Please help... trying to get BL touch ABL to work and I am about to give up and cry

I am serious about the crying btw and I have no shame in admitting it. I have spent so much time and money on this now, I have been working on this printer for several months now and I am about to throw in the towel and just destroy everything with a sledge hammer out of frustration.

I am attempting to replace the controller of my CR10s with an azteeg X5 GT using BSD2660 drivers for all axis and the extruder.

Had a horrible time trying to find out how to drive a dual Z axis with a slave setup, but thanks to some friendly folks on the reprap forum I was able to get this working.

So now the last bit keeping me from printing is the actual homing and ABL process…

I can home X and Y no problem. Since I use a zprobe and not a z min endstop, I am aware that I need to “home” Z by sending G30 Z1.5 but when I do this after running G32, it will trigger once and go into alarm state. If I send G28 to home X and Y after this, the print head will be dragged across the bed and even worse, pushed into the bed because the grid I probed before sending G30 is apparently ignored completely.

I just don’t understand how to get this right. Please please help…

Here is my config and here is the starting sequence before a print I am using right now:
G28 X0 Y0;Home
M280 S3.0
G32
M280 S3.0
G30 Z1.5
G92 E0 ;Reset Extruder
G28 X0 Y0;Home

When I slice an stl using that as start gcode, the head will be smashed into the bed with a lot of force and my BL touch will be warped…

The sensor is mounted besides the nozzle in such a way that at 0,0 it will be beside the bed and the nozzle as well is beside the bed. I tried to compensate for this in the config by setting:
leveling-strategy.rectangular-grid.x_size 250
leveling-strategy.rectangular-grid.y_size 250
leveling-strategy.rectangular-grid.probe_offsets -50,-50,0

But I can’t figure out if that is the correct way to do it. There is so many similar options to set.

Thank you very much for helping, I will gladly provide more information as needed.

Had a horrible time trying to find out how to drive a dual Z axis with a slave setup, but thanks to some friendly folks on the reprap forum I was able to get this working.

Why go to the Reprap forums for this? http://smoothieware.org/3D-printer-guide#doubling-stepper-motor-drivers

G28 X0 Y0;Home
M280 S3.0
G32

You should definitely add a G4 in there to wait a few seconds for the probe to deploy, after having asked it to deploy.

Here is my config

You need to read the documentation. This clearly shows you haven’t. PLEASE as it’s mentionned several places in the documentation, upgrade to the latest firmware and exemple config file before asking for help.

It’s no surprise you are getting frustrated if you don’t follow the instructions…

2 Likes

Hello Arthur, thank you for responding.

I have ofcourse read the documentation and followed the 3d printer guide as well as use the migration guide from marlin to smoothie.

Why exactly do you assume I did not read any of this? How is this “clear” to you?

I went to the reprap community asking for help because the first thing I tried to do when gathering information about the azteeg x5 gt, was to go onto IRC and ask in the smoothieware channel (as advised in your wiki). I was promptly told to go ask somehwere else, because I “did not own an original smoothieboard” and was basically asked to leave. My question on the channel was “I am a new user, looking for information on dual Z axis setup on the azteeg x5 gt. Can anyone who owns this board help me out”.
Provoking such a toxic reaction lead me to believe, that I would not receive any help from the smoothieware community.

The information I was looking for regarding the dual Z axis, is specific to the azteeg x5 gt board (JM6 needs to be jumpered in order to achieve what the smoothie documentation mentions, the pins are not exposed elsewhere). It is not explained on the smoothieware documentation or anywhere on panucatts page, where it should be documented. I do not know why panucatts documentation is so incomplete, but it is.
Thus I asked in a more friendly community, and was promptly helped out in a very polite and helpful manner.
Please enlighten me, where I could have gotten this information anywhere here, and wether you now suddenly feel responsible for giving support regarding panucatt devices (it seems that you do not, and should not as it is not your product).

After your answer here, I am certain that I was right in my assumptions and going to the reprap boards. This attitude is exactly why I asked on the reprap forums first.

Did you even look at my config? BTW: I did flash the latest firmware and used the latest config as an example. I had to iterate through many stages of switching on features one by one, testing and then when I had a working config, I committed that to my own github repo. Panucatt offer config snippets for their BSD2660 drivers, the mini viki display and the board itself, which I assumed I needed to use.

Please, where exactly in my config are the problematic sections? I am not here to anger anyone or insult people by not reading documentation, I have read documentation for the last 14 days while troubleshooting. I am here because I do not understand the documentation regarding Z probing and the geometry of my printer (if everything is so clear to you, and unclear to me, maybe language barrier might be a reason? I am a native German speaker, my written English is ok, but I am struggling here)… I am not asking for you or anyone to write my config.

I am merely asking for pointers here, where I went wrong and what I could do to remedy this. If you do not want to help, that is okay, maybe someone else will.

Why exactly do you assume I did not read any of this? How is this “clear” to you?

Documentation requests users upgrade to the latest firmware and config before asking for help ( so that the helpers can work in as standard an environment as possible ). Usually people who ask for help with old versions, are people who have not read ( at least this part of ) the documentation.

