Watch the probe between interactions, or add a re-home button

[thormj]

So I was doing the calibration with ink that was really old (new ink on order), and it created a giant blob....
I removed the ink nozzle to wipe the blob off of it, and when I re-inserted the nozzle, it did not home, so the Z was a bit off and I broke the nozzle tip.

There seemed to be no way to get it to re-home unless you went back to the probe-the-board screen, re-did the board probing (which forced a nozzle change), and then go back. If you just went to the screen and did not change the probe, it still wouldn't re-home (if you don't do this right, you get a lot of "Fatal-Probe not mounted errors").

While waiting for the computer to send new input, watch the electrical contacts on the probe/dispenser and have the Voltera send a "tool changed" notification to the PC so that the PC would tell it to re-home first. Alternatively, put a button to "home sensor" on the ink cal screen.

[mewertow]

Hey @thormj,

That is a known issue that we're currently trying to address. Unfortunately, while the probe does have electrical contacts, the dispenser doesn't, meaning that we can't reliably tell when the dispenser's been removed.

Currently, the workaround is to release the motors with Alt+R - this will force a re-home and re-calibrate when the V-One starts moving again. Not a bad idea to have a re-calibrate / re-home button though.

• Matt

[mewertow]

Hi again @thormj,

Turns out that the home button in the app will force a recalibration (I thought it just moved the head to home position, turns out I was wrong). Just click the home button in the top right corner of the app, shown below:

• Matt

[thormj]

Ah. Ok. I'll just hit that button whenever I change the cartridges...
Should I make a separate message for "A weird fatal error appears when you go back to the probing step without a probe?" (it should just say - make sure probe is mounted, not "fatal error")

[troy]

Hey @thormj,
Coincidentally I've implemented some improvements in this area:

1. don't try to calibrate a tool until an action button (Outline, Probe, Calibrate, etc.) is pressed.
2. redo the tip calibration on the next move after pressing Stop
3. remind the printer which tool is attached on reconnect

the first and third improvements will eliminate the error you saw in this case. The second should help you avoid nozzle breaks, if you are hitting Stop. Otherwise, you do need to hit Home if you remove then add the tool after the V-One calibrates the tip.

I'll be releasing a new version of the app asap. In the mean time, using Home will work.

If you have suggestions on how to make this better/safer please share them. We use to calibrate the tip any time you did an action...that sucked a bunch in terms of user experience. We'll revert to that if we have to, but we are hoping to avoid it.

Lastly, i agree than how we display errors needs work. It does the job, but it's one of the few ugly things in our UI. I'm glad you brought it up, since that increases the priority of that work.

Cheers,
Troy