Software and parameters

I Started to use the RepSnapper software and loaded some STL files, converted to GCode and printed at 200c.
To my disappointment it looked like crap! Also the Y position seemed to shift for each layer resulting in the leaning tower of pisa.

But when I wrote a GCode program manually and moved the Y position fort and back, it always came back to the same spot. So I was suspecting that RepSnappers conversion to GCode wasn't that accurate.

I tried to use Skeinforge for the GCode generation and the Y position became steady again, so it must have been some problem in RepSnapper.

Skeinforge looks like a technician puking buttons after a really bad meal in a foreign country. For a beginner it just looks pointless to even TRY fiddling with the parameters.

I just figured out that someone else must have done the same thing before me so I googled and found a setting made for a Mendel Gen6 in the Mendel-part forum.

The result looked better but now it seems like it is far to little plastic extruded.

It came to my mind that This settings are probably not for Adrian's Geared extruder that requires (according to my little calculation) 38 times more steps/mm. When I extrude 100mm it only does around 2.6mm, so 100/2.6 = 37.04 times more plastic is needed.

After some reading on various forums someone has changed the FW


#define E0_STEPS_PER_MM 20.2


to


#define E0_STEPS_PER_MM 765


The question naturally comes to my mind: Why doesn't Camiel deliver a FW that works with the extruder he put in his own Mendel kit (Adrian's geared Extruder)?


Anyway, I have not confirmed yet that this is the case with my FW, but everything points into that direction...
(If anyone knows a way to adjust this in Skeinforge, please drop a comment)