I have been pretty surprised how well my crown drawings have come out after building and powering up!
But I’m not sure I really am understanding Repeatier very well. Here are a few things I’m not understanding:
If I "kill" a print and then restart it, it goes wayyyyy slower than the first time. Why? The only way to get it back up to the speed set from Estlcam is to disconnect and reconnect. Then it behaves.
If I "kill" a print and then manually drive back to the origin, then restart a print, it tries to drive evern further to where it 'remembers' the origin being when I started the print. Again, disconnecting and reconnecting lets me start with a fresh manually positioned origin.
— What is best practice for aborting and restarting a print??
If I click ‘home’ in the manual control tab, where is it going? How do I tell it what I want home to be? I assume this starts with bed dimension and print area?
Same as above with the control panel/knob. Can there be a ‘home’ without end-stop switches?
This is exciting! I really thought I was going to be fighting hardware all day, so I'm pretty happy to be on to the point where I'm working to understand software!
Kill restarts the board, so after that it doesn’t know what speed to run.
Since killing the machine resets it, that also sets zero to that position.
Don’t hit home unless there’s an endstop. 0 is where the machine starts. You can manually drive the machine to where you want it to start, then send G92 x0 y0 z0 to set the new zero position. It will keep this zero until you power off the board, or issue another g92.
Thanks, Barry. That is a start towards understanding, though I feel like your reply may refer to emergency stop, not to kill print?
If the speed of the program is part of the gcode, I still don’t really get why it would not run that speed if I restart.
I totally understand what you said about zero positions and not using home without limit switches. Sortof like always running in a “relative” mode where everything is relative to the power on position. This is just fine, as I’ve previously read and gotten in to the habit of holding it snug against the stops at powerup to square the gantry.
There’s a setting in Repetier for not killing power to motors when it kills a print. That has fixed the problem of slamming the router bit into the table when we want to stop something!
As for understanding where prints start, it is consistent for me if I G92 before I start every time. I don’t yet really undersstand where it thinks it is (seems like it thinks its at the end of the last print, even if I drove it from the manual tab to a new starting position) but zeroing after I position has it always starting where I expect it, now.
Yeah, Kill Print and hitting an E-Stop are different things. Kill Print stops the current job, turns off heaters and maybe raises Z a bit. It’s designed for 3D printing. On an MPCNC if you hit it you just have to assume it’s in a weird state and take things back to normal before trying again. That means jogging back to your original 0,0,0 and sending the G92 command. Once you have that you can start the job from scratch and it should redo everything.