Hey, all!
Thanks so much for helping through so many of my other n00bish questions. So I have yet to get a successful print out of my Zim. It seems that it’s either one thing, or another.
Right now, I’m getting strange behavior (noise & pauses) when I try to do a print. Mechanically, the print head moves fine, and I can create Gcode snippets that move the head around, and that run the extruder motors. I can load and unload filament just fine, so things seem to be working at least at that level.
When I go to print, it goes to the origin and extrudes a bit, then it goes to the center of the build plate and creates a square ring around the base of the cube (I’m assuming to take care of the ooze). Then it starts the first layer. When I have filament in there, for the first half of the layer, it’ll extrude super thick, and then for the second half almost nothing at all. Right about the time that the first layer is finished. The print head will just stop.
Previously, I’ve gotten further with this model and it sounded/behaved normal. It got about halfway before the filament jammed and was just “printing air”. On that print, other than the jam, things were working as I’d expect them to.
Sometime since clearing the jam, I get strange noise and strange, uneven extrusion. I can’t say if it’s correlated or not, from memory. I think I got some more normal-ish attempts before this.
I’ve tried using the other extruder and no dice there either. I’ve tried rebooting both the Octopi as well as the Zim itself thinking there might have been some communication issue, but I’ve tried multiple times now and get the same result.
When I look at the GCode viewer in OctoPrint/OctoPi, it seems to look like I’d expect the print to work, but the head just doesn’t seem to move that way when I actually do the print.
So mechanically, there aren’t things that are keeping the head from moving, the belts, pulleys and steppers are working fine. When I do bed leveling, or just put in gcode in the terminal, I can get the head to move all over. It’s just when I print this object where it’s not acting how I’d expect.
I recorded the print (where I didn’t add filament) and uploaded to YouTube here: https://youtu.be/rR3HMcNWOPU?t=81.
Does anyone have any ideas what is making that nasty grinding noise?
Secondarily, I’ve uploaded the original .stl and my sliced (with cura) .gco file to dropox. I was hoping someone could slice the .stl with their slicer for the Zim (using either extruder, just tell me which) and send it to me, so I could try it with a ‘known good’ setup. Also if anyone is particularly brave, if you wanted to look at the gcode and point out strange things, that’s be ok too.
Thanks!
P.S.: Here’s an image of what it looks like when I have filament in there:
Even though that’s what you see, the filament is and can move freely and the stepper is turning (I put a black mark on the motor shaft with a sharpie.)
