Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Printrbot Auto-Leveling Probe Fix

Has your Printrbot gotten cranky or just given up the ghost when trying to probe your bed?
Is the Printrbot forum not terribly helpful?

My Printrbot would detect the bed in the first spot.
Move to the second spot and go up, up.
Move to the third spot and go up, up.

If your bot acts kind of like this it means that something is wrong with your probe or your firmware or something. Use M119 to see if you can get z_min to be triggered at different positions. In my case it was easy to see that it would trigger near home, but not away so I could tell the probe was broken. Because the only difference was how the wires were stretched I had a strong suspicion it was somewhere in the middle of that wire pull that was getting moved.

None of the other wires in the bundle were having any problems so I don't know why the probe wires are so cheap. Anyway, I did it the proper DIY way chopped out the bulk of the wire and soldered in some heavier duty electrical wires I had laying around.



It looked like this.

I keep the thinner wires on the probe and the connector and soldered there because it was easier that tearing those apart and reconnecting. I fished the probe back into place and it works flawlessly.

I've had 2 different probes fail due to garbage thin wires, but never had a problem with the firmware as some people claim is part of the problem.

So if your probe stopped detecting the your metal build surface you may as well try replacing the wires. It's the maker way after all.

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Using a Raspberry Pi as an Airplay Server

This is mostly for my own personal notes. Maybe you'll get something out of it.
I've got an original Raspberry Pi B with a WiFi dongle that I have hooked directly to the USB input of my JVC Receiver.

Grab the "Lite" version of Raspbian because you won't need any windows.
At press time the most recent version is 2017-04-10-raspbian-jessie-lite.zip

Setup your accounts/wifi/localization the way you like.
Update and upgrade/dist-upgrade to get everything current.
Reboot to make sure everything is on the level.

Go to: https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync and skim the instructions so you know what you are doing.

Install All The Things!
sudo apt-get install build-essential git xmltoman autoconf automake libtool libdaemon-dev libasound2-dev libpopt-dev libconfig-dev avahi-daemon libavahi-client-dev libsoxr-dev libssl-dev
Clone All The Things!
git clone https://github.com/mikebrady/shairport-sync.git
Change Directory
cd shairport-sync
Setup Configuration Script
autoreconf -i -f
Configure All The Things!
./configure --sysconfdir=/etc --with-alsa --with-avahi --with-ssl=openssl --with-soxr --with-systemd
Make All The Things!
make

Create Shairport-Sync Group for Security
 getent group shairport-sync &>/dev/null || sudo groupadd -r shairport-sync >/dev/null
Create Shairport-Sync User for Security
getent passwd shairport-sync &> /dev/null || sudo useradd -r -M -g shairport-sync -s /usr/bin/nologin -G audio shairport-sync >/dev/null
Install All The Things!
sudo make install
Launch on System Boot
sudo systemctl enable shairport-sync
Configure All The Things!
sudo nano /etc/shairport-sync.conf
I added a name to the "general" section
name = "MusicPi";
interpolation = "soxr";
I added some output info to the "alsa" section
output_device = "hw:1";