Holiday Break 2021 Upgrades and Issues

 Howdy! I hope you all had a nice break for the Holidays. I personally am back in school and looking forward to my last year as an engineering student! 🎶It's been a long road gettin' from there to here🎶. 
Over my holiday break, I made it a point to include the updates to my printer that I mentioned in my previous blog post:

FLASHBACK

Future Upgrades

As you can see from the screenshot above, my print bed is pretty scratched. This is largely from my difficulties in setting up the direct drive extruder system that I talked about earlier. So, I will be getting a new print bed very soon. I am not quite sold on the glass ones, so I will likely just go for another magnetic print bed. 

Additionally, I have a BL Touch bed leveling system. However, with all the issues that I ran into while upgrading to the direct drive, I had to uninstall the BL Touch to help troubleshoot issues. I will likely install it again soon, I think the addition of the Raspberry Pi will make the BL touch easier to use. 

END FLASHBACK

    I was finally able to implement all of those upgrades. Interestingly enough, the BL touch bed leveling system and the new-unscratched print bed go hand-in-hand. The bed leveling sensor compensates for height differences in the bed by creating a mesh, which looks something like this: 

A mesh of my print bed was created in Octopi with the Bed Visualizer plugin.

    The BLTouch sensor shouldn't let the nozzle go into the print bed like it did before.

So theoretically, as long as I remember to update the mesh before I start a print my pristine new print bed will remain that way. 

    That being said, I've definitely forgotten to update the mesh before the print starts. My next mission will be to either write or find a script that does this automatically before a new print starts.

The new print bed was a simple purchase from Amazon, the installation of the BL Touch took quite a bit of time.

BL Touch Installation

    In my previous post, I talked about how I had tried to install the system but never quite got it to work. Now that I DO have it working, I understand that I missed some vital steps-- but hey, now I know quite a bit about flashing and editing Marlin firmware. 

Issue 1: A bed adhesion incident that happened while I was trying to print a bust of Master Chief caused a large filament glob to form on my hotend. 

A bust of Master Chief.

    What was initially a simple nozzle change turned into a full hotend disassembly. I ended up replacing both the thermistor and the hotend. If you've just gotten into 3D printing I HIGHLY recommend keeping a few of these on hand because they tend to be a common point of failure and often need replacing. You can get packs of both for pretty cheap on Amazon. 

    Issue 2: There are quite a few firmware updates that need to be done, which is a fancy way to say that you gotta comment and uncomment some stuff in the configuration files. I did have a bit of experience with this from my time in Project Lab 1 making a line-following rover using a BASYS3 board, so it wasn't a totally new concept to me. BIG SHOUTOUT TO Aurora Tech for her video that shows what to do! Most of my compiling issues had to do with improper environment setup, I hadn't changed which motherboard I was using, so I did get quite a few errors. But just like with any coding, I kept searching, eventually found the issue, and got the darn thing working! 

    A bonus side effect of figuring out how the Marlin firmware is edited was: I was finally able to center my printing area! I am now using substantially more of the available print surface.

After navigating through these initial issues, the BL Touch was working flawlessly. I was printing Christmas gifts like my life depended on it.

Until... 

Network Errors

    This ventures into the land of RaspberryPi and veers away from 3D printing. To be upfront: most of my Raspi knowledge comes from using Octopi -- so it's not exactly very vast. Most of my networking knowledge comes from my computer networking class -- so it is also not very vast. Suddenly I was unable to access my OctoPrint.local interface and was receiving a DNS error. I tried to SSH into my Pi, but was unable to. When trying to find the Pi on my router's device list it was not there. The most interesting part of all this is that it happened in the middle of a print--which turned out fine somehow? I narrowed the problem down to my Pi simply not being connected to my network. So what was it connected to? How was it able to keep sending packets to the printer for the duration of the print?

    I genuinely wish I had an answer to these questions, but I don't. This was one of those problems that seemed to work itself out. Restarting it on the day that I actually had the issue did not solve the problem, however, keeping the Pi turned off for a while and then restarting it has seemed to resolve the issue. 🤷🏼‍♀️  

To ward off any other issues I am going to retry SSH-ing into the Pi and get all the IP address information so if it happens again I am more prepared. 

My other quality-of-life side project is being able to remote into my Windows machine from my Mac...which seems like more networking fun. So eventually, I'm going to need to figure all of this out. 

But for now, I think I'll print this cool thing from Thingverse, and enjoy the last few hours of MLK day. 

Happy Printing!