Ran up the “old” Darwin software and setup the
Z axis so that the bed was fully up (normally fully down for plastic printing)
even then I had to put an extra block of wood on the deck to get the felt nib
to touch the A4 sheet of paper that I had taped to the block of wood.
Loaded an example PCB layout and printed it
using Pronterface after a little fiddling with the profile setup for Milling.
It worked surprisingly well other than my Z
axis did not appear to move at all in fact I could hear the stepper stalling when
it was supposed to be lifting the drill up and moving to the next mill point.
I remember that I had these sorts of problems
with the Z-axis before when I was trying to print plastic and I solved it by
setting the “Limit” to 1mm I tried this on the new milling profile but alas it
did not work, this got me to thinking that there is no reason not to upgrade
the firmware on my old G3 set now as if I am not printing plastic then I won’t
need the extruder at all and this was the key reason I could not upgrade to
marlin firmware before, because it does not support RS485 driven Darwin style
extruders at all, if I want to print plastic using this G3 set I will have to
bodge a G3+ adapter together so that I can drive the additional extruder
stepper directly from the motherboard.
As yet I have not tried this I will attempt to
change the firmware to Marlin and see if this cures the Z axis stalling problem
without the need to use limit function
in SFACT.
If all goes well I may be milling PCB’s sooner
rather than later, although I have read online that Darwins are not stable
enough to do any sort of milling, I am still going to try and set it up for
just PCB milling, if it does not work at all it may well sound the death-knell
for the Darwin.
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