Marlin rocks a little less still totally rocks
Update: This was a case of PEBKAC. The problem had nothing to do with Marlin in the end.
I’d been merrily printing things at blazing speed (such as this SimCity 2000 building) and I’ve been really happy with Marlin’s ability to not only print faster, but smoother at the same time. Unfortunately, I’ve run into what I believe to be a reproducible bug in the firmware. I have a 3 or so hour print, and after a while, the printer abruptly starts printing each layer farther off to the right:
I’m using Replicatorg of course, and after printing the same model three times (second and third printed with a different gcode file after re-skeining), the same thing happens in the same place at the same time. I checked out the gcode in Skeinlayer and it’s fine; it’s definitely not telling the printer to make the mess shown above!
I’ll mention at this point that I changed Marlin’s baud rate to 115200 to get it to work with Replicatorg. Yeah, yeah, I’m a bad person and all that. I decided to try printing the same gcode file with Pronterface, keeping the 115200 baud rate to see if it was my fiddling with the baud rate or Replicatorg. With Pronterface, it exhibited the exact same problem, albeit it started messing up immediately rather than waiting two hours (how considerate!). I then returned the baud rate to the normal 250000 and printed the same gcode file with Pronterface once again and got the exact same result as when I printed that file at 115200 baud. So it’s definitely the firmware’s fault.
I’ve asked the Marlin devs for help, but in the meantime, it’s back to Sprinter once again…
Categorised as: 3D printing, Software
Man, that is pretty neat. Although if you’re printing SimCity buildings you clearly need to be making Arcologies! http://mlkshk.com/r/5L4L especially the Darco that one is so bizarre and awesome, I have always been weirded out/impressed by its design.