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Ch 13Before you start

Before you start Chapter 13

Before you start · Chapter 13 — Initial startup

Turns the wired machine on for the first time and proves every subsystem in the order the Voron startup wizard prescribes — temperatures, heaters, fans, motors, endstops, homing, probe, PID, QGL, Z=0, bed mesh — then hands off to gantry squaring and comes back for the first print.

What you're building in this chapter. Nothing is assembled here. This chapter proves, one subsystem at a time and in the wizard's own order, that what the earlier chapters built actually works — and it goes outward from the safest test to the most dangerous. First the three temperature sensors are read cold; then each heater is driven briefly and watched to stop; then every fan and light is commanded on and off; then each of the seven motors is buzzed a millimetre to prove the right cable is in the right socket; then each endstop and the probe are pressed by hand. Only then does the machine move on its own, in the homing sequence, after which comes the calibration chain: bed locating and the 0,0 origin, the Z-endstop coordinate, PID tuning, a heat soak, quad gantry levelling, a hand-off to Ch 06b for cold squaring, and finally Z=0 by the paper test and a bed mesh. It ends with the first print — a 30 mm cube that Ch 14 will put a caliper on. Part L is an optional add-on: a silicone nozzle scrubber behind the plate, wired into PRINT_START. Its parts are printed only after Part L has measured this machine and decided which parts fit. Final belt tension, the closed-chamber soak and the hot Z-joint lock are Ch 14's, once Ch 11 Part B has put the panels on.

Revali watching a console
First power on. Prove one subsystem at a time, so there is only ever one suspect.

Time: 2.5–4.0 h hands-on, first build (survey §5.1 P13 / §7.2). Add ~30 min of unattended PID runs and 10–20 min of heat-soak wall clock, ~15 min at the laptop for the PrusaSlicer printer profile (Step 13.41), plus ~1 h for the cube print at the end. The optional scrubber add-on (Part L) adds ~2 h hands-on, plus a ~2.5 h Core One+ print in the middle of it.

Sessions: 11 × ~30 min hands-on, 15 with Part L (Pause segments below; every minute figure is a first-build estimate derived from the Time range and the step count, and excludes the unattended PID runs, the heat soak and the cube print).

Prerequisites:

  • Ch 10 — Wiring. Checkpoint #1 passed with a multimeter, machine unplugged. This is a hard gate: if you have not done it, stop and do it. src
  • Ch 12 — Software. Klipper, Moonraker and Mainsail installed; leviathan-printer-rev-d-sbv2.cfg fetched as printer.cfg (grep -c gpio printer.cfg → 0); both MCU serial IDs filled in; the 350 mm options uncommented. The boards were energised for the first time at Ch 12 Step 12.11, with the hand-on-switch drill; Step 13.3 repeats it.
  • Ch 06 Part A — Z axis (gantry installed, Z belts on) and Ch 07 — A/B belts at provisional tension. The gantry is not squared yet — that is Ch 06 Part B (06b), which runs out of the middle of this chapter at Step 13.34: cold squaring and a provisional A/B re-tension only. Final tension, the closed-chamber soak and the hot Z-joint lock are Ch 14 Steps 14.4–14.6.
  • Ch 11 — Skirts and panels: bottom panel and skirts on (Ch 11 Part A). Back, side and top panels off and left off (Ch 11 Part B comes after this chapter, before Ch 14) — you need access to the gantry for Ch 06b, and you want to see and smell everything on power-up. The heat soaks in this chapter therefore run with the front open; their gate is probe repeatability, not a chamber temperature.
  • Print batches: none. You will print Voron_Design_Cube_v7 at the end of this chapter, on the new machine. Part L only: one Bambu A1 nozzle wiper in hand. The scrubber parts are not printed ahead: Step 13.47 decides them from this machine's numbers, Step 13.48 prints them on the Core One+.

