Book Image

3D printing with RepRap Cookbook

By : Salinas
Book Image

3D printing with RepRap Cookbook

By: Salinas

Overview of this book

A systematic guide consisting of over 100 recipes which focus on helping you understand the process of 3D printing using RepRap machines. The book aims at providing professionals with a series of working recipes to help make their fuzzy notions into real, saleable projects/objects using 3D printing technology. This book is for novice designers and artists who own a RepRap-based 3D printer, have fundamental knowledge of its working, and who desire to gain better mastery of the printing process. For the more experienced user, it will provide a handy visual resource, with side-by-side comparisons of the two most popular slicers, Skeinforge and Slic3r. A basic understanding of designing and modeling principles and elementary knowledge of digital modeling would be a plus.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
13
Index

Calibrating the x, y, and z axes

Proper calibration of the printer's x, y, and z axes is important if we want an accurate reproduction of a model. This includes both the physical alignment of the axes to each other and the calibration of the firmware, which provides instructions to the stepper motors that drive the axis. For this recipe, we'll assume that you have a 3D printer that's well constructed and has aligned axes. What we'll focus on is finding the correct firmware values for your x, y, and z axes.

Getting ready

You'll need a precision caliper or, at the very least, a metric ruler for this recipe. You'll also need your current E_steps_per_unit value, which is located in your firmware settings in the Configuration.h file. If your firmware allows, use a M503 command to echo your printer settings. What you are looking for are two lines similar to the following:

echo: Steps per unit:
echo:   M92  X90.00 Y90.00 Z4160.00 E989.00

The values you need will be listed...