floush

Hi there, just wanted to let you guys know that myself + another Ultimaker operator (Toni) are attending the FIT Technology-day in Lupburg (Bavaria, Germany - 30th March). For orientation: It's a 50 minute car drive from Nuremberg. It's also accessible via train. (Free) Registration: http://www.pro-fit.de/technologietag/te ... eldung.php Would love to see some more UM operators there to get an update on commercial rapid prototyping processes, the professional Netfabb softwares and a chat with Alex on the engine. (BTW: Didn't had a chance to have a look into the official 4.9 release yet...) Let me know when coming, so that we can meet up. When I'm remembering right they're expecting quite a crowd. Cheers Flo

@approx You're using the wrong tab on the right hand side! The "Slicing" tab isn't used at all. It's just for troubleshooting in different areas of Netfabb usage I think. Do you see the "Ultimaker" tab right below it? Drag a model onto this one and then you can do proper slicing! If you don't see it, you a) have the free basic version or b) aren't properly activated (demo mode). Let me know how this goes for you. Florian

Hi there, just wanted to give the community a quick update on the development of the Netfabb Engine. I was really happy to join Alex (from Netfabb) as well as Martijn & Siert from Ultimaker at the Netfabb headquarter for quick two day hack session to get some stuff fixed and improved. Find some screenshots and photos in the Netfabb blog: http://blog.netfabb.com/?bid=81 Features to come: - _Real_ customized Gcode header & footer (with some macros), which enable us to setup great startup-routines for a more convenient "click & print" workflow - Comb feature, as seen in the Christmas developer release - Outline feature (which is probably unnecessary, when using a proper startup routine anyways - Retraction settings finally have an effect, still needs some tuning - Big one: Plenty of quick overwrite settings within the region rulesets to enable slower first layers, different temperatures and nice cooling strategies - Some preliminary things for dual printing Mac OSX specifics: - Direct printing for Mac OSX, but Alex is still busy to make it reliable for Windows and OSX - Crash through cutting bug fixed - Plenty of visual bugs fixed I've probably forgot some of the stuff, but you'll get the point: Things are moving forward. The release is planned within the next two weeks I think. Cheers, Florian PS: If you have any bugs or small feature requests. Probably it's still time to summarize them here and get the fix or feature into the upcoming release.

Good question! Funnily enough: I don't know I passed on the printer to the next student team, so I couldn't test myself yet. Need to get an UM pretty soon... Alex rushed this release in order to get things done before Christmas. I hope he will clear up confusion soon. Oh wait: Paul confirmed that there's an 250000 baud rate setting available. If it works is not confirmed yet. So cool! Didn't mean to make this typo. But I like it a lot (and leave it as is). Cheers, Flo@off-to-christmas-dinner

Hi everybody, please read here to get all the infos: http://techwall.net/christmas-surprise-netfabb-just-got-better But then quickly come back and keep the discussion HERE! This is the best place to discuss your results, issues and feedback on this BETA release. Have a great Christmas time! Florian

HAHAHA... so funny. This was exactly what the guys from faculty said, when we proposed to buy an Ultimaker. "Wood. Yeah... nice toy." Now, a couple of months later we as a community managed to go below every commercial FDM printer in terms of layer thickness. Everybody involved in the industry seeing the print results is just surprised by the surface quality. Yes, there are problems remaining, but they will get fixed over time. But the wooden case is not one of them. On a personal note: I think every engineer should see that the UM is a quite superior and more finalized design compared with the Shaper Cube. Just because it's from Germany doesn't mean anything Yet another point would be software choices: If you want to print high detail models you need proper software. Skeinforge won't satisfy your boss at all. Tell him "Netfabb" comes from Germany, and this is the software which is exclusively available for the UM and BfB in a specially adapted version at the moment. Enough said... this is a really easy choice. Florian

Hi Ian, thanks for your kind words. We really hope to contribute with this to the overall success and further improvement of the Ultimaker. I wish I had more time at the moment to actively explain our findings and what could be done or better what else had to be tested in order to get the printer ultra precise. I mean for "artsy" prints it's already pretty good, but for engineering stuff the tolerances are quite high. And obviously this can be solved. Cheers, Flo PS: I couldn't get a print of your model yet... possibly you should open up the challenge as a separate post here. I would love to do it, but don't have direct access to the printer anymore as we handed over the project to younger students. We'll see how this goes on.

Hey there, we've finally finished up with our university project on Ultimaker's precision. Find the results and a short summary here: http://techwall.net/how-precise-is-the-ultimaker Sadly it's written in German... but the measuring results should be readable for everybody. Would love to hear your feedback! Florian

Hi Berend, great research topic! Just a couple of thoughts: - Finding the right Z speed/acceleration will improve the Z scar, in the best case let it disappear completely. --> Choosing improper values could have an effect on the Z accurancy. - Depending on your firmware the Z speed it completely overridden. E.g. Bernhard's Marlin uses a much too low Z speed per default. - Changing the Z accerlation in Netfabb will break the print time calculation. This has to be fixed soon. The default value of 0.0150 (or was it 0.15?!) is way to low. - At some point Paul and myself found that if you use the same Z speed as the perimeter is printed results in almost no Z scar. But at the moment this is overridden by bad firmware defaults. That's it for now - back to work. Cheers, Flo PS: To be political correct it's more like "Paul's profiles" than "Florian's profiles".