Help with strange diagonal banding on Ultibots D300VS+ ?!
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@JoergS5 The frame is rock solid. The D300VS is an all metal frame design with delrin roller wheels, carbon rods with spring loaded ball-cup ends, SLS nylon carriages and effector and a direct drive E3D Titan aero extruder (D300VS Kit Link). By all accounts, it should be a really very excellent printer because the components are all top notch, I'm sure there is just something I am missing.
I printed a tall single walled 40 x 40 tower in vase mode to show what the surfaces look like. The pictures of the 4 sides are linked below:
As you can see, the pattern is pretty consistent up the height of each side, but changes from side to side, which makes me think it has to be something wrong with the motion system (whether mechanical, electronic, config settings or slicer, I have no idea) not the extruder.
Any new thoughts with the added pictures?
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@wwmotorsports I expect the most logic is a part which is not centered (pulley, stepper two bearings inside the stepper) or is loose (pulley, frame, backlash in hinges) or not equal distance (belt). I know that the frame of your printer is rock solit, but a connection could be loose or vibrate.
You could use a digital dial indicator to find out where you have irregular movements.
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You can exchange the stepper pulleys (separately A,B,C axis) with different teeth ones, correct the firmware and print. If the distance of the ripple valleys and mountains is different, you know which of the three sides it is.
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That looks very similar to when I had a hob bearing get a little slop internally. The lines were quite a bit less sloped, but I am using Nimbles with 30 to 1 gearing and IIRC the Aero has 3 to 1 so that makes sense.
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Check the bearings on either side of the drive gear on the Titan Aero. I bet one of them has seized.
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@Phaedrux : I really wanted you to be right because that would be an easy fix, so I broke down the extruder last night to check the bearings, but unfortunately, both bearings were smooth as butter...
@Alexander-Mundy : My last printer (that I sold to build this one) was a Rostock V2 that I had put a Duet Wifi on and a Zesty Nimble as well. I had some growing pains with that extruder including the bad gear mesh inside of the extruder, so that was one of the first things I checked when I had this problem. Last night when I had the extruder apart, I even used an old Nimble trick and added some 30K diff lube to the gear mesh to make sure that friction in the gears was not my problem.
To be sure to eliminate the belts/gears as the source of the issue, last night I double checked the alignment of the frame top to bottom, checked that all of the bolts in the frame were tight, shimmed the gears and idlers so that the belt was within +/- 0.1mm parallelism to the towers across their whole length and removed the guiding flanges from the pulleys. One of the belts was rubbing on the flange of a drive gear a little, so I was optimistic that this change would be the magic fix. Unfortunately, even with all of the above checked and tweaked, the ribbing still persists...
The only other thing I might try to completely eliminate the belt/gear interface as the source of the issue is to try to run smooth drive and idler pulleys on the back side of the belt, but that is obviously not a long-term fix.
I was starting to think I might just be crazy, but then I picked up a project I had printed with some parts from my old Rostock and some from the D300VS, and unfortunately, there is a visible difference in print quality between the parts. In the picture linked below, the upper portion was printed on the D300VS and the lower portion was printed on the Rostock using the same slicer and the same roll of black PLA filament.
D300VS vs Rostock Print Comparison
I'm 100% sure that the geometry and design of the D300VS is better than the Rostock, so I'm really stumped as to what is still causing my issue.
@dc42 : Is it possible I just have a bad stepper driver?
Just in case I'm missing something obvious, here's a link to my config file if anyone wants to comb through it.
Thanks again for trying to help everyone!
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Your image seems more to be a matter of underextrusion. And maybe you had a smaller layer height with the Rostock.
I am no Delta specialist, but 0.1 mm could be relevant, if you have deviations of around 0.1 mm.
In one forum thread the frames were dicussed to flex. So I would try to fix them at a wall and connect the three aluminium frames horizontally in the middle with something stable (temporarily for testing).
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Well, everyone who had money on the extruder as the source of the problem can cash their chips in.
