Before I wrap up this build I would like to perform some fine tuning. After I sorted out my bad stepper and corrected my end stops (oops) the table is running fine but not as smooth as I would like. I haven’t added “sand” yet. Here’s a link to a video of it running a simple spiral pattern from Sandify:
Should I be tweaking acceleration and jerk? Thoughts and suggestions welcome!
Mike
Using Sandify Gcode, board, drivers, steppers?
I hear the steppers kinda chunky (not normal) but it is really hard to say. Baking soda smooths out the ball’s travel but it does bounce around a bit in the magnetic field.
Hey Ryan - My builds a little umm unorthodox… I’m using the board from my 3d printer - Anet A8 v1.7 with built in steppers. The steppers are not tunable. Wait unless they are digipots… Will need to investigate that. I’ll have to find a good speed to print at. If I really slow it down (F100) it’s silent but very very slow. I think I had it set t0 1500 in that video. I guess wire loom and baking soda are next!
You want to tweak the speed more than acceleration and jerk. There is going to be some sweet spots you’ll find where the ball just lags the magnet, forcing it to roll on the baking soda. If you are too slow the ball will have a tendency to slide, if you are too fast it will get dropped. Start with a quite thin layer of baking soda, say well under 1/4 the diameter of the ball then start moving faster and faster until you start dropping the ball. If you are using the DRV stepper drivers you’ll end up with a fair amount of stepper noise when it’s running best, so then you either add dampers to the motor mounts or smoothers to the driver wires to get the soound down. If you are putting it into a busy loud place (like the tavern mine is in) the noise is a lot less of an issue than putting it into your living room. 
how do you get marlin to let you change the bed size on the anet board. all i get is an error when i try.
Which Anet board are you using? I’m using the newer 1.7 board. In Marlin I edited the bedsize under in configuration.h for mine it’s
#define X_BED_SIZE 610
#define Y_BED_SIZE 610
Have you been able to flash your board before? Though mine is working fine I will be swapping the board out and going with the SKR1.3 board and 2208 drivers. I have that setup on my old A8 and it is silent.
it is an old board that was giving to me bricked. used an arduino uno as a programmer and got it back to marlin. after that when i try to put in the bed size, i get an error every time.