I'm at the end of my tether.
I posted this after failing to get the IR z probe to work properly on my machine, but this is just the last step in what has been many previous failures. I don't know if some of you have similar experiences, or if some of you have hours every night to tweak your machines, or if some of you get lucky and your machines work perfectly first time. I only know my experience, which has been a configuration crapfest, TBH.
I feel the Duet system of gcode configs is like going back to the dark ages of editing machine code. It's a nightmare of 20,000 gcode combinations that no one except the devs can disentangle for you. Each time something doesn't work, it's 'oh, did you miss S1 off the M*** command? You didn't put the M*** before the M*** did you? Did you not read the page on G** where it states you shouldn't combine it with M***?' and so on. The error messages can literally leave you days away from finding any solution: 'Homing failed'. Yes...?? I gathered that much myself!
Each time I come back to my machine that has the Duet Wifi board, I spend days trying to get it to work. I've never succeeded. It's enough to drive a man to drink.
Since I installed the board as an upgrade on the previous RAMS, the printer has not produced a single decent in print in nearly 8 months. I have spent hundreds of hours trying to get it to work. Day after day, week after week. I just move in config.g circles, never getting the problems solved, always moving onto the next problem. Sometimes back to the old problem. Sometimes one problem leads onto the next, or causes the next. But surprisingly often, the problem is caused by the complexity of having to understand so many gcode options that may or may not apply to your printer config, and the fact that many operations and printer types are not clearly described. Sometimes, in an effort to make things better, you make them worse with a foolish config change that can takes days to discover.
It cost me a lot of money trying upgrade instead of just chucking the K8400 in a skip and buying a cheap Chinese i3 clone, but I so wish I had done that and swallowed the guilt of contributing to the destruction of the planet with more plastic crap rather than waste months of my precious time fruitlessly trying to configure the Duet to produce a print.
I had thought it was the right thing to do. But now I realise I'll never get that printer to work again. It's going in the skip, along with the marvellously configurable Duet board inside it.
I've ended up out of pocket, out of time, out of patience. It's not a path I could recommend to anyone.