You think you have things (sorta) figured out. You buy the replacement parts and you recite your mantra; enjoy the holidays. I had another shot of my friend’s JW Blue label scotch and my sense of smell was on. A remarkable smoky note plus a bunch of other harder to describe flavors.
Christmas morning I spent in my friend and her daughter’s company, sitting around in nightclothes. Drank a double shot of espresso and after a few hours of conversation took at Uber back home.
Today the last of my purchases arrived and it was the essential part – a smoothieboard controller. This turns out to be more complicated than I thought. There’s a bit of a war between some commercial companies putting out a design called mks sbase that uses the open source smoothieware hardware design and the smoothieware project, which perhaps justifiably views them as cancerous leaches.
The problem for the buyer is that it is hard to impossible to even find out about the “genuine” smoothieboards and they cost 2x to 3x the cards sold on Amazon which have, in some cases, a friendlier design. Meanwhile there are two different sources for answers and the two groups act like ill mannered children.
I started my day going back to the house and using my tablesaw, bandsaw and jigsaw to turn some plywood into a base for the printer. The printer is light enough but not 100% stable and the 3/4″ plywood definitively takes care of that. In addition it provided an area to mount the smoothie board until I can print out a container box for it.
When I got home I marked and drilled eight holes and used wireties to attach the printer to the board. I may improve that once everything is complete, although 1/4″ wireties are pretty secure.
I then drilled a couple of small pilot holes and screwed the smoothieboard into place and wired it up. I did a lot of double checking as there are a couple of areas in all of the controllers where oops can blow at least part of the board.
The crucial moment and… they hadn’t included a micro SD card (cheapskates) so I had to toss my desk to find an ancient 256mb one from a black berry (<< you read right) and I put that into the card slot.
I powered it up and plugged in the USB and Windows happily mounted the SD card. I put in the current firmware and a config file and restarted and it read the firmware and config just as it was supposed to.
So far so good.
Unfortunately after that mostly frustration. I had an easy time getting the sense of the end stops fixed (just invert them) but when it came to moving the X and Y axis it just gave me a big middle finger no matter what. I tried swapping cables, putting in a brand new stepper motor, feeding it caviar, adjusting the current, massaging it, you get the idea.
And so now I wait for Godot… but at least the Z axis works.
My Gifted Life 