RepRap: Blog

I've found the maximum speed I can run at without causing excess vibration: 8mm/min. I noticed the probe accidentally touched the slide when I was moving at 14mm/min doing some tangram shapes, so I did a bit of experimenting.

To find out what the speed limit is, pick your safe Z height -  the height to which you feel happy raising your probe between moves. In my case this is 35μm. Then you put a slide covered in Sharpie marker under the probe at that height, and start issuing manual GCODE commands to move 500μm at ever increasing speeds until your motors slip or the probe vibrates so much that it whacks into the slide.

Here's my test. You can see the horizontal lines moving in a square pattern where the probe starts digging in.

This was with Probe 9. I haven't tried this out with other probes, so I don't know if this is a probe vibration issue or a structural vibration issue.

It occurred to me that if I'm drawing with resin rather than placing dots, I'm not so fussed about micron accuracy. That's because my plot is going to need to be 30-40μm wide to have structural strength. So if the probe drifts by 5μm I don't care at that resolution.

Soooo, I can just draw lines rather than do little dots. I'm modifying the "dipify" code to support that straight out of PrusaSlicer. I still need to break the GCODE lines up into short segments so that I know when to go and dip the probe in more resin.

Still, it should speed things up a bit when printing. I can switch back to dots if I need more accuracy or have a more wobbly probe.

# posted by vik-olliver @ 6:24 AM