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ddurant

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Posts posted by ddurant

  1. or, once you've loaded the model in printrun, go to the file menu and select edit. Change the second line with the M92 Exxxxx with the xxxxx being the value you want.

    Right.

    Also, I dunno M2210 but Joergen is usually pretty clever so you may want to look into that, too.

     

    In print run if I extrude 50mm the actual length drawn is about 46mm.

    If you didn't already know, multiply your current esteps value by 50/46 (1.09) then measure again. Keep repeating and adjusting esteps by desired/measured until it starts behaving.

  2. When extruding through a hot nozzle I am finding a significant difference in the measured vs expected extrusion length.

    Do you really mean "extrusion length" here?

    The esteps value is how many steps (to the extruder motor) are needed to pull one mm of filament into the drive mechanism - it's not about the length of filament coming out of the nozzle.

    Unless the filament is being offset (ie: slipping in the drive) in a very predicatable & consistant way, changing esteps may not be the right way to address this problem.

  3. I think the bigger question is going to be what will technically meet your needs. FDM (extrusion) printers can be a bit tricky with small parts and large parts can take a lot of time to print, if you also want quality..

    (you should also add a MakerGear M2 to your list..)

  4. What does (F) stand for and what does (E) stand for exactly? How do I find the Z height?

    F is feed rate - the X/Y speed in mm/minute.

    E is extrusion - how much filament is going into the drive.

    Find a G1 command with a Z value in it - that's the Z height.

    MAKE SURE you do what Daid said and put an M92 E in there to reset the extrusion to where you left off. Failure to do this won't break anything but you'll be very, very unhappy with the result. Like, it'll start by trying to push (based on the gcode you posted) about 11 meters of filament through the hot end before doing anything else. Ask if you're not sure exactly what to do..

  5. Yes I can see the option to post now!!

    Great!

    It's been so long since I was a new user that I've forgotten what the process looks like.. When you signed up for the group, did you get an email, saying that you had to click a link or do something? I'm just wondering what the process is and how things can be made smoother for new users...

    No, I didn't get an email to click on something.. there should be a way to give post permissions by default to all new users that sign up..

    Don't really want to do that - it encourages the spammers.. :(

     

    or mabye it is an anti-spam feature where users have to click something to be allowed to post...who knows..

    It should be obvious for new users so I suspect something is broken. I had to switch back to the old groups format to enable posting for you - googles "new and improved" format seems to be missing a bunch of admin features. :roll:

    I reported the weirdness to google. No idea if they'll fix it, though...

  6. Mine's a little sensitive to static.. If I forget to touch something metal before touching the machine while it's printing, I sometimes get a reset. Not often - maybe 2-3 times, ever.

    Things like having fluorescent lights on nearby can also do weird things. My machine doesn't have a problem with them but I've heard of other machines having such issues.

  7. I can see that you (or somebody else named 'approx') joined the group 4 days ago but that "posting" for you is set to "none" insead of the "allowed" setting that most people have. There are a number of others that have joined in the last couple weeks like that, too. I don't see anyway to change that setting, though.. WTH, google?

    I'll poke around with it some more. I seem to have all the right privs to manage/approve members but google is saying there aren't any new members to approve..

    Is it sending you emails when people post?

    edit: try posting now.. Better?

  8. Anybody have an idea? Thanks!

    Only that I've never had great luck getting transparent PLA to come out really transparent.

    I've suspected that the two big factors are printing speed (ie: pressure/turbulance in the nozzle) and the temperature. I don't have any rules or tips, though...

  9. After writing the above, I decided to take the printhead apart and there I found a big melted PLA in the end of the bowden tube. Not good.

    What can I do to prevent this? As this doesn't seem to be an extruder problem but more a printhead problem...

    I've got one of the first Ultimakers to ship and have printed for many, many hours. I've seen this problem, the PLA plug at the end of the bowden tube, only once.

    My best advice, if you haven't already given up, is to never, EVER leave the machine hot. Don't even preheat until you've got the gcode loaded and the build platform ready and all that. It only takes a minute to heat up so get everything else done and ready before heating.. Once it's done printing, make sure the temperature gets set back to 0 so it cools off.

    As filament moves through the system, it pulls heat out of the hot end.. If this cooling rate is less than the heating rate, the hot end ends up with an excess of heat, which moves up the system and can cause the dreaded PLA plug to form at the end of the bowden tube. The way around this is to find the (somewhat fine) line where you're just adding enough heat to the system to allow melt the filament the right amount but not so much that the excess can move up the hot end to the bowden tube.

    You haven't (AFAIK) posted about the settings you're using.. If you need help getting the machine to behave properly, you should start up a new thread and post those and the probelms you're seeing.

