The Beast Lives…

My first large scale printer was a Creality CR10-S4.  Up until last July 2020 I had been running with the stock hardware and overall it worked pretty well.  But I had been wanting try some uprades for quite a while so I got my hands on a Duet 2 WiFi main board and Slice Engineering Copperhead hotend.  I printed out an enclosure for the mainboard and a new mount for the hotend.  Once I got everything installed I printed a benchy aaaaannnnnnd…

It was a disaster.

The printer seemed to be both under and over extruding during print.

I tried several more benchy’s making tweaks to the slicer settings every time with the same results.  Well I put this project aside to get my shop set up after purchasing the 3D printing business from Chris.  I moved the printer and it sat on a table until a week ago when I finally got around to revisiting a project. Sometimes it’s good to let a project lie fallow for a while and come back to it with fresh eyes.  I did some more digging around in the online reprap firmware documentation and found the problem came down to two words and one Gcode command:

Pressure Advance: M572 D0 S0.425

I won’t get into any explaination here because there’s a really good article discussing what it is and how it works.  I added the command to my config file, printed a benchy and the light shone down from heaven with an angelic choir singing at the top of it’s lungs!  Well, not really but It worked.  So if you are ever doing these kinds of upgrades remember these two words: Pressure Advance.  You’ll be glad you did.

Happy Printing!