jelleatprotospace

A simple solution could be if cura would create a random directory and give the file its normal basename. But yeah, this might need some cura changes. At some point the start.gcode had placeholders for the filename, but they were never replaced with the actual filename.

I have a good idea: instead of having to go here to see if there is any new content, have it sent directly to your inbox. And when you wish to contribute, you just hit 'reply' and do just that. No barriers, no control freaks, no new logins that you forgot, no problem!

Daid, did you test the endstop at different temperatures?

Hi there, How hard would it be to get rid of the subforums and put all threads in one place? For me, the google groups (newsgroup) format works beautifully: i get some emails and filter them in their separate folder, no further subdivision needed. On this forum, you get greeted by 5(?) sections and 18(?) subforums, each dividing the visitors into fractions of one or two. I do want to learn what is going on with the UM community, but trawling all these forums is a non-starter for me. Thus far, the googlegroups-like bahaviour that was promised at launch, has not appeared and I think this division of focus plays a big part in the failing of these new forums. (having an option to share with facebook but not with G+ is another, but minor factor)

Every participant in our last Ultimaker workshop had loose belts. There is no way you can explain that by saying they all did not follow instructions. If the belts are a different length than designed, then there is little you can do but improvise. It seems there is no quality control procedure yet at UM for belt-length.

it is easy to explain the non-staggering infill: straight lines take longer to print, so there needs to go much less info over the line. That means no buffer underruns and no slowdown or stopping. That is most likely what is happening to your perimeters, if your STL was very detailed, the resulting gcode to the perimeter will have a lot of very small segments that take more time to send than to execute. Marlin tries to mitigate this by going slower when its buffer gets low, but when conditions are marginal it will stop once in a while. See if reducing the baudrate to 115200 makes the problem go away. Another option is to decimate the stl in meshlab (reduce the number of facets) to make the average path lenght longer.

Measuring thickness variation and doing something useful with it seems very hard to me. An encoder wheel on the input to the hot end would be a good idea, but at the same time measuring diameter and presumably compensating for off-round filament just seems like a bridge too far. But why not try to make the filament you have now and make it conform to a better spec? Apparently you can limit the thickness with a tool I only know as 'pulling-iron' an iron plate with smooth slightly conical holes that you pull your filament trough. The extra thickness is converted to a little extra length and the diameter is limited to the hole used. Easy to do by hand for smaller lengths, but it should not be too hard to make a machine for.

the 'kamer maker' is mostly hot air for now. The flashy presentation is just to generate some funding which they succeeded in. I wonder if they also told their funders that they were shooting for the moon.

yes the belts are/were annoyingly long in the last batch of UM's I have seen built. But that does not cause the symptoms you describe. Those could be caused by pulleys that are loose or the small belts being too loose. Do not forget the washers under the screws for the motor and put quite some down force on the motor when you tighten them. Read and follow the building instructions, that is the best advise to follow! Doing the geek thing and thinking you can do it without the manual will only hurt your pride.

If you overheat the steppers you will get very funny prints/bird nests, but other than that, no harm done. The chips have a overheating protection built in.

19V may heat up the regulator a little too much, as it needs to dissipate 14V*0.xxx (arduino current), which will quickly approach >1Watt. If you connect to the 12V output, the load will be spread over two regulators, with the largest load (the 7812) getting some cooling air from the fan (if you trim the airduct) I do not understand 'leaking 5V to the 12V fan'. Does a voltage on the output side turn up at the input side of the regulator when it is not powered? And how much current will it pass then?

why not use a gear to drive the opposite gripper? I've drawn a herringbone gear here, but with hindsight it might be better to use just a helical gear. The undriven gear will tend to be pushed along the axis, gripping the filament even tighter. It should not be too expensive to have this made in stainless steel at shapeways, I think. I've left drawing the larger drive gear, that should be on top of one of the gears, as an exercise for the reader...

Has anybody tried using TEC/peltier elements for this yet? a peltier element can cool or heat, but with a horrible efficiency. Proposed setup: -------------thin glass top--------------------- ==========Alu top==================== [peltier] [peltier] [peltier] ==========Alu bottom================= When you heat up the top, the bottom plate will cool down. When your print is done, you reverse the current trough the peltiers and the top cools down quickly. Hopefully that does not break the glass, but will allow your print to pop off effortlessly. You do need a full H-bridge to drive it, so either use an extra pin on the arduino, or drive it with an extra pin in tri-state configuration.

Why would making 5V from 12V be a problem? So why would it be a problem when linear regulators are used? A simple connection from the 12V regulator output to Vin on the main board suffices. No fans turning when you connect the USB, nor is it trying to power a 40Watt machine from a 2.5Watt connection.

Actually, that is a regression. Ultimaker started out with a 'hobbed' bolt, which means that a groove was cut out using a 4mm tap. It works, but there are some serious downsides: The groove tends to fill up with shredded PLA, making slipping more frequent and necessitating flossing of the bolt (brushing actually) The quality of the hobbed bolt is low, usually you end up with an incomplete formed gear that has a pronounced high spot. That means that extrusion will vary with the diameter variations too and the low side will tend to slip a little sooner. So, you can try to go for a hobbed bolt if you like, but do not expect a better performance.