ddurant

Ok, I think I've fixed this.. Most recent version attached, which also builds the right info for traditional rafts and includes a couple other small bits. Please let me know if this works better! Also, if you want to edit the netfabbconfig file, feel free but be very careful to not change the formatting and use a plain text editor like notepad instead of a rich text editor like wordpad. edit: old version deleted - see first post in thread for the latest..

Do you normally use , for a decimal place or . ?

Hm.. The only thing I can come up with is that your filament size isn't set correctly.. If you're really sure it is correct, changing the Filament Packing Density is probably the thing to do. Lower values get you more plastic and higher values get you less plastic.. Normally, I'd suggest changing it at 0.025 intervals but yours seems pretty far off so give 0.90 a try and see how that works. edit: are you sure this is PLA plastic? Does it smell like maple syrup or like hot plastic? If it smells like hot plastic, it's ABS..

Yeah, I wouldn't suspect firmware yet.. Does it look like your start.gcode is really showing up correctly at the top of generated gcode files?

I wouldn't worry about that until you get that infill right.. On layers that should be solid you can see the layer underneath, which is something you shouldn't see. Some people here are running different filament drives and electronics and stuff.. Is this a whole kit from Ultimaker or do you have other parts in there? Which bolt from http://wiki.ultimaker.com/Ultimaker_rev ... eparations do you have installed?

It is indeed.. If there are people still using the old bolt, I can try to work out the math for that..

Is that filament from Ultimaker? That sounds bigger than what most people have - on my old MBI machine, 3.1mm would definitely get stuck and jam things up. It's also got a lot of variation in it - mine consistantly measures 2.82mm to 2.86mm. 2.85mm or so seems to be the 'standard' when people talk about '3mm' filament. Do you have different filament you can try, just to see if it behaves differently? For the "excessive intersection" I'm not exactly sure what you mean.. If the infill is consistantly getting too close to the perimeter, lower Fill\Infill Perimeter Overlap. Lower values cause less overlap, higher values cause more overlap. I think most people use about 0.15 on this but feel free to set it to 0.0 for now then start working it up as your prints improve. If the infill seems off with just one side of X and/or Y, redo the tension on the short belts on the motors. On earlier machines, the bolts were a little too long and didn't grip the wood very well - a couple washers on each bolt solved that for me (and have more surface area so might be a good idea anyway). Starting at 50/50 with 100 travel might be a better way to start.. Start with slow & easy settings until things look good then put the spurs to 'er. Don't worry about strings for now - just make sure Comb is enabled and, for now, ignore them. Blobs should be first priority.

I'd stick to 0.25mm or 0.20mm layer heights until you get a few really good prints done. Thinner is certainly possible but it's easier to work through issues if you start with the easier settings.. Good move, going up to SF40+ and Sprinter/Marlin! Pretty much all of these pictures look to me like they need more plastic. You should only be able to see the outer-most layer and I can see the layer(s) underneath on most of these pictures. What's your start.gcode look like? If you're not sure, just post the first ~20 lines of something you sliced recently. Are you sure you've measured your filament diameter accurately and told SF45 what it is? It's in the Dimension tab. When you measure the filament, make sure to get a variety of readings from different angles and use the average. Also, the Filament Packing Density setting should also (for now) probably be set to 1.0. FillSolid Surface Layers tells SF how many totally-filled layers to do near outside surfaces. People usually forget about changing this when they change layer height.. Usually, for a layer height over 0.25mm or so, this parameter gets set to 3 which means 0.75mm (= 0.25mm * 3) of solidity on outside surfaces. If you keep this at 3 but change layer height to 0.10mm you're only now getting 0.30mm (= 0.10mm * 3) of solidity, which probably isn't going to give you a clean outside surface, if you're trying to cover up a less-than-solid infill. There's no hard rule for how to set this but I'd move up to 5 if you're at or under 0.10mm layer heights. This is one of those things that just takes practice: keep an eye on it when you see it starting to cover up sparce infill - the first layer or so looking crappy is normal but the outside surface should be nice. You didn't mention CarvePerimeter Width Over Thickness and FillInfill Width Over Thickness.. The w/t values control how skeinforge slices things on the horizontal. This value times the layer height is the width of the threads in the print. With a 0.40mm nozzle, you probably want threads in the 0.40mm to 0.6mm range, though you can probably get away with as low as (despite common sense) 0.35mm or as high as 0.75mm or so. As you change layer height, make sure to also set these values. At 0.10mm layers, w/t values of 5 will get you 0.50mm thread widths, which is a good place to start. For now, just divide 0.50 by the layer height and set the two w/t values to the result.. Could be too much belt tension but probably not too little, I think.. The machine tried to push the print head in one direction something pushed back so much that the stepper motor lost some steps. The electronics don't know when this happens and just assume that every move happened as-expected. With the power off (or steppers disabled), make sure the print head moves smoothly in each direction. If it doesn't, take a close look to make sure stuff's lubed and orthoganal. If you've got blobs on a print, that can also cause skips if the print head smacks into one at high speed..

