Daid

The extra setscrews are included for "just in case". We had a few cases where one of the set-screws in a pulley where bad and needed replacement. Throwing in a few extra setscrews costs us little, but can save a heap of trouble. Note, the kits a year ago had a heap of extra parts. I still have a part bin from my build a year ago.

The "ultimaker HQ" way of getting the moisture out of a roll of PLA is to print all of it and use a new roll :-) But storing it dry with the silica gel should be enough. (Ultimaker PLA should come packed sealed with 1 package of silica) The effect is minor, but looks like a skin condition. I think it's caused because the moister in the PLA boils and causes micro-bubbles in the print.

Owen, 64bit windows is compatible with 32bit applications, so Cura runs fine on it. (My dev machine is 64bit windows) the only thing is that you cannot use more then 2GB of memory in a 32bit application. Illu, I've been noticing the the extrusion problem myself, it seems to depend a bit on the printer (as my home machine was printing fine with 50% support material). So I need to do some test on what works. I'm not a huge fan of support material, so that doesn't help in getting the best settings for it 3D-Junky, the platform is already in the current release, but only shows when you select the Ultimaker as printer. I have no plans to remove support for other printers, with different bed-sizes or even delta-bots (Which need to have the 0,0,0 position in the center of the bed). While Cura is tuned for the Ultimaker, that's mainly because I have one and Ultimaker pays me. But the more people that use Cura, the better it gets.

Actually the "duplicate outlines" currently doesn't work very smart, as it just uses the same contour twice. I think slicing at different layer thicknesses is patented. Not that I would mind. But I would need my new C++ slicer for that, as the SF slicer currently in Cura is not really up for the task.

Should be between SIG and GND, as the 4.7k resistor is between SIG and 5V (on the board)

Hi everyone, As some people might have read, and others might have not. I'm working on replacing the slow slicing engine behind Cura. First a bit of history. Cura started about a year ago as a better and easier to use GUI on top of existing slicers. Back then I picked Skeinforge as the engine to use, because I knew how to get good prints out of it. And because it could slice just about anything, only a bit slow. I also left the option to use Slic3r as engine. But because Slic3r is very picky about manifold meshes I never enabled it. Now a year later, and Slic3r is still picky, crashes on a few models that I tried. And not that much faster then Cura. Skeinforge is running on it's last breath as people are printing larger and larger models. With more and more layers. And so people are pretty much forced to use KISSlicer or NetFabb for large prints. KISSlicer does a pretty good job. And once you get NetFabb configured it also does a nice job. So. Now that I work at Ultimaker, and I have more time to actually do stuff. I'm doing what I said I would never do. I'm making my own slicing engine. In C++. And I'm crazy (for the people that didn't know that already). So, what do I have? I have a working slicing engine. With: Basics like side walls, with infill, top/bottom filling, sparse insides. It doesn't do the strange "interface layers" thing that Skeinforge does. It does do proper bridging like Skeinforge. It also does retraction, combing and proper path-order-optimization. So it doesn't do a crazy amount of traveling, stays inside the model when possible. I just added support material today. So that's one thing crossed off the ToDo list. The thin wall problem? It's solved. Yes, it, is, solved! There is still a lot of work to be done. It's only partially integrated into the Cura GUI right now, progress bar is not working for example. About all settings in the expert-config are missing. The new "bottom cuttoff" feature (from Cura 13.03) is not implemented yet. Retraction settings are not added (retraction itself is), cooling settings are still missing. Dual-extrusion is missing, as well as project-planner support. And then there are a bunch of models that do slice with Skeinforge, but not yet with my new engine. So, work, work, work. But I am making awesome progress. And I hope to get a test version out to more people soon. I've send a early version to a few people. And it's been mostly positive responses. Oh, and did I mention it is fast? I didn't measure the latest version, but so far most things slice in seconds compared to minutes with Skeinforge. So that's awesome :-) Finally, this project has gotten high priority at Ultimaker. And it will be open-source once we have a version out. So I hope to see you all slicing at light speed soon :-) Also, this would be a perfect place to request features ;-)

13.03 will not solve the memory issue for windows (sadly enough), unless the pypy project comes with a 64bit windows version this will remain like this for a while. I am working on a new slicer, from scratch, and making good progress in getting up to "Skeinforge" compatibility feature wise. I shall post my progress in another topic a bit later on. The Ubuntu deb can be found at: http://software.ultimaker.com/Cura-13.03-debian.deb

There will be a stable release out tomorrow.

It matters if your filament has absorbed water. PLA with too much water in it generates uglier prints. It does print, but you kinda get an ugly finish. (took us a while to figure out that this was the problem with some of our prints) printing hotter sometimes helps a bit, but you're always left with a bad finish.