@DigitalVision and @JoergS5 , thanks for pushing me to take a closer look at the extruder, because I was dead convinced it was an issue with the motion system.
I considered that under extrusion might have been the issue, so I just cranked up the extrusion multiplier during one of my test prints, and sure enough, the pattern immediately changed. Interestingly, there was no actual under extrusion as the printed width was exactly what was requested, so I did another test.
In the image linked below are three test prints at different layer heights with otherwise identical slicer settings. On the largest layer height print, the imperfections are so close together they are almost hard to see, but as the layer height gets smaller the "ripples" get farther apart and at a shallower angle. I repeated the test at all kinds of amperage and micro-step combinations and got the same result. For grins, I also tried another extruder stepper and different filaments but got the same result. So, as far as I am concerned, there must be some mechanical issue with the E3D Titan Aero that repeats at a constant volumetric extrusion amount, causing the issues I have been having...
For now, I'm going to take this to the E3D forums for some more focused discussion, but if anyone has any other suggestions, I'm all ears!
Thanks again for the help everyone.
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@wwmotorsports said in Help with strange diagonal banding on Ultibots D300VS+ ?!:
For now, I'm going to take this to the E3D forums for some more focused discussion, but if anyone has any other suggestions, I'm all ears!
Can you please post a link to your E3D forum thread? While I don't think I have anything to contribute in regards to a solution, I'm very interested in the problem and what solutions might be suggested.
Thanks
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In my experience with the aero there are a few things that may be your issue.
The aero gears need to be perfectly aligned to mesh smoothly. The whole body has to turn slightly to get them just right.
The bearings are fickle. Even though you say it turns smoothly my learned instinct says never to trust them. I'd replace them out of spite.
The large gear may need to be adjusted on the hobbed gear to get the filament path lined up on the teeth.
The idler tensioner tension has a sweet spot of not too tight and not too loose.
Just throwing some ideas out there.
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@garyd9 , sure thing. See the link below:
https://forum.e3d-online.com/threads/titan-aero-repeating-pulse-pattern-on-prints.3138/#post-32237
@Phaedrux , thanks for the tips! I definitely agree that this thing appears to be pretty picky. I have already clocked the body and adjusted the large gear on the hob to get the hob and filament path to align. I have replacement bearings on their way as I type this, so I can eliminate that as the issue soon.
The only other thing that I can think of is where the stepper shaft gets centered into the heat sink. Since there is not a bearing in there and I'm sure that the idler is moving the shaft around a little, I wonder if the shaft is actually making contact with the aluminum housing and causing a repeating stick-slip condition? Hmmm...
If I can't get this resolved shortly, I'm probably going to nuke the Titan Aero and go get an effector from 713 Maker and put an E3D V6 and a Zesty Nimble on it since I had such good luck with that basic setup in the past. I'll report back on whatever I find that actually fixes this!
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@wwmotorsports You have two bearings inside the stepper, so non-centered bearings could be a cause.
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As I read this thread today, I did also a test:
I printed a 50 mm diameter cylinder in vase mode. Identical settings. On the left, 0.13 mm layer height, on the right 0.2. On the right, you see like a twisted symmetrical spiral all around the print (in live- version even more than on the photo) which is absolutely gone on the left... Really strange!
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@JoergS5 : that's definitely a possibility, but I have tried two different brand new E3D steppers (compact and pancake) and had the exact same defect so I doubt that's my issue in this case.
@kuhnikuehnast : what kind of extruder are you running?
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@wwmotorsports said in Help with strange diagonal banding on Ultibots D300VS+ ?!:
@JoergS5 : that's definitely a possibility, but I have tried two different brand new E3D steppers (compact and pancake) and had the exact same defect so I doubt that's my issue in this case.
@kuhnikuehnast : what kind of extruder are you running?
It is a zesty nimble. Really strange! Has anyone an idea how this is possible?
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EDIT: I had the extruder gear ratio in the wrong place in the calculations, please see my comments in the next post
Well, I am not 100% sure, but I think this may all stem from a full step positioning error of the extruder stepper, at least in my case.
