While doing maintenance on two H2 Series printers, I inadvertently hit the “up” control to move the bed while cleaning. Evidently I hit it a couple times too many. It hit the top and wanted to keep going. Can’t be good for the machine.
Is there any possible way the Firmware could be modded such that a LIMITER would be added to keep the bed from going beyond the bottom limit and beyond the top limit. That there would be a solid STOP so that this could not absently happen. Not that it couldn’t be overridden in certain cases. Perhaps it could be manually forced during a very specialized parts replacement? Perhaps?
It would certainly make sense that the printer be restricted beyond a certain point either up or down. And it would absolutely make sense to protect the end user from such boneheaded moves.
I’ve been at this game for quite a few years and yet I still found myself making that error. I would imagine there are new users that will most assuredly hit those up and down limits with abandon, not knowing the potential damage it causes. Granted, after a few times of hearing that noise, they may in fact learn from the mistake.
I do it every so often, I don’t really mind when it hits the bottom and continue until it stops but I never liked the up travel because when the head is parked, the bed hits the fan vents of the toolhead and force on it.
I finally came up with a hard stop on the rods to prevent that:
There is a firmware safeguard in place, but you have overridden it.
When you manually move the printer and it needs homing, it asks you to home the axis.
You then have 3 choices:
Close
Don’t remind me
Home Axis
If you choose “Don’t remind me” it does exactly that until you power cycle the printer.
If you just choose for “Home Axis” you don’t have any issues and it knows its limits.
After a print job, the stepper motors are powered off directly. So moving around manually after that always raises the question above. Most people (including myself) mostly choose the 2nd option to bypass the homing.
Maybe they should change it into “Don’t remind me for 15 minutes” so the next time you’re moving the printer again it will remind you.
That is not a firmware safeguard for what I am discussing. If I am doing maintenance, homing is not a variable to concern myself with. Nor would anyone. That is not a discussion point nor is it a solution. I am requesting a firmware mod that would allow for the bed to be manually raised and lowered for maintenance with a built in hard stop limit at the top and the bottom. It’s a relatively simple request that could be implemented. Not a difficult move for the engineers. Hopefully, they see it through. Perhaps a “Maintenance Mode” selection?
When I want to move my bed or tool head manually, I select the manual XYZ move on my printer menu.
As soon as I hit any of the motion buttons and the stepper motors have been disabled for whatever reason, it comes up with the homing question (mentioned above).
If you then choose “Home Axis” the printer does a homing sequence and after that all the soft limits are automatically taken into account when you move the printer head or bed around.
If you choose to ignore homing, then you must accept that you run into the hard limits of the printer with the results you mentioned.
If you want the printer to run with less current on the stepper motors, so when it hits a physical limit, it doesn’t hit it as aggressively, then just mention that.
But just home before doing maintenance is the simplest solution and doesn’t require a firmware update.
I misunderstood what you were stating in the first post. My apologies. You are spot on with this one. I hadn’t considered the soft limits when homing. Outstanding comment. Thank you.