Review of the electronicgeek.ca PRUSA I3 EG-1 3D printer (part 4)

Ok, a bit late writing this part 4. I completed the assembly during the week-end with the help of Justin (my second boy):

The next step was the wiring, and man a Prusa design has a lot of wires ! ElectronicGeek, you should really beef-up the documentation regarding how and where to run the cables.

During assembly I had done one mistake in the orientation of the Z motors. The cables have to go out the back:

Bad

Good

With the kit comes a nice cable management plastic wrap. There is more than enough but I went overboard and used some of the same stuff that I already had handy. This cable wrap is pretty inexpensive and easy to install (even for a guy that sucks at cable management like me):

Now an other piece of advise for the EG folks. I would suggest that you install crimped terminals on the side of the wires that go to the power supply. Makes for a much more solid connection to the screw terminals:

I only had ring type terminal available but what you want is what they call "spad" terminals:

Now regarding the teminals on the power supply, the label showing the terminal position was a bit shifted on mine which made me do a wrong connection at first:

Bad

Good

Once all that was done and that I double checked cables (especially power) it was time to power-up the unit and try to move the axis with the RepetierHost software connected from my laptop to the printer using the supplied USB cable.

That went without much problem, I was able to move X, Y and Z just fine. 

My next test was to check the auto-level sequence. I'm used to this having added a similar induction sensor to my PrintrBot Simple Maker. It's as easy as homing X, Y and Z, and then sending the G29 GCode command. 

That is where I hit an issue... After homing X and Y, the head and induction sensor that is supposed to sense the metal of the bed was way out of the bed:

If I tried homing Z at that point it would NEVER sense metal and would crash when hitting the bottom of the Z threaded rods... You don't want that.

After some investigation I found that my Melzi board was running a Repetier firmware which it's not supposed to be as this printer is supposed to come with the open-source Marlin firmware. Not expecting much before Monday I fired an e-mail to ElectronicGeek support and to my surprise Eric responded a few hours after asking for picture of the display.

Following sending Eric the picture of the display et responded that indeed I had a Melzi board with a Repetier firmware and it was not supposed to be, should never have shipped that way. Unfortunately the only way to reprogram the board was using a USBISP adapter which amongst all the Arduino stuff I have I did not have that... Eric suggested that they ship me a replacement board which was fine with me. They shipped it Monday and I got it today Tuesday. 

During my lunch break I installed the new board and bingo auto-level probing was working. I proceeded with very basic manual bed level and Z-Offset calibration. I was eager to do a first print !

I was really surprised by my first print result, happily surprised:

This is the 50mm calibration angle found here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:53668

That is it for now. My next article will be about doing some Repetier configuration and providing some example config.