06-17-2020, 05:23 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-17-2020, 06:22 PM by czyzczyz.
Edit Reason: Added a note of astonishment that someone had the Elegoo Mars Pro 5 months ago.
)
I'd be happy to do what I can to try and make some files that will work on the Elegoo Mars Pro.
I looked at the .stl file, "UvTest2.stl" that was used as an initial source for the photon resin test in meshmixer.
Somehow this object must be sliced in such a way that the first layer is exposed for a long time to make the bed, then the z-axis moves up 1 layer, and then the remainining layers are each exposed in sequence to the same layer without any further movement of the plate.
My guess would be that to do this right one would need to:
And then before printing that ctb file one would need to run the gcode to set the printer to not peel between layers - but do we know if that gcode works on the Mars Pro and more importantly if the test-mode.gcode works, does the print-mode.gcode file also work and are those the correct settings for the Mars Pro? I'd hate to successfully run the test and then leave the printer set to a non-standard peel or acceleration setting. 'Course if it doesn't save the settings to eeprom then a reboot would fix it.
And of course while searching to see if anyone had reverse-engineered the .ctb file format I came across this description of the format as a template for a hex editor. And stepping back a couple of directories from there, it appears that this file is part of a branch of the resin test created specifically for the Elegoo Mars Pro. (and the repository was created 5 months ago -- was the Elegoo Mars Pro in circulation back then?)
The readme simply states "Based on https://github.com/altLab/photon-resin-calibration but adopted for ELEGOO Mars Pro 3d printers."
It appears this might be the answer. Run the test-mode.gcode, print the .ctb, run the print-mode.gcode - and there's the test. Yay!
There's only one .ctb file in the repository, "resin-test-50u.B100.2-20.ctb", which would be the 50-micron 100-second, 2-20 exposure-range test file. I'd love to generate a 25u file as well but don't know how. I wonder if this tool is at all involved in creating the test file -- the same user who made that Elegoo Mars Pro version of the .ctb file also contributed a patch to that project. It looks as one of the functions of that tool is to convert between various sliced file formats for SLA printers, and it recently added support for the .ctb format. Maybe that tool can be used to convert the Elegoo Mars or Photon versions of the test files into ones for the Elegoo Mars Pro?
I'm going to give it a try. Because I don't know if that print-mode.gcode sets the printer's parameters exactly back to normal, I'm going to use this test mode gcode file from a different repository which doesn't save settings to eeprom. That way the printer should go back to normal after power-cycling.
For what it's worth, it does appear that there's a file on the supplied USB drive from Elegoo named "Machine parameters.gcode", so assuming that's all well and correct I should be able to get back to the standard parameters regardless what I do with these setup gcode files. Good to know.
I looked at the .stl file, "UvTest2.stl" that was used as an initial source for the photon resin test in meshmixer.
- It seems to be an object that's 12mm tall.
- The first 1mm is a plate or bed
- the 2nd mm is blank
- and then the rest is a 10mm-tall stairstep arrangement of test strips (i.e. the first strip is 1mm tall, the last is 10mm).
Somehow this object must be sliced in such a way that the first layer is exposed for a long time to make the bed, then the z-axis moves up 1 layer, and then the remainining layers are each exposed in sequence to the same layer without any further movement of the plate.
My guess would be that to do this right one would need to:
- scale the z-axis of the object such that the 12mm in height drops to 12*layer_height. So for .05mm that'd be 5% scale.
- slice the object into a .ctb file, with the first layer set to expose for (some long amount of time)
- hack the .ctb file to remove any further z-axis advance between layers 2-12.
And then before printing that ctb file one would need to run the gcode to set the printer to not peel between layers - but do we know if that gcode works on the Mars Pro and more importantly if the test-mode.gcode works, does the print-mode.gcode file also work and are those the correct settings for the Mars Pro? I'd hate to successfully run the test and then leave the printer set to a non-standard peel or acceleration setting. 'Course if it doesn't save the settings to eeprom then a reboot would fix it.
And of course while searching to see if anyone had reverse-engineered the .ctb file format I came across this description of the format as a template for a hex editor. And stepping back a couple of directories from there, it appears that this file is part of a branch of the resin test created specifically for the Elegoo Mars Pro. (and the repository was created 5 months ago -- was the Elegoo Mars Pro in circulation back then?)
The readme simply states "Based on https://github.com/altLab/photon-resin-calibration but adopted for ELEGOO Mars Pro 3d printers."
It appears this might be the answer. Run the test-mode.gcode, print the .ctb, run the print-mode.gcode - and there's the test. Yay!
There's only one .ctb file in the repository, "resin-test-50u.B100.2-20.ctb", which would be the 50-micron 100-second, 2-20 exposure-range test file. I'd love to generate a 25u file as well but don't know how. I wonder if this tool is at all involved in creating the test file -- the same user who made that Elegoo Mars Pro version of the .ctb file also contributed a patch to that project. It looks as one of the functions of that tool is to convert between various sliced file formats for SLA printers, and it recently added support for the .ctb format. Maybe that tool can be used to convert the Elegoo Mars or Photon versions of the test files into ones for the Elegoo Mars Pro?
I'm going to give it a try. Because I don't know if that print-mode.gcode sets the printer's parameters exactly back to normal, I'm going to use this test mode gcode file from a different repository which doesn't save settings to eeprom. That way the printer should go back to normal after power-cycling.
For what it's worth, it does appear that there's a file on the supplied USB drive from Elegoo named "Machine parameters.gcode", so assuming that's all well and correct I should be able to get back to the standard parameters regardless what I do with these setup gcode files. Good to know.