Good progress! Did you read this bit? And to you!

Oh.. Er.. That still sounds pretty low to me but try it - worst that'll happen (I think) is that you'll get a really anemic print. And late here! I'll check back tomorrow..

Nooooo.. Have you figured out the "real" correct value for esteps? See http://reprap.org/wiki/Volumetric_Dimension_settings . That's the value you want to divide by 865.888 then multiply by 14. Should probably come out somewhere between 10 and 20..

Er.. Don't use rafts with material configs that this program generates yet.. They won't work well (at all?) but it's on the top of my list to fix. Probably tomorrow..

Now that I think about it more, if you can figure out the 'real' esteps value for your rig, the correct M92 E value for netfabb (until it moves up to real volumetric 5d) is probably 14 * esteps / 865.888. So, if you come out to esteps = 700, you'd add "M92 E11.3179" to your startup code and the built-in netfabb profiles should work for you.

That's going to be tricky.. The original version of the program was closer to real volumetric 5D, doing the math so that netfabb ended up generating G1 E values with the amount of raw filament to pull in. Doing that screwed up all the built-in material configs and would screw up any custom defs people made outside of my program. This is one of the main reasons I switch to doing just material configs. The program really wants to be run on a machine with an extruder that behaves the same way as an ultimaker with esteps set to 14.. If you can get the esteps on your machine to print fairly happy with the built-in materials/build styles on the ultimaker version of netfabb, my program should work pretty well on it too.. Does that help?

Here's the program. Yes, it's windows-only (though likely works on mono) and there's no source yet.. If those are a problem, the offer to be a data entry monkey for people still stands - only takes a minute to type stuff in and get a profile. The original version of this (that nobody else saw) generated a whole netfabb machine configuration file and setup the start/end gcode for you and did some other fancy things but there were some problems with doing that so I changed stuff around to just generate a material configuration. I did leave the start/end gcode stuff in there 'cause I think it's cool but you'll have to copy & paste the gcode it generates into netfabb manually, if you want to use it. ONE BIG THING TO NOTE is that this isn't an end product - it's just a step towards where I think we want to be, which is having all this integrated into netfabb with algorithms that can generate the correct settings for a wide variety of scenarios. So, that said, please post here if you use this and what you think of it - Did it just totally suck? Did it work but always produce a bit too much/too little filament? Did narrow threads work better or worse than fat threads? These are just some off the top of my head - I'm looking for any data you can provide. To install it, just create a directory for the program then unzip the exe to that dir. There's no separate installer program. There's nothing stored in the registry. There's no internet stuff needed. It's just a simple, stand-alone exe. To uninstall, just delete the directory that you created for it. It does create a .xml file but that just contains all the values you've typed in, so the program can continue with your last settings the next time you run it.. To run it, just enter whatever values you want then click the Save button. This will open a standard Window save-file dialog - type in the name of the config file you want and it will create the material config (".reprapcalibration") file. To import into netfabb: - click on Ultimaker in the context area, where it says Parts, Slices and Ultimaker - on the lower right of the screen, click Manage Materials - right-click on the window that pops up and do Import Material - browse to the material config you made and click Open - click the Close Window button - back on the lower right of the screen, set Extruder 1 to be the material you just imported Note that the "profile name" setting in my program doesn't do much - this used to set the name of the material in the machine config but you (apparently) can't set the material name when just generating a material config. Instead, netfabb uses the file name as the material name. You can always change the name of the material in netfabb Manage Materials, though.. Not sure what else to say.. I think the program's pretty self-explanitory to run but if something's not clear, feel free to ask.. Questions? Comments? Bugs? Bring 'em! edit: old version deleted - see first post in thread for the latest..

You should clean this before doing much else. If it is all clogged up with filament, it won't work well at all..

