I am working with a mini and trying to convert it to use this universal paste extruder http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:20733/ . As you can see, this would require removing the nozzle, which is required for the autolevel procedure. So for this to work, I imagine I will need to skip the autolevel at the beginning of every print.
Is there a way to just cut this out of the g-code? I know I’m not the only one with this issue, and I’ve heard that it may take some firmware modification, but I don’t know my way around that very well, so I’d like to avoid it if possible.
If there are any other ways that I could get around this, like by keeping the nozzle wired in, but not installed, and just touching the corners when it is trying to autolevel, that would be neat, but I’d like to know if this will mess with the printing if it’s not exact.
I know this is pretty open ended, but really any tips or suggestions on how to get around the autolevel would be fantastic.
If you remove the leveling g-code, it tries to print well above the bed. I’m not certain if it is always the same amount though. That would be interesting to check. If it is, you might be able to use a Z-offset to get the print head where it needs to be. If not, you need to do firmware modifications to work around it.
There was an experimental firmware that would save the leveling positions and not reset them unless you ran a probe. That seems like a good middle ground to me, you can level if you like, but have a faster startup the rest of the time. The leveling matrix doesn’t change frequently, based on the output from the log window.
Thanks for the advice, the fix was actually relatively simple.
So I removed most of the start.gcode, and that worked well enough. Turns out that it always tries to print at the same height above the bed (I think the z=0 point is originally set at the height of the corner plates). I fixed this with a z-offset in the machine settings, (-2.75mm) and I can play around with that by adjusting the initial layer height in the quick settings.
This is working fine so far, but I can definitely see it running into problems when the bed gets out of level. I was an idiot and didn’t save a copy of the original start.gcode, but if I can find that, then I figure I can just run that every once in a while to bring it back into working order. For some reason I was hoping that cura would refresh with the original start.gcode when I closed/opened it, but it doesn’t, so I guess the hunt for the original script begins…