Moving the head with the machine on

Just as an FYI, I manually moved the head to the right to get a little cleaning wipe on the lens. I did this with the machine on. If you do this, it seems that the machine doesn’t realize it has been moved, and does not recalibrate unless you power cycle. So your print would be offset from where you expected it.

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Support is adamant about the machine being off when manually moving the gantry or head because it can damage the machine.

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This is true, the :glowforge: uses stepper motors and just counts steps to know where it is at.
They didn’t wag a finger at me so I don’t know for sure but I may have contributed to a failure on my PRU by not turning it off once. Always turn it off for any maintenance.

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So if that happens, does it reset with a power cycle or is it wonky forever.

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I power cycled and it seems to back to normal. It did some funny adjustments with the head right beneath the camera. Maybe the camera is the absolute reference point?

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Yes. The homing procedure is how the machine orients itself to know where the head is in relation to the bed.

Every time you boot the :glowforge: goes through an alignment procedure and everything gets zeroed out. There have been suggestions to boot at least once a day but I find this normally to be unnecessary.

As @astevens suggests, this uses the lid camera and the :glowforge: logo on the head to do its magic.

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Boot once a day… do you normally leave it on all the time?

Sometimes it will stay on for several days at a time, especially weekends. I normally turn it off when I am at work but sometimes I forget.

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That’s part of the magic on the Prusa i3 mk3 is they sense current drawn by the motor so are aware of movement and skipped steps so no limit switches (just run inTo the end of the rail) and purportedly can correct from a slipped layer!

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I had no idea. FDM printers just keep getting better. I see where they have gone in the 3 or 4 years I’ve been seriously following and have to wonder where they will be in another 5?

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FDM printers just keep getting better.

Prusa’s been innovating like crazy. The core platform is solid so now the Original Prusa i3 Mk3 adds things that make the whole process easier, like remembering what it was doing when it lost power, so when power is restored it can resume, and a connector for a Raspberry Pi Zero W so it’s easy to add Octoprint. And integrating lots of innovations that were add-ons / mods, like a magnetic removable print bed, broken or jammed filament detector. Their Multi-Material Upgrade is awesome, too.

Though if you want to go really bleeding edge, check out Carbon3D. That’s some awesome Science.

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