I was promptly told to go ask somehwere else, because I “did not own an original smoothieboard”

Do you have logs? This isn’t our policy, and I would be extremely surprised if this happened the way you are describing.
What was your nickname?

I would not receive any help from the smoothieware community.

We help several people each day.

I do not know why panucatts documentation is so incomplete, but it is.

He designs and sells boards but makes close to zero efforts in term of documentation and user support. That’s definitely the worst feature of the azteeg line. He pretty much relies on us to do support for him, even though he shouldn’t.

giving support regarding panucatt devices (it seems that you do not, and should not as it is not your product).

We help all users. We will sometimes ask users to first ask the seller, and then come back to us if the seller doesn’t help. Then we help them. This is meant to try to put some pressure on the sellers to do their job, though it doesn’t seem to work very well.

I did flash the latest firmware and used the latest config as an example.

Unfortunately, those aren’t the latest, but Azteeg doesn’t bother providing you that, pretty much making it so you are then incapable of asking for help the way we require users to. Scrolling through the config file I immediately recognized it as a very old config, and came back here to complain about you not upgrading to the latest, as the documentation requires.
It seems like this is not due to not reading the documentation, so sorry for that ( not reading the documentation usually is the cause though, which is why this might have been a habit-caused thing )

Please, where exactly in my config are the problematic sections?

All of it. To have a proper config, you would need to compare an old smoothieboard config and an old azteeg config, then grab a recent smoothieboard config and turn it into a recent azteeg config. It’s a lot of work, and it’s work Panucatt should be doing, not you.
It’s still required to be able to help you as best as we can.

I am merely asking for pointers here,

You need to use M206/M306 for your Z height offset/setting. If once you’ve done that, you still have issues, tell me and we’ll work on those.

Thanks a lot for going into detail and being sincere about helping. My config has been shuffled around as I pieced together sections from panucatt and the example config, as well as places with info I found online.

I will start with a fresh config from the latest example in the smoothieware repo and go from there, fill in what I had without copy and pasting and follow your pointers regarding z probing and report back then.

After having slept and thinking a bit, I believe my problems really are with the endstop offsets. This was a bit clearer to me while configuring marlin, but I need to get used to the process here and get to know the config better.

And no I do not have a chatlog of the IRC session, but I really don’t see why you have to doubt my experience. my nickname was the same as here btw.

Well let’s start fresh, I might have been a bit too paranoid after all the warnings on the wiki.

This was a bit clearer to me while configuring marlin,

Yes, the way Smoothie does things is different to Marlin, and users will sometimes be confused if they have already done Marlin and have to move to Smoothie.
FWIW, Smoothie implemented a lot of this first, and Marlin then chose not to care about making things compatible.

And no I do not have a chatlog of the IRC session, but I really don’t see why you have to doubt my experience. my nickname was the same as here btw.

Because we take this sort of stuff seriously, we have an actual policy about this, and everybody involved takes it seriously enough that I find it very unlikely your story happened the way you described.

Let me remind you what you said happened:

I went to the reprap community asking for help because the first thing I tried to do when gathering information about the azteeg x5 gt, was to go onto IRC and ask in the smoothieware channel (as advised in your wiki). I was promptly told to go ask somehwere else, because I “did not own an original smoothieboard” and was basically asked to leave. My question on the channel was “I am a new user, looking for information on dual Z axis setup on the azteeg x5 gt. Can anyone who owns this board help me out”.
Provoking such a toxic reaction lead me to believe, that I would not receive any help from the smoothieware community.

Now here’s the only instance ever of your nick being in the channel logs:

226723-Mar 08 17:49:12 *        xnopasaranx (~xnopasara@i577AD30C.versanet.de) has joined
226724-Mar 08 17:52:54 <xnopasaranx>    hello there people! New smoothieware user here, trying to figure out how to get dual Z axis with two stepper drivers in sync on the azteeg x5 gt. I read that jm6 needs to be jumpered in order to use E0 in sync with the default Z axis. Do all of the pins on jm6 simply need to be bridged with three jumpers? drivers are bigfoot BSD2660 btw.
226725-Mar 08 18:42:26 <ccecil> http://smoothieware.org/general-appendixes#doubling-stepper-motor-drivers
226726-Mar 08 18:46:26 <xnopasaranx>    hi ccecil, thanks forthe answer but I have already read that page. The azteeg x5 gt has a different board layout and I am not sure I can bridge those pins mentioned on the wiki page with the Bigfoot drivers mounted, as they use a different pinout from the polulu form factor
226727:Mar 08 18:47:23 <xnopasaranx>    should I use the unused polulu pins that are exposed under the bigfoot drivers and bridge those regardless?
226728-Mar 08 18:47:58 <wolfmanjm>      I looked on the panacutt page and there is no documentation on those jumpers, and as this is NOT a smoothieware issue I suggest you contact Panucatt for help.
226729-Mar 08 18:49:04 <xnopasaranx>    yeah I guess I will do that. sorry, just thought someone else here might have the same board as me.
226730-Mar 08 18:49:17 *        xnopasaranx has quit (Quit: Verlassend)

Do you see the problem here?