All fine and getting some really good prints but I stupidly knocked the bed. Yep, clumsy is my middle name. I decided to calibrate in case I had upset the bed level but, when I tried, the machine wouldn’t even go home. Just moved to a couple of random points in mid-air and then asked me to adjust the nozzle height. (A good twenty centimeters above the bed at that time.) But the Z axis wouldn’t move at all using the touch-screen.
Turned the machine off and waited ten minutes then tried again. No joy. It looks like the firmware is screwed. I used this site to send a cry for help from Snapmaker so as not to alarm you folks here if it was something stupid I had done. Yep, my other middle name is ‘stupid’! But no response from them at all.
So, symptoms: Nozzle temp changes work and I can open a gcode to print, (although I have’nt ventured to do that in case I drove the nozzle through the bed), but none of the axis jog functions have any effect. I tried manually moving the X, Y and Z axies, (axises, axii?), to the normal Home position but still no help.
Does anybody know how to re-load the firmware? Is that even possible? I have no Wifi connection so it’ll have to be through either the USB stick or the mini-USB port.
Any thoughts about this problem would be hugely appreciated. It’s a very nice looking paperweight but also a rather heavy and expensive one!
Calm down, worst choices are made when panicking. What was it doing when you knocked the bed? How hard did you knock the bed? And what did it do as a result of knocking the bed? How did you hit it? From Side? We need more information please.
I had just cancelled a print while the printer was putting down a three-line skirt as I’d changed my mind about the filament colour.
The knock wasn’t very hard as I was simply reaching up to the shelf above the printer for the other colour spool and caught the bed with my hip so I guess I hit it from the side. Nothing very fierce but I thought it best to re-calibrate before proceeding.
The machine seemed fine for that, nozzle heated up, unload worked. I like to clean the nozzle before calibration so everything was perfectly normal up to then.
I’ve checked all connections, all secure. mechanically the machine is fine; no binding on the axis sliders although they are, and have been from the start, very stiff to move by hand compared to the Ender. (You would think that the weight of the machine would allow you to move the Z axis using two hands but you have to hold the machine down with one hand. Feels like pumping iron!) But, as I say, it’s been like that from the start and doesn’t seem to affect the print quality.
I don´t understand this posts well.- So much letters for a bit to say confuses me.
This machine can cnc-carve so it should be able to take some stress on the mechanic (If you sit on the bed, yes- this could cause damage but is repair able).
You could easily reinstall the firmware, simply go to files and navigate to your firmware on the usb-stick.- I guess there is no need to but you asked for it.
May you take some photos of your machine and a video about the thing what doesn´t work, please.
I was asked to describe the symptoms, so I did. Hence the long post.
I’ve tried moving all axes to the home position. To no effect.
I’ll try to video the machine attempting to calibrate. But there’s not a lot to see. X and Y move a bit but Z is stuck at Home.
The USB stick has a .bin file on it. I think that’s just the update for the firmware. I’m fairly sure that I need to replace/re-install the software on the chip in the controller. I can’t see a way to do that.
Maybe I’ll just have to hang on until one of the SnapMaker team pick up on this thread and come back with a solution. Perhaps I need to ask for a replacement controller unit from China?
Yep. I was rather disappointed with the machine. Engineering was brilliant but the software was frankly sad. It really shouldn’t have taken so long to get the machine dialled in. But, two months down the line, (eeek), it had become as good as the Ender-3!
But here we are with what appears to be a software issue again.
In my innocence I thought that posting here through the contact window was the same as an email to support. Why else would they have that window I ask myself.
Anyway, I’ll send off an email with maybe a link to this thread an see what they have to say. Thanks for the tip. I’ll report back here on any solution they come up with as others may hit the same problem.
Well. I only had the Ender-3 to compare it to so the really heavy, solid engineering was, to me, impressive.
OK, there’s that long wait for the bed to heat up but I can live with that.
It’s slow when printing, but I guess that’s because it doesn’t use a belt drive anywhere. It’s certainly more accurate than the Ender when it comes to layers and the like.
All in all I like the engineering. All my early problems seemed to emanate from the firmware and here we are again!
Nope. It’s gotta be under warranty still. My one worry is that they may ask me to return the entire machine, all 25kg of it, to China. I doubt I could afford the postage!
Yea, there’s also the inadequate cable strain relief on the heated bed - keep an eye on that when it frays, it’ll short out the controller.
There’s also a tendency for people to accidentally insert the connectors backwards and short out the controller because the connectors are symmetrical and can be inserted backwards.
They will likely try to invoke this line from the warranty exclusions: any defect or damage caused by an accident, including but not limited to ... human causes such as ... collision...;
You need to clearly communicate to them what happened and how this is a failure worthy of a warranty replacement.
@Mebyon i agree with Brent, I’d just like to add that while the quality of the machining is excellent, engineering is essentially has to be graded by everything in a machine like this. That includes software. Mechanical engineering is top notch, but doesn’t really mean much when the electronic engineering counterpart is a par behind, by that I’m talking about the PCB’s inside the rails and such.
As far as warranty goes, they may try to invoke that line in the warranty just as Brent said. Make absolutely sure you explain in detail that it wasn’t a hard hit justifying a broken machine.
Potter from Snapmaker jumped in and took the problem in hand. I swear I checked every connection but, after a series of Mxxx commands he/she diagnosed that it was a cable loose somewhere on the Z axis. Pulled all Z connections out and pressed 'em back in and, voila, all works well.
The moral: Don’t just press the connections in, pull them out and put them back.
But kudos to Snapmaker for not simply hiding behind their warranty.
Me panic? Never! Just very sad. 