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.

After assembling your Ultimaker, and you have extrusion working and you have levelled your building platform with the paper under the nozzle trick (you did do that trick, didn't you?), you still have no proof that it can lay down that first layer hands-off. Here is some gcode you can run to test if your bed is level enough, and the Z-height is set correctly. It will slowly lay down a single thread on the bed, moving from corner to corner. You can test if it adheres right (try to rub it off) and is not blocked too much(depress the bed slightly with a finger and see if a large flow comes out). I assume that you are past the 'printing in mid air' and 'digging into the tape' stages. The head moves slow enough to allow you some time to turn the set screws. ;the silly forum is not allowing .gcode files, so you will have to cut&paste this code in a 'new' file in rep-g...M104 S240 ;Set temp but dont wait for it yetM92 E14 ;Old style E=mm out of the nozzleG28 ;home all axesG0 Z30 :move up a little to avoid making a mess on the bedG1 E100 F1000 ;Extrude some stuffG92 E0 ;set Extrusion too zero againG1 X10 Y10 E14 F500 ;Start first move to corner.G1 Z0.2 ;Common first layer height? Optionally set this to your normal first layer height.G1 X180 E184 ;and start laying that thread.G1 Y180 E354 ;you can twist the four screws now to make sure you get an even laydown all over the bed. G1 X10 E524 ;ideally, your bed should be level within 0.05mm (or even lower if your Z-resolution is lower)G1 Y10 E694 ;M3 screws move 0.5 with each turn, so your fine-tunig should be with less then 1/8 turns. G92 E10G1 X12 Y12 E14G1 X178 E184 G1 Y178 E354G1 X12 E524G1 Y12 E694G92 E10G1 X14 Y14 E14G1 X176 E184G1 Y176 E354G1 X14 E524G1 Y14 E694G92 E10G1 X16 Y16 E14G1 X174 E184G1 Y174 E354G1 X16 E524G1 Y16 E694G92 E10G1 X18 Y18 E14G1 X172 E184G1 Y172 E354G1 X18 E524G1 Y18 E694G92 E10G1 X20 Y20 E14G1 X170 E184G1 Y170 E354G1 X20 E524G1 Y20 E694 If your are satisfied with the results of your tweaking, you might hunt down some prefab gcode and while that is printing, you can get your feet wet with compiling some gcode of your own. I hope that UM has released a newer version of rep-G, bundled with some working profiles, by the time you read this..

The newly generated materials also seem to cause a negative extrusion to occur? Is that something that rings a bell to you?

Not really a surprise, as there is no code in the calibration file to define the start and end gcode?

This seems to work, but I have some trouble with the start-gcode not showing up? Is there a different place where those can be defined too, or do I need to update netfabb?

we have cut several acrylic Ultimakers. I can send you the file we used for that when I am back at work on Monday, but it is not hard to do the modifications yourself. Use the original drawings, not a possibly out of date derivative. remove all the lines that are intended to be kiss lines, iirc these are all blue. The drawings contain instructions what part to cut from what material, you might need to split the drawings up into separate files, one for each thickness (you need 6 and 4mm). As far as I know, coloured acrylic is not available in 6mm, only 5, and you will get some fitting issues if you use 5mm: the slider blocks will be a bit smaller and the stacks for the build platform will be too narrow to fit the linear bearings. Be aware though that the extruder motor construction will break over time, it has just too little material in it. I have made some drawings for an improvement, but you may have guessed it: those are at work and it is not that hard to modify yourself. If you want a machine in clear 6mm acrylic, we can cut that out for you for 300 euro ex shipping. You can sand it yourself, or add some colour with a transparent foil later. We usually sand them for a matte look, and add some colour to the engravings with a marker and sandpaper.

That certainly looks nice, but chocolate printing still has a long way to go before we can print the Stanford bunny in its rightful chocolate. On cooled beds: if you get below the dew-point, it will start to attract water droplets. Water and chocolate should not be mixed or you get an awful mess. A better solution would be to cool with lots of cooled air and/or to precisely cool the tip of the nozzle so that the chocolate is slightly solidified the moment it gets deposited. As it is now, the material retains too much heat (transports that heat too slow) and does not solidify enough to allow multi layered prints.

Common sense suggests me that this has indeed been tried already, we do have a set of taps and dies here. But you have not tried any of the two materials involved: PFA and PEEK, did you? The move from telfon (PFTE) to PFA was later in the development, and it is a bit stiffer than PFTE, so it might just work. The PEEK is something that should be gotten rid off as it is hard to source. A setup with a longer stainless tube instead of the brass that can be screwed into an alu heatsink is much more preferable. The ultimaker is not aimed at the gada price, so it is not on a silly energy budget. The extra losses from a heatsink do not weigh up to the simpler construction without PEEK.

A thick nozzle is good for speedy prints, which is good if you want to make particularly high prints... We have a ultimaker++ here with a 0.8 mm nozzle which would be very nice to drive with netfabb gcode (skeinforge takes it sweet time with high models..), but we also have two 'regular' ultimakers that are driven mostly with skeinforge 35 because that is perceived as easiest. So we certainly could do with some material defs: Ultimaker++ - base layer height 0.25 - 0.5 - filament diameter (measured accurately!!) black 2.85, white 2.88, pink 2.93 - temperature: honestly, I have no idea what the 'best' temperature is. Usually I drive it at 240, so I guess a range from 210-250 should do? - travel feed rate: fast! (again, no idea about the actual values, I really dislike the silly percentage thing instead of mm/min) - min and max feed rates: see above - min and max thread widths: again, no idea, I think it should be a little wider to make single skinned objects a bit stronger. plain Ultimaker: Basically the same thing, but these ones should print at a lower height too. Is your program shareable? I really dislike burdening you with a boring data-entry job.

What is the exact value you should store with M92 E... if you are using 5D volumetric slicers? I tried something in the order of 937 as I think i've seen it somewhere, but that is not very scientific. The bolt on this machine is a recent knurled one (so not hobbed).

I concur with the realtime panel bug. Its really annoying as you open it when you worry about your print, and this bug start to kill your print from then on... :( Marlin version is the latest one from Bernhards github. (used tortoisegit to update)