Ready to Print (Almost)

Well I have to say the weekend ended better than it started.  Thursday night my stomach felt terrible and I had to stay home ill on Friday.  In time I began to feel better, but I was still pretty tired.  And then on Saturday they delivered a pair of flexible aluminum  couplers that I had order off of Ebay.  I was in business!

It wasn't until today however that I was able to get this thing ready to print.  Most of that time was trying to figure out how the Repetier-Host software was supposed to be configured.

Gotcha #1
I do not believe the firmware was pre-loaded on the Melzi board.  Whenever I connected I kept getting a serial error.  Then again, it may have been my baud rate.  It needs to be set to 115200.  Anyway, I was only successful after I had loaded the supplied Arduino program.

Gotcha #2
While I realized right away that I needed to reverse the X and Z axis directions, I failed to realize that the Y axis also needed to be reversed.  It is confusing to beginners because the Y axis is moving the bed, which is opposite to the direction you want to go.

Gotcha #3
Calibrating the home position took quite a bit of time to figure out, with just poking and prodding.  Finally, after fixing all the axis problems, the limit switches began to behave like I expected.  Home is on the "origin" of the three-dimensional space cube that makes up the print area.  It is the bottom left corner of the print bed. When you get all the limit switches placed to give you the most printing area, pressing the home buttons will move the particular axis to it's home position by tripping the switch.  

Gotcha #4
Then you have to set the size of the print area so that the printer will know when to stop on the opposite end of each axis.

Anyway, I think I am ready almost ready to print.  All I need are the extruder springs.