Daid

What I see on that top photo looks good. (much better then what I'm seeing in the first photo) The printed clip is also good, it will hold fine. A photo from the side front of your printer head might help in seeing if something is wrong there. Kinda like a mugshot. The plug that shows on the 3th photo should never be able to form, as where that plug is, normally the teflon part should be. (Backflow of PLA is to be expected, and should get solid in the teflon where it can be pushed back down)

I'm not seeing the white teflon piece in your photos? That should prevent the plug in the PEEK part. The gap between the alu plate and your wood in the first photo is also huge.

Looks like a possible problem with language settings. What native language do you have configured in your Mac? Most likely, removing the "at: {day} {date} {time}" from the start code works around this.

We're refactoring the development version, so that's breaking things left and right. As for the 12.11 release, it's the same as the 12.10 release except for a bugfix for Windows. I did upload the Mac 12.11 so I would get less questions. But the 12.10 for linux would be 100% the same as the 12.11 for linux.

First, start a terminal (you should be able to find it in the finder) Then, in the black window type: cd /Applications/Cura/ ./Cura/Contents/MacOS/Cura

Going on that a 0.75kg roll is 30 euros. And that a full roll can be printed in 30 hours, on quality settings at high speeds. Which puts the price on a euro per hour for the materials. But Joris prints a roll in a few hours if he wants, but he is insane As for the printer, so far I've only seen the old extruder wear out. The new extruder with the bearing wheel seems to have less wear. And then, even if some parts wear, you replace the parts, not the whole machine! I've yet to see any machine to show signs of wear. Except for the one machine which needed belt replacements because of improper assembly (The belts where worn, because the pulleys where skewed)

The preferences file should be saved in in your home directory in .cura (which is a hidden location) What you could try, is running Cura from a terminal, then you should be able to see an error log.

No problem in picking mine, I actually took that photo to show people that you can secure everything with a few bits of tape.

It's a mechanical problem. First I would check all pulleys, if they have black screws in them tighten them a bit extra. (Which is hard to do on the motors, I know) There recently has been a batch of slightly lower quality of these screws that need to be tighten a bit better or they vibrate lose. You could also use a black marker to put a dot on the pulley and axes, so you can see if it shifts (It's how I detect this issue at UM)

On new kits the location of the cable ties are changed and it's quite possible to tidy it up better then I did. Also, I move my machine a lot and that's why I taped everything in place. But I can tell, the tape is still there, after a year!

Cats are a purrrfect way to ruin a print:

6 months ago, that could be the bad batch of gray (called silver on the sticker I think). 3.15mm can be too much for the bowden tube, depending on the tube, and makes it hard to push it into the hotend. 2.8mm should be no problem, IF you have the spring extruder upgrade. Without the spring extruder varying between 3.0 and 2.8 could cause some grinding and extrusion problems. For the 3.15mm, printing slower could help, as the extruder is stronger at slower speeds. I recommend using the red PLA. Red is also a nicer color to print with. (I started out with black and red, hated the black, loved the red) (I don't know if we have a return policy on the bad PLA. You could send a friendly email to support, they will know better then I do, they might also be able to find out if you have PLA from the bad batch.)

You're welcome, I've already done some small improvements on the plugin GUI for the next version. It's small things that should make it easier to install plugins and get the information you need.

We've actually printed a few custom sample parts for potential customers already. So has Makerbot. Sometimes just a photo compare, which is tricky, as Makerbot is quite good at hiding flaws. They printed an sample in transparent PLA for example, it took me a good look, but I could see scars of the raft and some other bad things that the potential customer didn't notice on his compare. As the transparent makes it hard to see flaws. The potential customer also said that they printed it without support material (which was impossible, and you could also see the scars from the support). As you can read, I'm not happy how Makerbot handled this compare. (I believe in honesty over pushing sales) Anyhow, I think we can handle a test print for serious interested customers. But don't expect massive 10 hour prints, we're not shapeways. And we are currently very busy with the sales of the pre-assembled machines. So no guarantees here.

The wood grains can be used with the Wood plugin. We actually uploaded a plugin for Cura 12.11 which can do this: http://wiki.ultimaker.com/Category:CuraPlugin Special thanks to Jeremie Francois who created the code.

Joris has a bunch of machines, some are stock, some not. But the biggest change his does is a larger nozzle to print faster. I think print->molding is a very interesting step for many people. I talked to someone yesterday who was interested in the UM for just the same reason. And he looked at 3D printing a year ago for the same reason but then the quality was still too low, now he was very pleased with what I showed him.

New silver is good, half year old silver is most likely the bad stuff with varying diameter. But I rather call it gray, as proper silver looks different :-) But this looks like black PLA. Which is horrible for photos. But good for spotting problems in your prints. First I would try increasing the temperature a bit, to see if that is causing the extruder problems.

Maybe something else is still "connected" to the serial port, the port needs to be free for Cura to connect. And serial ports in Windows can get into a "limbo" state, where windows thinks an application still is connected to it. Try: -Disconnecting the USB cable -Restarting your computer -Start Cura -Connect the USB cable -Try upgrading the firmware. If that fails, could you try pressing the "print" button, that should show a new screen which fails to connect, but it will show a "error log", this error log might help in diagnosing the problem.

FYI, without pypy (that I use and gives a 4x speedup) Python is about 50x slower then Java when I measured it. So, yes, Python is a very bad option. Java does a lot better, and C/C++ can get the most speed here. (And indeed, Skeinforge is a huge bag of random shit hold together with strings)

It's a mechanical problem, maybe slowing down the printing speed helps a bit against it, but most likely your extrusion is slipping. Are you using UM filament? Or from a different supplier? Do you have the spring extruder upgrade?

Quick comparision of the PrintrBot plus and the Ultimaker. My ultimaker, and the ones around me are printing. The PrintrBot LC+ from a friend of mine has used up many of his evenings and produced a total of 5 successful prints. And he is considering to sell his PrintrBot and buy an Ultimaker. But you don't have to trust me on it (after all, I work for Ultimaker these days) You can trust Make magazine, who rated the Ultimaker as fastest and highest quality: http://blog.makezine.com/review/make-ul ... ultimaker/

I can add a bit on that. Here on Ultimaker we test every new type of PLA we get. We already had a number of experimental rolls with different additives that we discarded because they clogged nozzles.

The sureway I know of to keep a bowden tube in place is threading the tube and putting an M7 nut on it below the top wooden part.

Did you install the blue clip on the printer head? And did you add the horse clamp to the blue clip?

Beeone, did you install pypy 64bit? Usually this error happens on Linux when you have a 32bit pypy on a 64bit only system. As for "what to do", the short list to get Cura working on Ubuntu is: - Download the latest release - Install the packages: python-numpy, python-pyopengl, python-serial, python-wxpython (these package names could differ) - Run the cura.sh script to start Cura. Linux installation support for Cura isn't the best right now, as it's a low priority target with lots of differences between systems.