Tools

  • Laptop or tablet on the same network, with the Mainsail console open, and a second window with M112 already typed and unsent — that is your software emergency stop. Mainsail's red Emergency Stop button in the top bar and the touchscreen's E-stop send the same thing. RESTART is not a stop: a console command normally queues behind the move that is running. Type M112 and nothing else on the line — Mainsail turns exactly that into the same emergency-stop call as its red button (and KlipperScreen's E-stop), which bypasses the command queue; RESTART, or M112 with a comment or a second command on the line, waits its turn behind the move. After an M112, FIRMWARE_RESTART brings Klipper back.
  • A sheet of ordinary printer paper (~0.1 mm) for the Z=0 paper test
  • Digital caliper, steel rule and masking tape (rotation distance, Step 13.40)
  • 2 mm and 2.5 mm hex keys (Z endstop position, probe height)
  • Phone with a belt-tension spectrum app, for the Ch 06b return leg
  • A dried spool of Prusament ASA, the PTFE reverse-bowden fitted (Ch 11 Steps 11.42–11.43), and the laptop with PrusaSlicer for Step 13.41

Consumables: a spool of ASA, dried and warm from the dryer (survey §7.3). Nothing else is consumed.

Printed parts

STL Qty Colour
Scrubber add-on, Part L only: brush bracket, stop bracket, purge bucket, generated and printed inside Part L after the decision step 1 each Black

Hardware (chapter totals)

Fastener / part Qty Note
M3×8 SHCS 6 Part L only: scrubber brackets and their two sheet stops. Otherwise nothing is fastened in this chapter except re-positioning the Z endstop and the probe, both already installed in Ch 09/Ch 10
M3 roll-in T-nut 4 Part L only
6×3 mm neodymium magnet 4 Part L only: kit spares

Read first

  • PID tuning comes before QGL, and QGL is run hot. A thermally unstable machine will not QGL repeatably. Do not reorder this. (survey §3.3, §4.4 #16)
  • Do not trust a QGL until PROBE_ACCURACY shows σ < 0.003 mm with no trend across the 10 samples. From cold, that takes 10–20 minutes of soak at temperature. (survey §4.4 #16)
  • Never unplug or re-plug a stepper with the power on. Every "swap the A and B connectors" instruction in this chapter means: power down, swap, power up. (survey §4.4 #10)
  • The stock LDO config ships every build-size option commented out and [safe_z_home] home_xy_position set to the placeholder -10,-10. A full G28 will refuse to run until you replace it with a real coordinate — that is Step 13.26, not a fault. (survey §4.4 #15)
  • If Ch 12 loaded leviathan-printer-rev-d.cfg instead of leviathan-printer-rev-d-sbv2.cfg, stop now. Every nhk: pin differs. Klipper refuses the V1 file on this toolboard (Pin 'gpio23' is not a valid pin name on mcu 'nhk'), so you will not mis-drive anything — but you will not get past Step 13.4 either. The check is not the serial ID (you pasted that yourself, and it is right in both files); it is grep -c gpio ~/printer_data/config/printer.cfg over SSH: 0 is the V2 file, 20 is the V1 file. (survey §4.1 ①, §5.2 W13)
  • M112 is the stop. RESTART is not. Have M112 typed — alone on the line — and unsent in a second console window before every first move — the homing steps say so each time. Test it once, at Step 13.22, before the machine ever moves under its own power.

Sources for this chapter:

Video coverage (Steve Builds, pre-release LDO kit — differs from Rev D+): Part 9 @1:36:00 (+4m), Part 9 @1:39:33 (+16m), Part 9 @1:50:46 (+3m), Part 9 @2:49:00 (+5m), Part 9 @5:16:40 (+9m), More Extras! @3:20:30 (+5m), More Extras! @3:44:05 (+15m)

helperHelper steps: 23 · 13.5, 13.6, 13.12, 13.13, 13.14, 13.15, 13.17, 13.18, 13.19, 13.20, 13.21, 13.26, 13.28, 13.43, 13.44, 13.45, 13.46, 13.47, 13.48, 13.49, 13.50, 13.51, 13.53

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