MakerFarm 8" i3v Prusa build by Printbus

[printbus]

Hi Printbus, I totally forgot about your comment about needing the ball driver, I will pick one of those up tonight. do you think having 4 springs is better than 3 and a spacer? As to the end stops, I put them where Colin said to without really looking at the board itself. could my less than stellar sodering jobs be related?

If you have the endstop connectors where Colin shows them, and the mins work OK, maybe the right answer is to not worry about the maxs. The configuration.h file has the #defines for the pullups on the input pins for the max endstops commented out; this likely prevents the internal pullup being activated for those pins on the MEGA2560 processor. That would lead to the input being randomly read in as high or low depending on how the unconnected pin tends to float. With the #defines for the max inputs commented out, firmware likely doesn't do anything with the inputs for the max switches. Your soldering is likely fine, since the min and max endstop switches would be on separate connectors on the RAMPS board.

I prefer the four springs approach. It allows me to just get the Z endstop anywhere close, and then all fine adjustments are done in the four corners of the bed. Of course, I have thumbwheels on the corners now too. Leveling the bed takes me about two or three minutes. The stock makerfarm approach can easily take 20-30 minutes because of the crude approach for mounting the Z endstop switch, the complexity caused by the fixed corner that requires a near-impossible fine adjustment of the Z endstop, and the multitude of tools required to adjust the other corners.