Daid

Lots of pins are used, but even more are free. But what's even easier to use for this, is the 2nd heater output. This heater output is PWM enabled, can be used with "M42 P4 S[pwm_value]" (For heater 2) You should check the PCB layout for details which pins go where http://reprap.org/wiki/Ultimaker's_v1.5.7_PCB

On my home machine the max that the feeder seems to do is 27mm/s, so you can turn it up more then 20. 20 is just a safe start point.

The lack of manual for the assembled machines is an oversight from our (Ultimakers) side. The most important thing you need to get started is Cura from http://software.ultimaker.com/ But some proper unboxing instructions, final tuning and filament instructions are also needed. A video showing how to insert filament can be found here:

Keeping in a bug to keep broken features? Sounds like http://xkcd.com/1172/ Seriously, NetFabb didn't get their stuff right with retraction. Just ask Paul Candler. But the fix is to lower the maximum E speed to 20mm/s in the firmware. Quite easy and you should do that anyhow if you use other software which currently has set the traction speed too high.

It's a secret feature ;-) new in 13.03 we didn't really highlight it because it has an interest to a special group instead of everyone (it also only shows if you have minecraft installed)

Pink lines are moves with retraction, blues are moves without. Infill is shown in 3 colors.

I'm not drawing the infill for lower layers, to save drawing time.

Arrow key control has been suggested for layer switching, which makes sense and I will add soon.

you need to have py-objc installed. Not sure from where.

You need to run cura with pythonw -m Cura.cura

Would be extremely heavy. But stay tuned ;-)

No, that's a different issue, that's named the "thin wall", which is that empty parts between the first perimeter and other perimeters are not filled.

How are you running Cura and which version of MacOS are you using?

The saving function for the project planner is bugged in 13.03. Will be fixed soon.

RepetierHost does a horrible job at showing extrusion widths. I'm not sure what it's doing, but it doesn't use the proper values from each segment. I noticed this because I had a bug in my new engine which caused some segments which huge amount of extrusion. Which you could see in Cura's GCode view, but not in RepetierHost. So be careful when you use Repetier. Other then that, you are right, it's easy to visualise with Cura. Use the default settings, only set the wall-thickness to 0.7, then you will see that the fills are under-extruded and have gaps. Funny that nobody noticed before. But good catch! The fix is easy and I will have it out soon.

SteamEngine is just a work name. Like "Longhorn" (vista codename from microsoft) Funny how people don't see the changes.

The electronics are fully open: http://reprap.org/wiki/Ultimaker's_v1.5.7_PCB And can be ordered from the shop.

I've uploaded a sneak peek of stuff I'm working on at the forum gallery: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/gallery/album/28-cura/ This is pretty much work in progress. And I'm not telling anything more, letting you all wonder what things mean.

You cannot brick your printer with a firmware update, as the firmware installation bits never get overridden. Worst thing that could happen is that you have to re-install the default firmware. Brick-free (unless you print bricks)

The spheres in the yoda eyes are causing problems, as they are printed hollow instead of properly filled. It's one of those models where it doesn't work as designed, but works good enough to get the proper results. What happens, on a "basic" level, is that the code is doing kind of a "exclusive" boolean operation, where 2 pieces overlap, instead of filling it, it makes that part empty. (it has good reasons to do so, but it can give unexpected results) But you can also have "self intersecting meshes" which is simply the same problem, but less easy to solve as you cannot boolean it together in most 3D modeling software. A simple example would be an arm, which is usually modeled straight and then animated with bones into the proper standing. With this animation you get internal triangles, usually at the inside of the elbow, that intersect with it's own mesh. With this problem it's always "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't", but it's best to understand where the problems come from so when it doesn't work you can fix it. (I like printing stuff extracted from 3D games, which do just about anything as long as it looks ok, so those meshes usually require cleanup for proper printing)

Most likely the hex-file is not what you want then. Because 2 days ago it was already going down hill fast. Note sure when/if the builder comes back up. The machine is pretty fucked up, and I have no backup of the builder. First thing will be getting a new hard-disk.

NO. Nor you want to mess with it. W/T as it's once was called. Is stupid, idiotic and died a year ago when I started work on Cura (still called SkeinPyPy back then). It was the initial trigger which started Cura. Basicly it comes from "oh, we cannot control the amount of plastic coming out of our nozzle, but it is steady flowing over time", and if you have a steady flow over time, keep the nozzle speed constant, then you have a width of lines depending on the height of your layers. Also, people that originally made the Skeinforge software loved ratios. I think they had a ratio fetish. But normal people are no fan of ratios, they are difficult and require you to do math in your head most of the time. But the W/T doesn't make ANY sense once you have control over your extrusion, which we have, because we have a stepper motor on our filament. And with that stepper motor comes control. And with that control we can do something called "volumatric extrusion", instead of randomly guessing and tweaking the extrusion, we can perfectly control and measure the extrusion. We know how much plastic goes in, and thus how much goes out. Cura does all the nasty math for you (As computer are good at math. Humans are not). The machine knows how much it needs to turn the stepper motor to push 1mm of filament to the nozzle. Cura knows how thick your filament is (because you tell it Cura), and the rest is just math. Which, once again, we are to lazy to do and will be left to the computer. So, anyone who still uses W/T right now has a very old machine without a stepper extruder. Or a ratio fetish. (or both, most likely)

Depends on how long your products needs to last. For example, it's used in body implants where it degrades in 6 months to 2 years. (wikipedia) Degrade of PLA in "normal" conditions takes many years. I cannot find the source right now, but I've read 70 years or more. What's more a problem of PLA is the low glass-transition temperature. Which means it goes soft somewhere between 60-70C, which is possible in a car in the sun. Dishwashers also give problems.

It's another one of those damn ascii encoding bugs. I've fixed it for the 13.04 release (will be out soon to get rid of some small bugs) Most likely your filename or path contains an "odd" character. (anything not a to z)

When did you build this? As my builder was breaking down due to harddisk problems (which is why it's offline now) so it could be that you don't have a proper hex build after all.