See the pictures below. Just got my printer set up, but I have been 3D printing with an Ender 3 for over a year and know my way around.
I got a perfectly successful vase sent to the printer over WiFi via Luban. So far I’m having no luck with STL’s over USB stick. Tried a couple of calibration models, and then doing this ceiling tile which I have printed successfully on my other printer. All of them have had a good first layer, but then as you can see there is horrible under extrusion. It’s not a nozzle problem. As you can see, the first layer is great, but I did try a new nozzle for giggles. Running firmware version latest I see which was 20200822.
Specifics of the job:
ABS filament, 235/80
sliced with cura engine 3.6.0 (I do this via AstroPrint)
copied to USB stick inserted into SM2
I have not manually inspected the gcode yet, but I can if that’s going to be interesting, tell me what to look for.
EDIT: I’ve narrowed this down to something about the g-code or how it was sent to the printer. Same STL sliced in Luban and sent over wifi is printing ok. Still need to figure this out, I’m gonna be a Octoprint guy once my new Pi shows up. Ideas?
Pics:
On the left of this first image is a successful print, right side is SM2
Made some progress, see edit above. Got a calibration cube to print, and it’s close enough to know e-steps aren’t way off. (Will still set them properly soon.)
To me it looks like classic under extrusion. Notice the strong lines on the first layer, that generally indicates that your z offset is to low. Soo under extruding pluss squishing is making your first layer come out ok. But then after that you aren’t squishing so it just underextrudes. If you share pictures of your calibration cube that may help?
Yup, I agree with Atom, and pics will help for sure. I think for most of us, the E value we ended up with was in the range of 230-245 (up from 212 default). That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a change of roughly 15mm over 100mm of filament (a 15% change), which is actually pretty significant.
And did you print the cube with the same filament as the images of whatever that other model is? Filament from different manufacturers can have different effects (which you probably know from your other printing). I was printing for over a year with exclusively Hatchbox and never had any issues with the default E steps. When i switched to Solutech (and a “bad batch” at that), i had all kinda of issues and found that exact Extrusion thread, which fixed those no problem. Once I switch back to hatchbox i will check the calibration again to see what effects there are (also with the new nozzle i’ll be installing tomorrow for better flow and heat transfer…) with that.
Yeah, the cube was printed with the same ABS filament as the larger print. And it was really quite close, 19.97 mm out of 20 in the y dimension. I forget the others but yeah I will be checking my extrusion, but that’s really not looking like the problem at this point.
I think it has to do with the slicing ie the contents of the g-code, but I’m not sure how to go about diagnosing this.
If you think its in the slicer then my recommendation would be to ditch luban and use cura (the luban slicer is a poor spinoff of cura anyway) but slicing is rarely the cause of these issues. And you can have an underextruded print that is close to being demensinaly accurate. If it has banding or holes, that is a big indicator. Another thing you could look at is your retraction settings and linear advance k value. Both of those could cause issues with printed details.
