MakerBot Support Forum/Technical Support/The Replicator™
HPB platform moves up in between toolchange (SOLVED)
Bart ter Haar
asked this on April 24, 2012 06:21
I'm making models of our architectural projects. In general I think I have fine tunes the several settings in skeinforge for this kind of print (lots of walls and columns of 2mm).
The biggest problem is that after a toolchange the platform moves up in the flight from the last printed object of that tool to the startpoint of the second tool. Therefore it printed pushes objects and breaks them often. I have to tried it to fix it with hop, but that only works when printing. Not in the flight in between toolchange. I have also tries it with a fresh and resetted ReplicatorG and a standard object (hilberts box). It happens there as well. I have checked the Gcode, but the Z coordinates are always the same or getting higher (so the platform is always moving down according to the Gcode). Maybe it has something to do with the coordinate system (G54/ G55) witch is called, but when I change this the same problem occurs.
Hope you can help.
Bart
Comments
After investigating by makerbot support it turns out that one sentence in the Gcode was generated with "," comma's in stead of dots ".".
It occurs only when merge dual extrusion and only in between toolchange. (but very annoying when it knock over your delicate columns)
Because skeinforce not works with dots probably only reads Z=1 in stead of Z=1.74, resulting in going up. Explains as well the difference each time it goes up. Sometimes a lot (max a mm I suppose) and sometimes almost noting. Can be fixed bij doing a search and replace in the Gcode file (so replace "," by ".")
The problem is only when regional settings (so Europe probably) being used that "," for decimal defines and not a dot. So problem also being solved by switching your computer settings to US. Or only the settings for decimal I suppose.
See also: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/makerbot/A-nxyHZEcTo
Hope this helps the rare non US replicator dual extrusion users.
Bart