Could be a Cura bug. There is a bug related to the "minimal feedrate" setting in the expert settings. Any version less then 13.01 it's best to set this value to 0. (This bug only happens when you have very small layers)

It's kept in memory, but you won't see anything in it for this error. It's EMF causing a glitch on the Arduino. Especially the windows drivers handle this very bad and can just hang. Switching on a halogen lamp causes a current spike, which causes quite an EMF pulse, which acts on the wires and electronics of the Ultimaker. What you need is extra shielding.

The "Term" tab in the Cura printing interface can do this.

Sounds like an issue with your iMac and not the software itself. As all 3 software packages are vastly different. As for the 12.12/13.01 Mac problems. The 13.03 release that will be released next Teusday has a number of fixes for problems on different Mac installations, so most likely it will work again.

Your photo shows signs of under-extrusion. The 2 lines of the outside walls are not connecting. So most likely that's the cause of the gap you are seeing.

Small note, if the retraction speed is corrected because of this, the sanest thing to do is limit the E speed in the firmware to 20-25mm/s instead of the current default limit of 45mm/s

I've used the latest marlin source to build dual extrusion with heated bed a few days ago, worked fine back then.

Looks like the amount of stringing left after you enabled retraction. You can reduce it even more, but never 100% remove it. What helps is increasing the "travel speed". The default is 150, but most machines achieve 250 fine. Faster moving it less time for oozing. You can also lower the temperature a bit, the higher the temperature the less the nozzle oozes. But the hairs should come off pretty clean by just scraping with your hands.

So far there has been too little diversion in "slicer world", everyone with RepRaps is keeping their hopes and sights set on Slic3r. But we have: KISSlicer is awesome, but some RepRap people do not like that it's closed source. Making a huge deal out of this caused Jonathan to ignore the RepRap people a bit. SFACT (not well known along Ultimaker people), is an updated version of Skeinforge. It's a bit like Cura a year ago, when Cura was still called "SkeinPyPy Beta 0.1". But it makes more sense then plain Skeinforge. Cura, well, we know this one. It's a kickass GUI, but still Skeinforge under the hood. So at the base, it's not that different from SFACT. And still slow. Makerbot has MircleGrue, which nobody but them seems to touch with a 10 foot pool. But they are also not using it for their "high quality" profile setting. Which is a bit odd. Slic3r, while most RepRap persons are using this, doesn't slice a lot of models. It needs perfect manifold models. And even then it sometimes crashes or uses up all memory. So we have 3 major players. KISSlicer, Skeinforge (&friends) and Slic3r. I hope we can add a better engine behind Cura soon to provide a real extra player their, instead of being a "friend of Skeinforge"

I think the idea is that he could "split" the shipping costs. Shipping parts from UM to the US costs $30?. As multiple small parts won't increase the shipping price, it's cheaper to order 30 nozzles at once, pay shipping once and then re-sell those nozzles in the US for cheap postal shipping. Also, some parts (like nozzles) have discounts if you buy multiple, which is another way to 'turn a profit' from this.

The attachment limit is most likely something they haven't configured yet. About the white areas... no wait. First. Congrats on finally having a functional controller. Took way to long, but in the end it did work. Now, as for the white spots. Maybe they are caused by a wrong contrast setting. There is a small potmeter on the back of the PCB I think, which controls the contrast. It should have been set properly before shipping, but maybe it moved a bit after being shipped around the globe.

It's not out yet. It has gone "gold" as they call it. I can send you a copy by PM if you want. Should be out really soon, we just need to finish some screencasts and change lists. As there is also a newer version of firmware included, we also want to highlight and show those changes.

Oh, yes. You could describe my reaction as hate. Because they are ruining the image of 3D printing. If you are showing off prints that are worse then the average RepRap produces. And if you have people telling you "I have a leapfrog, I want to get rid of it because it doesn't work. And I want to buy an Ultimaker, because I know I will get support, unlike LeapFrog who doesn't have a technical support staff". Then you are bad for everyone's view of the current state of desktop 3D printing. There are lots of options for printers. With different specs. But so far everything I've seen and heard about LeapFrog is just bad to worse. Yes, Ultimaker is expensive. We know that. We're also not trying to be cheap. If you want cheap, a printrbot jr is only $400: http://printrbot.com/ Quality, speed, software-support. Building good products. That's what we offer.

It's a kitty cat!

(As for the "if leapfrog can do it", LeapFrog is founded by the son of a founder of a major printer producer, while Ultimaker is doing everything themselves without "money&facilities from dad")

A heated bed with blue tape works like a charm. But you need to be sure not to press the PLA into the tape as you do with a cold bed with tape, else you will rip up the tape in notime. Heated bed temperature for PLA is around 70C, but depending on your bed you need to experiment a bit.