One of the most tedious tasks I find on such a big machine is the process of leveling the bed. When the Gigabot first hit the scene auto bed leveling sensors were not around but now I am seeing them on fairly large machines.
Is their a particular reason people are not adding this to their Gigabots?
We plan to try a BLTouch or capacitive probe.
I have recently upraded my Gigabot 2.0 to the latest Marlin firmare 1.1.9. I highly recommend this version because it has Bed leveling without a probe. (manual probing using the nozzle and a piece of paper. I am having great success with the bi-linear option. I think unless you have a perfectly flat and level bed on your machine, the bed leveling feature is essential. Gone are the days of failed print due to bed adhesion.
I also find the advanced linear_adv feature very good to! The idea behind this feature is to have the extruder control the pressure in the nozzle to be neutral when it reaches a retract point and rapid travels to the next. It also has an effect when transitioning corners, eliminating zits, blobs and stringing. It has eliminated all the problems I was having with retracts and ooze control. It also allows me to run prints at a much faster speed than before. Using this feature, I recommend turning of all extruder ooze control features in your slicer program except for the basic retract setting. Mine is at 0.25mm
Here are some tips I've found that helped me get to good prints consistently:
1. Make sure there is no backlash in your extruder drive system. My pinion gear cracked open where the set screw was and the driven gear where the nut fits into was too big. It allowed the nut to spin in this pocket causing it to slip.
2. I use a pico B3 all metal hotend. You must use a duct to direct air over the cooling fins on this hotend. I had lots of jamming issues until I got the cooling issue sorted.
3. If you are printing with ABS material, an enclosure around the printer is needed to keep heat in. Especially if printing tall thin parts.
4. Set acceleration, max feed rate, jerk. As well check Vref voltage on the trim pots on the stepper motor drivers. This will take care of missed steps and print shifting.
5. Calibrate the extruder steps/mm according to your nozzle diameter. This will allow you to fine tune under/over extrusion during the print run.
Overall, I am impressed with the Gigabot and the newer version of marlin has really brought my printer to life!
Hi Jesse,
Great to hear of your Gigabot rebirth :) ! I agree with your assessment of the new Marlin Firmware as we recently released the the latest Gigabot firmware with Marlin 1.1.9 We also included an additional feature called endless printing for our dual extrusion customers. You can read more about the updates here: https://re3d.org/gigabot-3-firmware-4-2-0/
-Matthew
I only leveled my bed once; the time I bought my GB2 that was 3 years ago. Still pretty good. Even when I switch between .4 and .5 nozzles. (Now that I said this I will have a catastrophic failure :- | )
