Fun with firmware

I have spent the last week Ill and off work (too sick to do any RepRap) but I did manage to spend some considerable time the previous week/weekend playing around with configuring the RepRap FiveD firmware, and this is what I have discovered.

1)     I am a moron! Yes in order to use the RepRap FiveD firmware you first need to setup the configuration.h file properly to describe your Machine as best you can.

2)     RTFM! After much more web reading I have managed to get the reprap FiveD firmware configured as a Gen3 Mendel, this immediately enabled me to use Software such as RepSnapper, Reprap Host, and ReplicatorG using the FiveD driver, hurrah at last this is the sledgehammer to the brick wall that has been blocking my progress for a while.

OK so now I finally have comms using the FiveD driver things have started to work a little more as expected, firstly I have RS485 comms with my EC (yey), secondly I can monitor the temperature (although it needs calibrating) turn the cooling fan on & off, and turn the heater on and off. (that is major progress from where I was recently)

So next I spent some time wiring up the extra stepper driver board I have. (bought from Techzone along with my EC)

This worked like a treat from the off. (sweet!)

My next issue was that although I had EC comms & control sorted I had gained a serial comms issue with the motherboard.

Suspecting a firmware issue I began rolling back through the RepRap FiveD firmware releases until I came across 1 from mid-2010 that did not have the serial comms hanging issue.

Darwin style "screw thread" extruder mechanism

 

So at this point I “appeared” to have full control of my machine time to finish putting it all together, now I don't as yet have a geared extruder of any kind and was hoping that I may be in a position soon to print one, So I have proceeded to bodge the now working extruder stepper motor onto my existing Darwin style screw thread extruder mechanism, apart from the stepper turning the wrong way and having used more zip fasteners than you can imagine thing are starting to look like they might actually work!

However I soon discovered that although I have full control over each independent part of the machine using the manual controls as soon as I began to load STL’s and attempt to print something more issues arrived.

RepSnapper seems to send GCodes to the machine and merrily tell me that it has completed after having only moved the XY & Z a little, it’s almost like the codes are being sent and received but acknowledgement of the code being received is interpreted as G Code sequence completed!

Reprap host just hangs when I attempt to print, the community are warning that the latest release is not good, & RepG does well nothing when I print (but this probably has more to do with me not knowing what I am supposed to do to print using RepG.

All in all I am amazingly close to actually printing something, at least all of the software seems to be working (ish) I think my issue is now I am finally at this stage I need to do a lot of catching up on how you are supposed to use GCodes to print, I realise that there is an intermediary step when using GCode’s and that is the slicing or GCode conversion element.