halfie

@MikeLindall sorry I should have mentioned, I use the socketed UM2 board. Look for ultimaker 2.1.5 on AliExpress. It looks like they've been taken down though, so I think your best bet might actually be a 32 bit board like the DuetWifi. It's what I intend to switch over to in the long term, since my UM2 clone is now barely a UM2 any more from all the mods. I can't remember who put up a video on the process, I think it might be neotko, but it seems pretty straightforward, and has nothing but advantages

Currently using one of the UM2 Clone PCB's on my system, and replaced the 4988's with 2100's. It runs flawlessly. I had to change the mode to Spreadcycle, which is about 10% louder than the Stealthchop mode, but the noise difference is still incredible compared to the 4988.

Hi @jonnybischof, or anyone, I'm having trouble deciphering the pinouts and how they all relate to values in pins.h? For example, LED J15, is defined as pin 8 in pins.h. On the schematics linked to, the BC817 leading to the signal has PH5 at the end of it, which when I look at the big Mega2560, looks like it's pin 17? How to I correlate the different values? Specifically, I'm looking for details on the signal pin for J9, and J24-J26 (I'm hoping to add auto levelling on J9, and a third extruder to my UM2 for J24 and J26, per the Ultimaker2 Diamond on the reprap wiki, for a multi material experiment I want to run) Edit: I'm an idiot, I found what I needed here. Saving for future reference: https://www.arduino.cc/en/Hacking/PinMapping2560

I'm noticing this too, particularly through Pronterface. I'll set the temp to 185, and it'll either stay there until it hits 185 and then immediately turn off the heater, or stay on for a few seconds and turn off. Looking at the printer, it seems as if it's going into the preheat menu for a split second and then leaving it.

There's a couple of potential culprits: Are you installing them in the correct direction? They need to be installed upside down compared to regular 4988 drivers. Are the pins shorting out on anything, are there any accidental bridges between pins? Has the voltage been set correctly? I blew up my TMC2100's because I tried to bridge two spots on the board to put it into a higher torque mode, and left the soldering iron on for too long. Could that have happened?

Tried flicking my 2100's over to spreadcycle on the weekend, and I think I burned out one of the chips trying to bridge that tiny tiny little gap. No matter, the A4988 Black Edition I got are fantastic, and I have just thrown it into a back room to avoid the noise. I also noticed that 90% of the noise is from the extruder motor, so I'm going to chuck the astrosyn on just that, and take them off the x and y axis, I think.

@mutley3d are you running in spreadcycle or stealthchop?

This sounds dumb but could there be slop introduced into the driver over time with heat generation or something?

This works pretty ok, but I noticed on playing with manual bed leveling that I was getting odd movement: if I jogged the wheel, sometimes it would move 0.3 or 0.5mm before the stepper kicked in and did it's move, and then if I wanted to back up, I had to jog it waaaaay back and then go back in slowly, it was odd. I'm wondering if it's to do with the steps per mm... Using the 4988 my z steps is 400, but using the 2100s it was still 400. The umo thread mentioned having to double your steps per mm from 200 to 400... I also wonder what would happen if I left the microsteps for z at 16 instead of dialling it back to 1, so then it's 16 (board)x16(driver). The z doesn't need to move all that much so it doesn't need speed like the X and Y

That's what I figured. I'm planning to splice in a Raspberry pi 3 soonish, and run it from the phone as well, it seems like a great way to keep an eye on things while I'm at work.

I'm actually wondering something... Would it be possible to use a different controller (ie the duet3d) and just use the ulticontroller plugged in via ext1 and 2 like they are for the ultiboard2?

@mutley3d I have them set to 0.9 each, with heatsinks, and with active cooling blowing across them from a 5050 blower, I'm definitely thinking it's stealthchop. With regards to the drivers, the ones that you get from that AliExpress shop you don't actually need to wire bridge, just connect 2 solder pads on the driver, which makes it so much easier Now if I can get any form of Auto bed leveling working I'll be happy

I'm using the aliexpress 2.1.5 board at the moment, and it's working just fine. What I did was change the MS1, MS2 and MS3 microswitches to OFF/OFF/OFF, to make the board full step, and then inserted the 2100 drivers. No modifications to drivers, like resistors or whatnot, just plug and play. The printer was completely silent. I got some TMC2100's sent along with the board, but I couldn't get them to satisfactorily print, it was constantly skipping steps. Could be voltage, or could be something else to do with the switch positioning? I don't know. Also, the UM2 LCD isn't supported in the latest 1.1.8 release of Marlin, so I had to jump on the bugfix version, which made the screen work, but I could never get good, sharp corners. Just a ton of bleed (Linear advance on or off). There were a host of other issues too, like I couldn't figure out how to get auto bed levelling working with my piezo, which drove me nuts since it seems like such a cool thing. Wish I had more time to experiment, maybe I could have fixed the issues, but eventually i just switched back to A4988 drivers at 1/16 stepping on tinkergnome and the 8 diode smoothers. I'm sad.

I always dropped the acceleration and the jerk way down on my system, to get way cleaner prints. I'm in agreement about Linear Advance, so far I'm actually finding I got sharper corners with the original tinkergnome firmware. My k factor is set to 314 at the moment as well, which seems crazy high, but I'm also running at 80-90mm/s and still getting some very nice prints (other than the sharp corners), when I would have run the same calibration cube at 40mm/s previously. I'm using 1.75mm filament into an e3d, using a length of the Capricorn bowden tubing, with clips on all push fittings to minimize tube movement. I'll have to continue testing this weekend, but I've been running experiments with a piezo bed leveller (which will be AWESOME once i've printed a new head) Edit: ataylor, it looks like the issue with the soft corners is inherent to the 1.1.8 and bugfix branches.

Just for anyone that comes across this in the future: I was having serious issues with prints starting to skip steps, and it turns out that the default acceleration is insanely high on Marlin default. It is set to 3000 around line 531: #define DEFAULT_MAX_ACCELERATION { 3000, 3000, 100, 10000 } Modify it to #define DEFAULT_MAX_ACCELERATION { 500, 500, 100, 10000 } or even lower, and you should notice a huge improvement. Also while you're in there, you can probably lower these as well: #define DEFAULT_XJERK 10.0 #define DEFAULT_YJERK 10.0 #define DEFAULT_ZJERK 0.3 #define DEFAULT_EJERK 5.0 a value of 2-5 should be good. I'm thinking that if you lower the acceleration and the jerk, and then compensate with Linear Advance (Configuration_Adv.h) fine tuning, you should have sharper prints at faster speeds with less ghosting.