I’m also noticing that it has a crunchy noise in addition to the motor hum. The crunchy noise is loudest when the middle is moving along the gantry (X on my machine). It’s also louder when the center is in the middle of the gantry. I wonder if the center is bouncing a little bit, on the gantry, and that’s translating out to the bearings, which are amplifying the noise on the rails.
I didn’t think leveling it would be that hard, but it kind of is. I like the idea of making a little zen garden rake. Might print something or else just make it from wood.
I tried using vibration to level it out. In my head, it was going to just turn to liquid and fill up the bottom. I don’t know why I thought that. It ended up not doing anything, except making funny cracks in the BS. I used my “unskil” saw with the blade removed.
I hooked up my octopi to it. It has been working fine. The gcode is pretty coarse, so something like the pause button doesn’t stop right away because something has a dozen lines of gcode queued up. 12 lines of gcode could be three huge loops when drawing squares. The temp graph is still present, annoyingly. But it works fine otherwise.
I made a rake. Table Saw and drill press:
The times are 1/4" long, but if you tilt them, they get shorter.
[attachment file=41917]
[attachment file=41918]
And the Zen part of the ZenXY…Rake and all. I have a little different printed style sketched out.
I must not be doing it right. The raking isnt exactly relaxing. Maybe I should throw in a bonsai tree.
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Need some rocks too.
I’ve been reworking my ZXY in the last week or so. I’ve done three major changes:
- I remixed the feet to mount on the bottom instead of the top. This is helping me test things, and I will build a box with a lid for the enclosure, so this way, the ZXY won’t attach to the lid. The results of this are TBD.
- I shrink wrapped the outside pipes with 1" heat shrink. I like it, but the bearings are sitting flush anymore (the diameter changed) and there’s no way I could wrap the middle, without some more remixing. The pipe is too thick to fit in the bearings.
- I tried some new controllers. First, I have tried it with the trinamic TMC2130, and IMHO, it’s basically silent. This is the configuration in the video below. Second, I have a Grbl_ESP32 board, and I have been playing with that too. I really like it, and the web interface is pretty good. I honestly wish it was Marlin, but grbl will work, there are just a few goofy quirks. I think I will either try to get Marlin to work on it, or get the TMC drivers to work on it. I haven’t decided if I’ll go the “silent stick” soldering/standalone route, or (the better long term solution) get them to talk SPI to the ESP32.
I need to do more building (obviously), but I still really like working on this machine. The ESP32 has me excited, and I have almost convinced myself I should make a dedicated controller board just for this machine.
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Oops, I forgot to post the video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/M7JWoJV4ZBVhCwwR6
As a bonus, you get to hear me arguing with my 4 year old (for scale).
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I went with a couple of these between the RAMPS and stepper and it made a huge difference to sound. Of course mine is going into a bar, and sound level isn’t going to be that much of a detractor… I’ve also played with speeds, the faster you go the louder it is.
Those would be an easy solution.
What speed did you end up with? I’m liking 2000mm/min.
I’ll have to look at my settings when I get home, but I remember something like 50mm/sec, so half again faster than yours.
So, it took about 2 seconds to convert an SPI TMC2130 into a standalone, in silent mode. So I soldered the SPI bypass jumper or whatever that’s called, and left the cfg 4 and 5 in place, and just swapped out the drivers in the Grbl_ESP32 board, and voila! It’s super quiet.
Last night, I had it just running a multi-hour wipe program, wipe after wipe after wipe, and all during dinner, it was loud enough that I could barely hear it through the ceiling (it’s in the room above the dining room). I couldn’t hear it when the heater came on, so it’s not like it was that distracting, but it was through a floor. Today, with the TMCs in standalone quiet mode, it sounds a little quieter than it did from the dining room. That as scientific as I can get. It’s at least 1 ceiling’s worth of attenuation.
If someone is interested, I can post a picture from the bottom of the drivers. I think it’s self explanatory. The other thing I did was adjust the pot (because it’s not set by SPI anymore) to 0.5V (it’s just a sand table, and I’m not exactly sure what the amperage of that is). The direction was backwards, and it’s got 1/16th steps (interpolated to 256), but otherwise, it was a straight swap.
Another totally scientific measurement: My wife noticed that it was a lot quieter and commented on her own about it.
Yeah 50mm/sec is 3000mm/min. I usually think in mm/s, but I can’t do that in the gcode files, so I’ve been thinking in F2000 numbers. F3000 is a bit louder. I think I could argue that a little slower is actually a good thing, because it is so hypnotic.
The most important test. Tells you two things, She thought is was loud before, and now it is less loud. This test does not tell you if if is quiet enough yet, because she still noticed it, So I would lean towards it is not.
I am going to try and whip up some drop in no bearing replacements so we can test them out. That way we can make sure they are more quiet and if they last.
I will do my best not to redesign the entire machine, but no promises are being made in this post.
New ZenXY table! Much quiet! WAF halved!