  10. Measuring thickness variation and doing something useful with it seems very hard to me..

    I agree.

    Rob Guiseburt, the guy who coined the term "Volumetric 5D", has been talking about that for a while now. He seems to think it's not THAT hard. Not sure I buy that but Rob's a very clever guy.

    Personally, I'm not sure it's worth it. For the most part, we're printing at resolutions where small differences in filament diameter are in the noise - unless you're printing at 100% infill, over-volume just gets smushed into the voids and under-volume ends up making lines that don't exactly join but are pretty close. Filaments that have big diameter variations tend to cause other problems (mostly at the cold end) and don't live long. People give up, the seller gets a bad name, etc..

    What I've been saying for a while, diverging from Rob, is that I'd like to see things move more towards "true" volumetric 5d where the slicer specifies (via "G1 E" or a new "G1 V" or some such) a raw volume value to the firmware in mm^3. For filament-based extruders, like we all have, this doesn't get us a whole lot - it lets you change feedstock diameter and (maybe) rescale a print without reslicing but that's it. What it does allow is non-filament extruders - PLA pellets cost like a 1000 times less than PLA filament....

  11. Though I haven't had to cut my bowden tube before, I do think you're looking in the wrong direction.. With some care, you should be able to get it cut straight enough to work. The amount of pain you're expeciencing doesn't seem to match up with this task.

    Have you tried heating up, ***carefully*** pulling the nozzle off and seeing if you can push filament through by hand?

    (edit: probably don't need to go to your normal heat range.. I'd probably start 15-20C lower than that and see how willing the nozzle is to come off then raise it up a little, if needed)

  12. 5D means that there is an "E" and "F" axis. The old-school machines used M10x codes to start & stop the flow, and it was really problematic to get the right speed when speeding up and slowing down. This was solved with 5D, where they added the "E" and "F" axis, to achieve high speeds.

    ...and E is 'extrusion' and F is X/Y speed.

    Basically, 5D allowed movement of all axes (x, y, z, f, and e) on each line of gcode. With that, it's a LOT easier for the firmware to play games with speeding things up and slowing them down so we can have features like acceleration.

    Volumetric 5D came later and redefined what E meant. It used to be (straight 5D) the length of filament you wanted to come out of the nozzle and changed to mean the length of filament going into the extruder drive. This made it WAAAAAY easier to come up with new printing profiles, since it allowed slicers to just say "I want this much filament" and not have to worry about nozzle size and temperature and all that crap that can vary from machine to machine..

  13. So I am thinking of slicing with Skeinforge. However I can't find any online manual. Can anyone send me a link or something ? Thanks.

    It's more 'reference' than 'manual' and, like daid said, there's a bit of a learning curve. I don't think it's THAT hard, though.. The trick really is to resist the urge to poke at all 693 settings and learn (then stick to, while you're still new) the 5-6 that really matter.

    A good starting place is

    http://wiki.ultimaker.com/Sprinter#Spri ... _and_later

    for some basic settings. It's a bit dated but should get you started. Ignore all the stuff about sprinter - we're all on marlin now.

  14. Why when i star printing it wants to go further left and further front, jumping steps and grinding my belts?

    Check your min endstops!

    Most startup gcode tells the firmware to move until it hits the X, Y and Z endstops then sets that position to -120/-120/0. If it is moving to the front/left of the printer then not stopping, it means that the firmware is not seeing the endstops trigger..

  15. Open a window. And shout "CURSE YOU ENRIQUE!". Close window. Feel a bit relieved.

    ...then send him a check (or a TY anyway) because, really, most of us wouldn't be here doing this stuff without his years of work.

    Have you had contact with him? Because I have. He seems to be quite a bit of out touch with what 3D printers are doing right now. He doesn't even have a 3D printer. His latest "updates" are just patches submitted by other people (without updating credits, documentation, or much checking what the changes do). And his code is a general mess.

    I don't mind if people no longer want to develop something they started. But he also doesn't hand the project over to other people. He also hates source control because "when he setup a public writable SVN people make a mess of it".

    I haven't talked to him since last summer, when he (very quickly!) fixed some issues Ultimakers users were having.

    Don't know what to say about the rest of the comment - he's still put years of work into this stuff and most of us still wouldn't be here doing this stuff without the work he did. Yes, it's slow and the UI isn't overly pretty but it's not rocket science - lots of people use it all the time and it's still the most reliable slicer around.

     

    Another thing you could try, is to close down RepG. Remove the .replicatorg and .skeinforge directories from your home directory. And restart RepG. Hopefully this resets everything to defaults.

    Or just do the temperature & cool stuff I said earlier up this thread.

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