Daid

Actually, assembly instructions in video form are quite horrible. They did this for the PrintrBot. The result is that you keep pausing/rewinding/seeking in the video to see what the hack is happening. (The fact that the PrintrBot assemble recordings where odd didn't help. At some part you needed to disassemble a piece because a previous video forgot a bit)

Good luck with convincing the wife ;-)

OpenSCAD is very picky with it's STL import, and usually fails at it. I haven't found a way to fix it.

Being in Australia, you will be hit a bit by customs and expensive shipping. So for PLA/ABS, I highly recommend finding a local supplier. The RepRap wiki has a huge list of material suppliers: http://reprap.org/wiki/Printing_Material_Suppliers Which could save you a ton on shipping. (The Ultimaker is not limited to only Ultimaker filament) Fir parts, you don't need any of the upgrades. They are included in the kit already. The V2 hotend, V3 knurled bolt and the extruder upgrade are standard on new kits. The only thing you want to add is a UltiController and maybe a spare piece of teflon and peek. As those are easiest to get damaged, and the teflon seems to be subject to some wear when you are printing ABS, and with the long and expensive shipping to Australia you might not want to risk those waiting times.

There isn't a huge waiting time, but the phone is only answered during dutch office times.

I have a specialized mac guy helping me on problems, if you could run Cura from a terminal and post back the output when the preference window doesn't show, that could be a big help. (I've put the "window falls off the screen" on my issue list for the 13.04 bugfix release)

Note, if you want plug&play. I think the UP! printer is the closest you can get at the moment. I wished I could say the Ultimaker would be it, but that wouldn't be true. The UP! does print at a lower quality and at a smaller size.

Noted. I also noted that keyboard control is missing for layer scrolling now, which would be a nice addition. The print window remains a bit of an odd one, as it's actually run as a separate application, which makes bringing it on top a bit hard sometimes. The "cancel=cooldown" is done against plugs, as people where canceling and then leaving their head sitting hot, which, depending on your temperature and how well you have the teflon-tube connection, can cause a plug.

(Your last URL contains a typo) This might look like an advertisement, and it is. But I do like what I've seen from them so far. We have the transparent rolls from them, which where from an early test run. But those already look awesome color wise. The prints they had on RapidPro looked awesome (they where standing across the isle of us) As far as I understood, the diameter of the colorfabb PLA is currently only matched by faberdashery. And I think they are the only one who sell a gold that actually looks like a gold instead of a brass (disclaimer, I do not know how the faberdashery gold looks) (This is my personal opinion which is unrelated to Ultimaker in any way)

The idea to print spare infill denser near the top is pretty good. Need to think a bit on how to implement it (I know how KISSlicer does it, but my code is using a different way to do things) The "oversolidfy" (or interface layers) is something I never really understood from Skeinforge, I know what happens, but I never understood why someone in their right mind would think it's a good idea. Thus, my engine does not do this. I'll most likely throw in a "power user" mode, where you can configure shitloads of things, like different extrusion widths and speeds for just about anything. For support material, there is a lot to improve. I currently have an implementation that resembles the SF way. But most certainly that will change. The "Skin" or stacked layer implementation of Skeinforge is just an ugly hack, and doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But this feature for my new engine will most likely not make it in the first version. As I have to choose what to include and what not. And slicing at different layerheights add quite a bit complexity to the current code. My "thin wall fix" is pretty simple and effective, but it will require some tweaking for optimal results. My initial settings caused overextrusion so I dialed it down a bit already. It also causes a LOT of tiny head movements, which result in a lot of noise. But the path-order-optimizer combined with the combing code take care of the possible time spend here. And the thin-wall-fill is done combined with the normal sparse and top/down infill, so it doesn't to it separately moving all over the place when the rest is done, but while the rest is also printed. As I'm also doing some changes on the Cura GUI... well, "some changes" are that I'm merging the project planner into the main window, adding better object selection for it, and updating the 3D view a bit. The code is currently a huge mess. For the technical people, I'm switching from the fixed-function depricated OpenGL code to VBO's with Shaders. We're working on better dual-extrusion support. And I'm pondering to add support for having a "multi-part" objects which you print with 1 head, but different parts at different settings (making dual-extrusion nothing more then a multi-part object where one of the parts has a different extruder as setting). The AMF file format might play a big role in this. But this is long term planning, so be happy with the current 13.03 release ;-)

The Cura website is a bit outdated and needs work, it still shows the older look and isn't as helpful as it could be. The new screencasts on the blog might be a nice thing to start at.