Definitely an improvement!! It looks like your extruder is inconsistant.. First thing to do is probably to pull the filament drive bolt off and make sure it's clean. You can also, while printing, sorta lightly grip the filament going into the drive between your thumb and forefinger to try and tell if it's feeding smoothly. If you can see the big wooden gear turning but the filament stops tugging on your finger, you probably need to pull the bolt and give it a cleaning. I got a toothbrush with brass brissles at the auto-parts store for about $3. Works pretty well at cleaning that bolt.

I think a lot of people have been having problems printing directly from netfabb. This is the first release with that feature so I guess there are a few bugs they still need to work out. I'd stick with printing from repg for now..

This looks way too hot to me - you shouldn't ever see liquid PLA.. Sorta tooth-pastey is fine but not liquid. Like Dingo, I'm suspecting you're starting too high off the platform.

It will be! PM me or post your email and I'll send you a copy.. edit: the reason it's not public now is that it's only been run on one PC and generated stuff for one machine - I was hoping to get a few definitions test first and maybe shake out some easy bugs before releasing it. I also had a direction change yesterday from having it generate machine definitions which include start/end gcode and some other bits to just generating material definitions and there's a bunch of cleanup needed because of that. It still works fine (I think) but there are bits to the UI that don't make sense anymore..

Most (all?) home 3d printers do supports by printing the regular material at a lower density and/or at different temperatures. It's the same stuff as what the object's made from but printed in a way that makes it pretty easy to remove. It's not a perfect solution but works pretty well.

Different nozzle sizes have different usable min/max thread widths, which you (or, rather, "I" for now) can just feed to the program but nozzle size doesn't really have as much impact on the extruder speeds as you might think so no, the code doesn't factor that in. It's really all about volume - matching the volume of threads in the print with the correct amount of filament feedstock.. I'm suspicious about the clogged nozzle stuff - I don't think anybody here has ever actually clogged a nozzle up unless they've run things waaaay too hot and baked all the bendy out of the filament. Most of the problems seem related to too much heat traveling up the hot end and forming a plug at the end of the bowden cable. To actually physically clog a nozzle, you need particules far bigger than dust or hair..

edit: latest file should always be here, in the first post of this thread.. I've been working on software to generate netfabb material definitions. You plug in some numbers and it spits out a .reprapcalibration file, which can be imported into netfabb as a new material definition. The program isn't quite ready for prime time yet but the results, I think, are getting close. So.. I could use some help testing this stuff.. If you use netfabb and want to try some new material definitions, post here with the specifics of what you'd like and I'll generate the profile & upload it here. Here's a screenshot of what I'm typing numbers into: netfabb material generator by ddurant123, on Flickr If you'd like me to generate a material for you, please post: - base layer height - filament diameter (measured accurately!!) - temperature - travel feed rate - min and max feed rates - min and max thread widths For the min/max ranges of feed rates and thread widths, the code will generate 5 values for each, even distributed between the min and max values. If you'd rather specify individual values (like "feed rates of 20, 30, 40, 100 and 150" instead of "feed rates between 20 and 80"), just say so. Of course, if you try one (or more!) of these out, feedback on how it worked would be much appreciated..

I'm not in the UK but if I was, I'd be asking how tall the object is and why it needs to be strong? What sort of forces are you going to put on it? Like, does it just need to survive a drop from 5ft up or does it need to support a person standing on it sorta thing?

We're getting closer but still aren't quite to the point of really automating that sorta thing.. What (IMO) is really needed is a new M gcode to tell the firmware the filament size then replace the current G1 E component, which specifies the length of filament to take in, to be a G1 V component that specifies the volume to extrude for that particular thread.. Maybe a gcode to specify what Dimension\Filament Packing Density does today, too. If we had that you could, for example, take gcode generated for 1.75mm ABS filament that needs 220C and with just a couple extra lines of gcode at the top, print it with 2.85mm PLA filament that extrudes at 190C. Or on a screw-drive-extruder that takes plastic pellets. Or whatever.. We're not quite there yet, though. Just like this time last year was VERY different than now, this time next year should have some big steps forward.. Yes. This is what I used to do and it quickly got unmanagable.. No, not fun. That's one option but I think it does other things under the covers that may or may not do what you want.. That's one of the issues with all the SF wrappers: by doing things for you, they take the control from you. This isn't necessarily bad, it's just something to be aware of. My preference is to use SF by itself - there are only a handful of settings to change and you get all the control to try other stuff, if you want. 13 months ago, I had probably 20-30 different SF profiles. For the last year (once the volumetric stuff got going this time last year) I've had just one - I have a base profile that's 99% correct for everything I do and just change the other 1% as needed..