Just an FYI, "calibrating esteps" as everyone likes to feel so great and smart in doing, is something that can give you a small amount of print quality, but ONLY if you do this for every single filament you use, and only if you are printing at the same temperature as it was when you did this calibration, AND as long as you never changed your extruder gear tension or nozzle. All of these factors will change exactly how much filament is extruded when you issue the command to the printer to extrude 50 or 100 mm etc. So yes it is good to check it, but don't worry much if it is off by 5mm +/- as this ultimately makes very little difference in whether you end up under or over extruding. It is miniscule. The MORE important thing to do, is calibrate for each material you print with, for flow rate% independently on your top/bottom layers, walls, and infill. Print a open top test box that is exactly 2 walls thick, with your slicer set on .4 wall width. If your cube walls measure very close to .8 with a pair of calipers, then you are doing well. If they measure .9+, then dial your wall flow rate back 10% and test print again. If you have over extrusions in your first and last layers, dial those back 5% at a time until they sit flat with no ridges or holes in the layers. Please, don't waste too much time worrying about esteps, especially if you aren't that comfortable doing it in the first place. It equates to making sure your car is burning the exact amount of fuel for every type of gas you might put in there. It is nice to be close, but ultimately it doesn't really matter as long as it isn't WAY off.
Hi Ishmael, thank you for your input! I agree on many of your points, and on a decision tree for printing around the clock, esteps come before flow calibration: esteps are a machine variable, flow is filament variable. Esteps are correlated to the extruder setup, and are constant whatever the printing speeds, acceleration, material, layer height, layer thickness. Is tied down by firmware and even swapping to bigger/smaller nozzles remains the same. It is also the reason why it is burned in EEPROM, flow is a floating variable that depends on the filament and nozzle accuracy, and minorly by tension on extruder teeth. A 5% discrepancy in estep values is massive (5mm every 100mm), as also for 5% flow from the correct value. The open box method you cited is a fantastic solution to calibrate flow, and it will be argument for another video focused on filaments more than printers
@@3DPrintingForMoney sorry but this is wrong. Your extruded filament will be different depending on every variable I listed. Check for yourself! It's an average number to give you a decent amount of extrusion across all the materials, nozzles, and temperatures you will be using. Nothing more. It's also usually set using PLA from the factory on a .4 nozzle, so depending on how different you go from that will change your extruded amount.i had quite a difference between just Pla at 200 and petg at 240, so I did a calculation for each and used an average e value of both. I then fix the smaller differences with flow rate. Again all probably not even necessary to begin with, hence the reason I've given my little PSA here
And 5% in flow is actually quite small. It will result in 100ths of a millimeter discrepancy in your extruded wall thickness, which could have just been fixed in your slicer settings to begin with
Yes estep calibration was important back when people were unsure of the effective estep value for their particular hob gear, but now it has become standardized enough for each manufacturor that this is completely unnecessary. And like said before, your results will vary especially depending on the hard or softness of the material you are running thru as well as other factors. Flow calibration is the way
@@FIN_OSCAR_RAHHHH Yeah flow is important, I don’t discuss it. Only saying that it is material-related. I’ve been digging awhile in how slicer outputs gcode, but didn’t find a clear answer if flow settings accounts also for retractions. until now, my understanding is that flow settings affects only for extrusions, but not retractions. So if esteps aren’t on spot, a relative 0 point won’t correspond to an effective 0 after the retraction movement. What machines do you have? Maybe I’ve been unlucky, of all the machines I run only one had correct esteps (Prusa mk2s), all others, mainly Chinese ones, were off…so I had to calibrate them all, and only then dig in other parameters.
Very very interesting! Thank you!!!!!
Just an FYI, "calibrating esteps" as everyone likes to feel so great and smart in doing, is something that can give you a small amount of print quality, but ONLY if you do this for every single filament you use, and only if you are printing at the same temperature as it was when you did this calibration, AND as long as you never changed your extruder gear tension or nozzle. All of these factors will change exactly how much filament is extruded when you issue the command to the printer to extrude 50 or 100 mm etc. So yes it is good to check it, but don't worry much if it is off by 5mm +/- as this ultimately makes very little difference in whether you end up under or over extruding. It is miniscule.
The MORE important thing to do, is calibrate for each material you print with, for flow rate% independently on your top/bottom layers, walls, and infill. Print a open top test box that is exactly 2 walls thick, with your slicer set on .4 wall width. If your cube walls measure very close to .8 with a pair of calipers, then you are doing well. If they measure .9+, then dial your wall flow rate back 10% and test print again. If you have over extrusions in your first and last layers, dial those back 5% at a time until they sit flat with no ridges or holes in the layers.
Please, don't waste too much time worrying about esteps, especially if you aren't that comfortable doing it in the first place. It equates to making sure your car is burning the exact amount of fuel for every type of gas you might put in there. It is nice to be close, but ultimately it doesn't really matter as long as it isn't WAY off.
Hi Ishmael, thank you for your input!
I agree on many of your points, and on a decision tree for printing around the clock, esteps come before flow calibration: esteps are a machine variable, flow is filament variable.
Esteps are correlated to the extruder setup, and are constant whatever the printing speeds, acceleration, material, layer height, layer thickness. Is tied down by firmware and even swapping to bigger/smaller nozzles remains the same. It is also the reason why it is burned in EEPROM, flow is a floating variable that depends on the filament and nozzle accuracy, and minorly by tension on extruder teeth. A 5% discrepancy in estep values is massive (5mm every 100mm), as also for 5% flow from the correct value.
The open box method you cited is a fantastic solution to calibrate flow, and it will be argument for another video focused on filaments more than printers
@@3DPrintingForMoney sorry but this is wrong. Your extruded filament will be different depending on every variable I listed. Check for yourself! It's an average number to give you a decent amount of extrusion across all the materials, nozzles, and temperatures you will be using. Nothing more. It's also usually set using PLA from the factory on a .4 nozzle, so depending on how different you go from that will change your extruded amount.i had quite a difference between just Pla at 200 and petg at 240, so I did a calculation for each and used an average e value of both. I then fix the smaller differences with flow rate. Again all probably not even necessary to begin with, hence the reason I've given my little PSA here
And 5% in flow is actually quite small. It will result in 100ths of a millimeter discrepancy in your extruded wall thickness, which could have just been fixed in your slicer settings to begin with
Yes estep calibration was important back when people were unsure of the effective estep value for their particular hob gear, but now it has become standardized enough for each manufacturor that this is completely unnecessary. And like said before, your results will vary especially depending on the hard or softness of the material you are running thru as well as other factors. Flow calibration is the way
@@FIN_OSCAR_RAHHHH Yeah flow is important, I don’t discuss it. Only saying that it is material-related.
I’ve been digging awhile in how slicer outputs gcode, but didn’t find a clear answer if flow settings accounts also for retractions. until now, my understanding is that flow settings affects only for extrusions, but not retractions. So if esteps aren’t on spot, a relative 0 point won’t correspond to an effective 0 after the retraction movement.
What machines do you have? Maybe I’ve been unlucky, of all the machines I run only one had correct esteps (Prusa mk2s), all others, mainly Chinese ones, were off…so I had to calibrate them all, and only then dig in other parameters.
come sempre, belle spiegazioni e contenuti compressibili, grazie pei i chiarimenti, video molto utile
Информация очень важная, спасибо Richard!!!жду продолжения!!!