I finally got my Delta RepRap moving correctly

I've been fighting it for over a year. First it was a bad RAMPS board/pololu drivers. I replaced that with a SmoothieBoard (which is awesome by the way) and then it took me a month to figure out that my bed center, homing and gcode combo is causing the machine to calculate out-of-bounds which gives some VERY odd movement.

But now it moves right, with just a single config setting change in slic3r. Set the print center to 0,0 and not 100,100 like I do on my Cartesian printer.

So, now I get to re-wire the printer, as the printer has grown a foot taller over the last year. The existing wires are now too short.

Then, I get to make it print!

In album 2014-04-28

The extruder motor doesn’t move near as much as the effector does. I hope this will allow me to get better prints than if I had a long bowden tube or a heavy effector.

Looking down from the top. You can see that the effector moves much more than the extruder motor.

I was SO happy I got it to move right, that I just HAD to mount the extruder right away. With the printer running. I was THAT excited about it moving correctly that I didn’t even stop the test-print.

Looking down a pillar. I was hoping to see the carriage move up and down more and that the belt & spectra hybrid drive works well. But, this is what is shown. Instead, this shows that the extruder motor moves very little in relation to the effector.

It moves!
I ‘borrowed’ some of my wife’s hair bands and zip tied up the extruder so it balances on a short bowden tube.  I saw this at MRRF and liked it so much that I decided to buy a SeeMeCNC EZstruder even though I already had an extruder for this printer.

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7 Comments

  1. +Jerry Rodberg Would you venture to do a back of the envelope calculation as to whether it's better to suspend the motor up like this vs hanging that mass on the effector proper?

    I can get you weights & distances if you want.

    Just looking for a "you should be able to move 25% faster this way" type of calculation.

  2. I'd say its better.  Ignoring torques from turning that motor (pretty minor) your motor center of gravity moves significantly less up above, so your force to move it will be significantly less than on the fully articulated head.  I'll have to dig up the math later.  

    That's a fair amount of frame flex in that, though.

  3. My intuition tells me it's pretty good. I don't have the math to support it though.
    I think a lot of the "flex" is image stabilization artifacts. although this isn't a stiff system, which is why they quickly iterated past it.

  4. Cool stuff! This is similar to the kind of delta that I'm starting to piece together.. It's really exciting to see the success that others are having. 🙂

    These GIFs make it look like the frame is flexing. That's an illusion right?

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