Your feedback and changes are making Maslow4 better already

Happy Wednesday Everyone!

Sorry for the weekly update coming out a little late this week, we’ve been hard at work trying to pack as much of your feedback as possible into this week’s firmware update. 

We’ve been finding lots of bugs and room for improvement and we want to give a HUGE shout out to everyone who has given us ideas this week for how we can make things better. The assembly guide, the shipping/packing process, and the software are all better thanks to your contributions. 

We’ve gotten a ton of excellent feedback on the assembly guide and we’ve re-worded several steps and added more pictures (sometimes contributed by the community) where we could make things more clear. I can’t tell you how much of a difference that kind of feedback makes because you only get to follow the assembly guide with fresh eyes one time. Once you know how it all goes together it might seem clear, but that first time doing it is a great chance to catch things which could be better.

As our first batch of kits have been arriving we’ve gotten a TON of excellent feedback on how they are arriving on the other end. By and large they are making it there OK, but we have found a couple issues, none of them with parts that we expected to have issues with. By far the most common issue that we’ve had has been with the hardware bags exploding in transit which is something that we did not expect. Going forwards we are going to solve that issue by triple bagging them. One of the hardware bags is made from a thinner plastic than the other so we are double bagging that one in a second ziplock bag, then we are going to place both hardware bags inside the plastic bag which contains the sled further preventing any loose ones from getting away. Luckily for the most part they stayed in the box, but still room for improvement.

Photo credit pdw125

The next part that we’ve seen damaged in shipping is the controller PCB. They have a couple of large capacitors which stick up and seem prone to getting bumped. We’re going to be double wrapping those in padding going forward as well. 

Photo credit to Glen_Paul in the forums

Finally we have been seeing the dust collector area of the sled being chipped. This part is very thin (if time weren’t an issue I would love to redesign it to be thicker) and the glass fiber reinforced polycarbonate that the sleds are made from is a very rigid, but also brittle material. To better protect the sleds in transit we are going to be installing the clamps on the uprights before we ship them, and adjusting how some of the other parts in the box are packed in relation to the sled.

Photo credit silo0623

One area in the user guide that we’ve gotten feedback about is the calibration process. It can be somewhat difficult to follow along with the written instructions so we’ve made a video to show the process. Expect that part of the firmware to change quickly so this video will be out of date soon, but we’ll just make a new one.

Speaking of changes to the firmware, we’ve incorporated a lot of excellent feedback into this week’s firmware update. 

We’ve fixed too many typos and little issues to list them all but here are some of the highlights.

If you click the arrow buttons before extending the belts they will no longer try to unspool really quickly. This issue could easily lead to the belts getting tangled or sucked into the drive gears.

We found that the calibration process could sometimes take a REALLY long time to conclude. The way it works is that it decides it has found the optimal locations of the anchor points when the results stop improving…the problem is that for some sets of measurements the results might keep improving by a tiny fraction of a mm for a long long time. The calibration process now automatically terminates after 200,000 cycles which is more than enough. While working on this bug we made numerous other improvements and fixes to the calibration process which should lay the groundwork for future developments like having a user defined calibration grid, and real time visualization of the calibration process.

The calibration algorithm finding the correct locations for the anchor points in real time

Maslow has a self test function which checks to make sure that all of the components are connected and talking to each other when it first boots up. If something isn’t right it will turn on a red light. Unfortunately that just tells you that something is wrong, not what is wrong. To solve that issue we’ve added a “Test” button which will let you find out what is not connected easily.

As always, you can find the latest firmware update here:

https://github.com/BarbourSmith/FluidNC/releases

You will want to update both your firmware and index.html files to get all the improvements. We strongly recommend updating regularly at least at first because there are so many excellent improvements and even more in the works thanks to your feedback.

When will my Maslow4 Ship?

We have been getting a lot of requests for updates on shipping. Understandable, because the forums now are full of people putting their Maslow4’s together. As reported in previous weekly updates, due to the delay in PCB manufacturing, we were only able to get 150 PCBs initially. The next 900 PCBs which were scheduled to arrive last Saturday arrived today. We’re going to jump right into testing them and hopefully be able to start shipping again tomorrow. In the meantime we’ve been preparing by packing boxes with everything except for that board to get as many out the door as quickly as we can.

We’re absolutely not going to make it to our goal of being 75% of the way through shipping the Kickstarter kits this week, but we’re really hoping to get through at least the insider edition kits and then push through the rest next week.

We’d also like to promote searching in the Forums for questions on assembly and calibration. Someone may have already asked the very same question you have, and an answer may be waiting for you already. Similarly, if you don’t see a topic on your specific question, please feel welcome to make a post about it. Others in the Forum will benefit from you asking questions and someone else may have found a solution. Bar, Roman and I will of course try to respond to as many posts as we can, but we have some pretty savvy Forums users out there who may just beat us to it, or provide an even better solution. Check the Forums out here: https://forums.maslowcnc.com/

Have a great week everyone! We’ll see you in the forums!

-Bar, Anna, and Roman