sections. Firstly, we can put in the feed rate that we want the print to complete at which means you can really crank up the speed. If that’s what you’re trying to test and secondly, we have a selector for if our printer was running jerk or junction deviation this hides and shows the correct columns to avoid any confusion. The stock Ender 3 value is 500 So I chose to go from 300 through to 800 jumping up 100 millimeters at a time. The finished print is 85 by 95 millimeters in size and has six vertical segments. The inner wall shown here in green will stick to the maximum feed rate that you stipulated and the outer perimeter will be 50 percent of that as I didn’t have a huge range in acceleration. My results are fairly subtle. If you look at the y, you can see as it gets to the top of the segments. There is additional ghosting. The best compromise is probably on the second band, which based on the numbers that I import would mean an acceleration of 400 millimeters per second per second at the bottom of the page. We have instructions on how to update this via a terminal with Gcode. And if I like I can then come back and repeat the test with my acceleration locked at 400 but this time altering my junction deviation based on my previous testing. These results will be a lot more subtle. Our last step is tuning linear advance and it’s worth, noting that this isn’t necessarily enabled in your firmware by default. Its aim is to make extrusion more consistent and that can result in the reduction of bulges and thin spots. If you enable it in the firmware, you need to do a calibration straight away and you’ll need to recalibrate. If you ever change your hot end and extruder and to use it properly, you’ll need to calibrate it for each type of filament that you use. I have a full guide and detailed video on this embedded in the page. Therefore, the content on this website is just a summary linked on the page Marlin’s excellent guide on linear advance, as well as the pattern generator used to make g-code to determine the correct K value. It’s all covered in the original video, but you’re looking for the most consistent horizontal line out of those available, and once you find it, you might like to repeat the test with a finer set of values either side of your chosen one to finish off at the bottom of the page, we have instructions on the different ways that we can use and save our K value. I hope you agree that this is a significant step forward in calibrating a 3d printer. And I really must thank my patrons for suggesting the idea discussing what should be involved and then testing the website for me. The whole website is open source. So if you find a bug or have a feature request rather than comment below this video, please go to Github and lodge an issue. There’s plenty more i’ll be adding to the website in the future, so make sure to subscribe, so you don’t miss any updates in the meantime, feel free to share it with anyone. You think it can be useful too? Thank you so much for watching and until next time, Happy, 3d printing. Gday, It’s Michael again. If you like the video, then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future. Click, subscribe and make sure you click on the bell to receive every notification. If you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content, become a patron, visit my patreon page. See you next time.