Makerfarm Calibration Thread of Grand Proportions

[gmay3]

Gonna kick it off right with a repost of my experience of...

1. Calibrating Extruder esteps
I calibrated the Esteps of the Extruder and everything else seemed to already be within calibration.

After downloading the stock Marlin files for my Makerfarm i3v from the build guide, I edited the configuration.h to allow me to save current settings into the EEPROM so everytime the printer powers on, the new calibration values are saved.

I had a little trouble editing the configuration.h to enable the EEPROM saving option from the i3v LCD so I just wanted to describe how to do it in case anyone was also thinking about fine tuning their printer.

1. Click the Marlin Firmware Link download found on the Download page in the Makerfarm build guide.
2. Download Arduino IDE (you can use the most up to date version as long as it is a stable build)
3. Copy a backup version of the Marlin files so you can preserve the original files and edit your copied version.
4. Open up Arduino IDE and click open, navigate to your Marlin Files folder and click on the .pde file. There should only be one. The IDE prompt should come up with a window that says this file can only run in some specific folder and asks you if you'd like it to create the folder for you. Click yes and the .pde file should open in Arduino IDE.
5. Go back to the folder that contains the Marlin software and check out the new folder inside that IDE just created. In order to edit the configuration.h file, you're going to need to select all files outside the new folder that should only contain the .pde file right now. Cut and paste all the files you selected into the new folder that contains the .pde.
6. Close the Arduino IDE program window and reopen the .pde file. When it opens you should have new tabs right above the editable text field, mainly look for configuration.h.
7. Click on the configuration.h tab inside your IDE window and do a Find (cntl+f) for EEPROM.
8. Look for "//#define EEPROM_SETTINGS" and remove the // so it will look like this "#define EEPROM_SETTINGS". All this does is remove the // which will disable the line of code after those characters. This re-enables the EEPROM setting ability inside the LCD menu.
9. Click the check mark in the top left corner of Arduino IDE. It should compile after a minute or too. If it says that you are all good and there are no errors plug a usb cord from the RAMPS board and plug that into your computer.
10. Verify that the LCD is powered up and then in IDE at the top go to Tools>Boards>Arduino Mega 2560.
11. Click the arrow icon next to the check icon to compile and send the edited software to the RAMPS board.
12. This might fail once if Arduino IDE is pointed to the wrong COM port but it should automatically fix it self after the first failure.
13. Wait for it to finish, verify no lights are flashing on the RAMPS board and power cycle your RAMPS by unplugging the usb cord and turning off the printers power supply if you turned it on.
14. Check to see that the EEPROM setting worked by going to Control in your LCD menu and check to make sure there is a "Store Memory" in that menu now.

Now that you've enabled the EEPROM settings in Marlin, check out this video where ZennmasterM provides a great tutorial of how to calibrate your extruder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_Wb0i0-Qvo

If you have any problems let me know!

[printbus]

I'm sure the results can vary, but as a datapoint I found an Esteps/mm setting of 877 was way more accurate than the factory default of 841 for my 1.75mm PLA.

Also note that for the i3v printers you want to download the RAMPS code only from the link in the i3v build guide as gmay3 says. Don't follow the i3v RAMPS build video that says to get the code from the link on the RAMPS part of the MakerFarm Build Instructions page. Turns out those files are intended for the i3 and not the i3v. One key difference is that the latter is configured for a RAMPS motherboard type 34 instead of 33. If you're wanting to use a print cooling fan connected to the RAMPS D9 terminals, that difference will keep the fan control from working.