I was updating to the 2.02 firmware last night when I noticed that the StealthChop mode was now available, so I thought I would give it a try. First thing, it was really impressive how much quieter the printer was with that chop mode enabled. Second, there was a noticeable difference in the print quality changing the chop mode, which I did not expect. In the picture below, the part on the left was printed with StealthChop and the part on the right was printed with an old firmware version using constant off time chopping. The difference isn't dramatic, but it is noticeable:
I wondered why that might be and I did a little research about that chopping method and saw that they claim it helps minimize zero-crossing positioning error. That got me thinking and I calculated the volumetric flow of the Titan Aero per full step of the extruder and compared that to the length of extrusion required to consume that same volume of filament (accounting for the fact that the edges of the extrusion are actually radiused). Lo and behold, the spacing between the ripples in my prints match the volume of extrusion per full step of the extruder almost exactly for all of the layer heights I have tested. See a screengrab of my calculations below (note: I'm tessting with a 0.6mm nozzle):
I figured this all out pretty late last night, so I haven't had time to experiment more, but my next step is to switch the extruder stepper to the other driver that I am currently not using to see if that helps. However, after a little more math, I'm not wildly optimistic that even the most precise stepper driver would fix this.
I have a 400 step/rev stepper with a 16 tooth pulley on my towers, giving me 12.5 full steps/mm of travel for the motion components, which seems reasonable that the human eye would not likely detect the stepping error at that close proximity.
The extruder, on the other hand, with a 400 step/rev stepper, a 3:1 gear ratio and a 7.3mm hob printing with a 0.6mm nozzle at a 0.2mm layer height has a 2.86 MM/STEP ratio when you compare the volume of extrusion per full step to the motion required to consume that volume. In other words, even with a geared extruder and a 0.9° stepper, the extrusion is 35.75 TIMES less accurate than the motion of the carriage...
It seems to me that the only way to remedy that is to run an extremely high gear ratio on the extruder which would cause significant speed issues, or run a filament diameter smaller than the nozzle diameter to alleviate the natural "inverse gearing" that happens when you squeeze a 1.75mm filament through a 0.4mm hole (inverse volumetric ratio of roughly 19:1 by my math).
Someone, please tell me my math is wrong because otherwise, this is a pretty sad realization...
@dc42 , any thoughts on this?
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I had a ripple similar to yours
It was the flex cable on the extruder.But your extrusion problem looks more cyclic than mine.
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@wwmotorsports Your findings are very interesting and I am curious what the others will say.
Instead of your expected reason I can think of another reason also: the delta segments the movement into small linear movements, and maybe your extruder stepper changes directions between the segments, resulting in backlash - and backlash resulting in underextrusion. I don't know how to test it: maybe it's possible to make a constant extrusion for the whole line and segmented movements for the axes. -
@JoergS5 Thanks, I am interested to see what the community thinks as well. While that may be a great explanation for other controllers, the Duet Wifi hasn't used segment approximation for delta movements since 2015, one of the major reasons that it has taken the delta printer market by storm. There may be some funky back torquing going on for other reasons, but I don' think it is as a result of segmentation.
It also turns out that I was moving too fast when doing those calculations and put the gear ratio of the extruder in the wrong place (how embarrassing), and the volume/step doesn't line up with the ripples at all... Sorry for the red flag folks... See my updated calculations with the gear ratio in the CORRECT place below:
CORRECTED Extrustion Ripple Calculations w/ Extruder mm/Step
The extruder is still roughly 4X less precise than the movement of the print head, but not nearly as bad as I was thinking. I guess I'm back to digging for a mechanical issue and I'll come back if I find any solutions.
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@wwmotorsports I think I have seen the same surface finish as you show in your last picture here: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipP0LgD2KayuBlFW1rtLkxyyz1ocY5nyEo4LoMh0iB94N_AW0Mr4rREXntzW---4GA?key=SkZRTkRHdE9Md0ZQWGp4ZVZfbE9veGc3MTlqVWZR
I'll snap some photos later today to compare. I have the same Titan Aero setup as you.
