Setting up Smoothie

 

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Setting up a Smoothie board in my experience has been pretty straight forward.  Prior to this point my experience has been with a laser.  The big difference is setting up the heaters.

After the controller and power supplies were installed, the next steps were accomplished in this order:

The motors were a cinch, just plug them in!  I had to adjust the current limit in the configuration file and reverse the filament feed motor direction, other than that the motors were moving within minutes.

End stops were also pretty straight forward.  The original wiring was used, however a short extension for the Y Axis was required to get the wire to reach the socket.

At this point the motors would move and safely home, however the steps per mm needed to be set.  I used my Digimatic indicator to measure the movement.  I would command 10mm of movement and then adjust the steps/mm accordingly.  Final results were 0.01mm error when a move and return was commanded.  The same procedure was used for the filament feed motor.  This one I spent considerable time with to get the best accuracy possible.  In the end any sensitive adjustments will be made in the slicing software.  I use Simplify 3D for my slicing operations.

The original thermistors were of an unknown type and the temperature curve could not be easily determined.  Looking through the Smoothie documentation I selected a single design that would work for both the bed and the extruder nozzle.  A Semitec 104GT-2 sensor was selected.  I only had to shorten the lead and attach the correct connector on the end.  Performance right out of the box was excellent and I have made no changes to the configuration file other than entering the Thermistor name.  as of this point I have not run the PID tuning routine.  There is a little oscillation in the first 4-5 minutes after the set level was attained.

The bed heaters were very easy. Just wire them up and set the pin number in the configuration file.

 

Configuration File  10/13/2020