Alice Averlong🏳️⚧️I have resumed the folly of 3d printing after a nearly year long hiatus
place your bets until how long it'll be until I'm ranting about how printers are a sin against man and god
crashed my slicer
I'm printing a calibration cube because I don't know what state I left this printer in.
presumably in the standard state of "it kinda works but I don't trust it"
crashed my slicer again
and again
and again
third attempt worked.
I probably should have updated octoprint before hitting go, and I probably should have done some manually leveling, but hey, it seems to be printing so far.
also the filament has been sitting in a garage, loaded into the printer, for a year.
it's probably really shit by now. as soon as the cube finishes I'm gonna need to swap to something, anything, else
it's probably really shit by now. as soon as the cube finishes I'm gonna need to swap to something, anything, else
there's a lot of work that can and should be done on this printer, but it's all gonna be limited by the fact I can't stand up for more than 5 minutes
well, there's something going on with the z-axis, but it printed more or less.
I've also got to switch to a different power supply for the pi that's running octoprint, and upgrade the pi to a new OS (which requires backing up and restoring existing octopi settings) because my python is EOL.
so it's working, but I'm still sighing a lot
anyway I loaded new filament and I'm printing a chep cube again!
okay I printed a CE5P calicat after attempting to fix the z-offset issue. It still is horrible.
possibly this is mostly a temperature issue: I'm using the stock temperatures but I think I upgraded this to an all-metal hotend that needs to run higher?
reprinted with higher temp. it's better, but still bad.
so probably there's another issue. I remember I did a lot of rebuilding of the hot end in the final days of using this before, so who knows what's clogged in there?
I printed on a raft because the z-offset is still fuckt
a higher temp (220°C) and 110% flow rate seems to be working well enough.
had to dig out my flir phone to take pictures for silly cellphone reasons.
Anyway, this is the 220°C 110% flow calicat. It looks way better, right?
also octoprint is yelling that my pi is undervolting. I'm specifically using a dedicated 5v 2.5A wall-wart, how is it STILL undervolting? ugh.
I need to throw away and replace every part of this setup and I don't have the time, money, energy, or space to do that
Thanks to everyone who has given suggestions for how to fix this. Unfortunately most of them require me standing up for longer than I can manage, so I've mainly just fiddled with settings (since I can do that from my bed).
but when I can, I'll be:
* calibrating the extruder
* trying to clear clogs in the hot-end
* calibrating the z-axis offset (which is a multistep nightmare in this setup)
I need to upgrade the octopi install so I might switch to a newer pi. I have one somewhere, it's just probably up in my office where I can't really get to it (stairs)
installed a USB power blocker to try and fix the undervolting. it didn't work.
So I'm gonna have to find another power supply for that
I'm gonna try cold pulling next because that's easier than getting to the extruder
okay I tried switching to a different USB power supply (5v 2A) with thicker usb cables: No difference, still undervolting.
I also cold-pulled the hot end a few times, to see if that'll help.
the extruder is still difficult to reach
printing another calicat to see if that changed anything
okay I think my extruder is fucked. damn it, that's the most annoying part of this printer to access.
michel v@foone the Ancients tell about mysterious "E steps" settings that may be tuned, but otherwise I’m out of ideas now. Do you have other filaments to check, by the way? There’s also a Reddit community called FixMyPrint, who may take pity on the poor feline.
@michelv I've got plenty of filaments but while most of it is sealed, it's pretty old. maybe I should pick up a new roll before I test again
@foone could also be a faulty PTFE tube. Is your printer using a Bowden setup (I assume it is since the extruder is hard to access?). I once fell deep into a rabbit hole, tweaking settings left and right because I thought the printer had started malfunctioning, until I realized it really was the tube that needed changing.
@michelv it does use a bowden tube, yeah. I definitely replaced it at some point, I think I replaced it with a better one? it seems to be in good condition, though
rx13 
@foone
@michelv Also, if the extruder is just above the hot end on your print head, some printers have a small tube between the extruder And and hot end separate from the tube going to the extruder, which can also wear and caused this issue for me.
Either way, that tube wasn't accessible unless you removed the extruder, so equally annoying. Best of luck to you