Illuminarti is spot on here. The times calculated in Cura do not account for acceleration, which can cause anything between a 20% and a 100% error. It's pretty hard to estimate printing times, unless you fully simulate the machine (which I might do some day, if I have one of those mad-coding days)

Twin Z axis will over-constrain your design, causing friction and wobble instead of more accuracy. The RepRap project has a lot of information about building printers from scratch: reprap.org

The end of the build guild points you to: http://software.ultimaker.com/ Where you can download the latest (and previous and testing) Cura releases. Cura is packaged with everything you need. (Unless you run Linux, then you could run into issues, but that's usually the case with Linux) Everything works fine without a printer, you just need to skip the initial wizard that checks your printer (you can always run this again later)

We've noticed the same on some Macs. I've yet to establish the cause. It didn't happen on our test machines strangely enough. Btw, which version of MacOS do you run on?

Hey Dave, Daid here. Developer of Cura, working at Ultimaker. (Yes, we develop and give our software away for free. As we sell printers) Our OpenSource Cura free software is pretty good. It has some issues related to large files, but other then that it's made to be user friendly. My current release (which was released 2 days ago) was a pretty big update on the GUI, which took me way to long IMHO. There are a few minor issues with it which will get fixed in a new release next month. Like I said, the large file issue is really bugging me, and is requiring me to re-write the code software (which I originally used from a different OpenSource project). I'm making good progress in this, and I hope to have a version out to the public in 2 months. My stance against NetFabb is, don't get it till you need it. It's a software download, so when you pay for it you almost instantly get a key send to you. So when you think "I need this" you can always shell out the 150$ for it. NetFabb is quite complex, so it has a larger learning curve, but because of that also very powerful. (As for LeapFrog, all I read and hear about it are horror stories. And what I've seen from it didn't compare to any other printer made in the last 2 years, as their printing quality was horrible. The average self-build RepRap machine gets better quality)

Odd, the print button should be "enabled" when it has found a GCode file next to the STL file. What size GCode are we talking about?

30 hours? guess you mean minutes. I forgot to update the links on the main page after the release. So they where pointing to the wrong files. The download page on github contains very old versions. The official download page is (and will become) software.ultimaker.com

Awesome, this saves me quite a bunch of work (as I was aware of the bugs, but I hadn't found the time to track them down and fix them), so I'm very happy that you are helping out here!

This has been suggested before. Before I worked at Ultimaker. And back then I took a firm stance against it. Because adding translations is a HUGE pain in the ass on a fast moving development. Because text changes fast, new texts are introduced and removed often. There is also always a layout issue. Where "load file" for example become "de charger le fichier" (google translate, don't kill me for this), but the french text is suddenly twice as long which can cause problems with the GUI layout. If Ultimaker decides that it is important, then we'll add it, and community translations will be a huge help then (as translating jargon is difficult and expensive for translation companies). But I wouldn't bet on it right now, as there is more important things to do. And if you have translated software, you also need translated documentation...

The Arduino driver that I install is the one from the latest Arduino beta IDE (because this driver is signed by Microsoft, and thus works on Windows 8) You can always skip the Arduino driver install, and the rest of the code doesn't depend on this specific driver. The auto-serial-port detection might fail on Gen6 electronics, I wouldn't know that. But if it worked before it will still work now.

Cura 13.03 has an "overhang view" where it shows the steep angled areas in red. Works great. (I think 12.12 also has this, but it's less easy to find) I think the multiple-layer-extrusion width setting is great, and it can be done. (But it is a bit of a GUI hell like NetFabb proves) But first a stable feature-complete release compared with Skeinforge.

I've seen this happen quite often, and so far I could relate most cases to a badly folded fan duct where the airflow of the fan cools the nozzle tip (which causes extrusion problems)

>Knowing that the windows drivers handle this badly, is there no workaround for this? I mean, the host software must notice that something is wrong? The issue here is that I request data from the driver with a timeout (of 2 seconds). But when the glitch happens, the timeout also never happens, so I never get control back. (And yes, proper electronics is something that is being worked on)

The term tab should have an inputbox below the text area, there you can enter a line and press send...