1 Topic by mburns

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Topic: Azteeg x5 mini upgrade: Z Rehoming Issue

Hi all,

I've had a Solidoodle 3 for a few years now and just decided to replace the sanguinoboard with a brand new Azteeg x5 mini. Aside from some hiccups with windows drivers (still not resolved; only way I can connect to the board is through linux) I was able to get it up and running relatively painlessly. Shout out to Ian from this thread (http://www.soliforum.com/topic/377/upgr … azteeg-x3/), it was a huge help. Instead of rewiring the old solidoodle endstops I took them out entirely and replaced them with endstops I bought with the board and assembled them with quick-connect terminals on the GND and NO switch leads instead of solder. I run my printer off of Octoprint on a Raspberry Pi B+, and for now I use Pronterface on linux for debugging/config editing.

After the upgrade, however, my z axis only re-homes after the "homing bounce" every other time I home it. The normal sequence is you hit home, it advances towards the endstop, contacts the endstop, retracts a few mm (1 mm based on my config), then approaches the endstop again at a slower speed until it contacts it. My printer will do this on one z homing, then the next time I hit home it will approach/trigger the endstop, retract 1 mm, then stop. It won't approach the endstop for the second pass at all. If I hit z home again it works fine, then the next time it skips re-homing, then it works, then it doesn't, etc etc. This happens when controlling the printer with Octoprint as well as directly through Pronterface on my laptop.

This doesn't break my printer at all, but I have to be careful to only start a print after a "failed" z home so that it does a proper home as part of its pre-print prep. Otherwise the nozzle will start 1 mm off the bed, which is obviously not going to fly. I combed through my config.txt file to see if there was some setting I overlooked but couldn't find anything that stood out to this novice Smoothie user. I suspect it's some sort of software issue with Smoothieware since it works half the time, but wanted to run it by the Solidoodle community to see if anyone has run into this problem before. I can't entirely rule out a hardware issue (such is my experience with this machine) although I doubt that would be the problem.

I'll gladly post any other info as needed. If anyone has some experience with this I would love to hear about it! Thanks in advance.

2 Reply by wardjr

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Re: Azteeg x5 mini upgrade: Z Rehoming Issue

This is a new one to me.  I'll be curious to see what the cause is.  My only thought would be a reflash of an entirely fresh firmware.  Good luck and keep us posted.

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3 Reply by Tin Falcon

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Re: Azteeg x5 mini upgrade: Z Rehoming Issue

check the connections and check that the z stop is not loose moving around.
Does seem a bit odd.

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4 Reply by carl_m1968

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Re: Azteeg x5 mini upgrade: Z Rehoming Issue

There is a setting in the firmware that tells it to move a distance after home which is the point at which switch contact is made, not the point it moves to.

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5 Reply by mburns (edited by mburns 2017-02-09 17:55:41)

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Re: Azteeg x5 mini upgrade: Z Rehoming Issue

Christmas/new year had me away from my printer since I made the post but I'll be back at it over the weekend. I'll try re-flashing my firmware and triple-checking my connections and report back. I made sure to add extra slack in the z endstop wiring since it moves but it's possible I messed that up, causing it to tug. The on/off nature of this bug still has me thinking software but anything's worth looking into.

I've got even money saying I messed something up deploying the firmware, as far as I can tell no one else had this problem and aside from the solidoodle frame there's nothing exotic about my setup.

[EDIT]

This topic is probably dead at this point but I just wanted to give a quick update. My x5 stopped connecting via USB for some reason so I haven't been able to completely fix the problem. Before that I figured out that if you home the z axis, increase z height by 1mm, then re-home it then the last home will work 100% of the time. I'm not a fan of band-aid fixes and I plan on solving this eventually, but until then the following gcode inserted into the print start gcode should force a proper z home:

G28 Z
G91
G1 Z1
G28 Z
G90

I say should because my board stopped working before I could try this out, so buyer beware. I'll make another edit if I get everything working again.