Filament Tracking System - Overflow Problem

Jagi

Hello everybody,

I'm installing Sparklabs Filament Tracking System on a printer with Arduino Due and RADDS.
Since all other Pins are used, I hooked it up to the SD card Pins. I've got a dual extruder and I'm using ORIG_SDCARDDETECT pin for Extruder 0 and SDSS pin for Extruder 1.

I ran into two problems:

Extruder 0 tracking is working fine, but I had set the extruder (hardware and software) to 1/128 microstepping (don't ask why), so I had a huge count of steps per cycle. It's very close to the overflow at -32768 and some cycles also show "-32768" as step count.
I changed microstepping to 1/64 and 1/32 in hardware and software (with new eeprom_mode), but the step count is still the same.

The second problem is at Extruder 1. When debugging with M602 S1 P0, I only get a step count once and then nothing. I think it's related to the SDSS pin. I checked the voltage of the pin and it's getting good levels of close to 0V and close to 3.3V, so there is probably a problem with the software. Is the SDSS pin used otherwise, so I cannot use it for this purpose?

Thank you for your time and help!

Best regards
Jagi

Repetier

You should use dev version. I‘m quite sure there we use 32 bit for step count on radds, so no overflow.
sdss is dangerous as it could be used by spi and due has hardware comtrol of sdss in that case, so it might become an output instead of input and then it does not count. Might also be that having sd card enables it.

Jagi

OK, thank you for the advice.

Am I right when I assume that steps per cycle should decrease when I use less microsteps?
Do you have an Idea why my steps per cycle did not change when I switched to 1/32 microstepping?

Repetier

Steps are steps send to extruder so going from 128 to 32 microstepping should give 1/4th of the steps. That it effective you would see in the need to reduce steps per mm in extruder settings as well. Of course you have to set the reduced steps in configuration and upload again. As far as I remember you can only change it after starting for the current session.

Jagi

I found the error: I did not decrease JAM_MIN_STEPS and it was set very high. Debugging doesn't seem to ignore this, so the lower values (steps/cycle) were not displayed.

Thank you for your help!