Daid

Your wooden pieces don't look the same as the military grade, because those are new cut parts by the design posted there. I've seen a solution where there was just a screw inserted to hold the coupling in place. Sadly, I cannot remember the details nor do I have a picture.

Maybe there is a short on your PCB between the endstop and the X motor driver trace?

maybe your X min/max end stops are switched around?

I'm reading that you started out with an ATMega1280. Do you have one of the early workshop machines? Because those machines are quite different. I've never seen the firmware do moves that are not in the GCode. But the software has been moving very fast for the last few months. Even the RepG25 you mention is quite old already. As for the thermocouple, when it fails, it's almost always a short in the wires. Check if the insulation is intact, in some cases this is damaged at the hot end side.

Ah, but my top surfaces also look like that, I'm slightly under-extruding. I rather under-extrude slightly so I cannot get a plug or blobs. Note that the visibility of surfaces like that depend a lot on the color, with black the printer lines are very visible. With white or red they are much less visible. Because black is very shiny. If you could get your extrusion rate just right you should be able to get perfect top surfaces. But that will require some tweaking.Cura only knows the line type for upskin/downskin. Sometimes you see prints with spiraled infill, that's done with NetFabb. Interresting, but won't your current setup cool the heads themselves a lot?Currently I mounted the printed stock fan shroud towards the back of the machine. This removes 35mm of printable area in the Y direction, but it works for now.

I've completed 6-7 hour jobs without issues, and I've had a 8 hour job detaching itself from the bed creating a huge mess. The only plug I had was because I pulled back filament slowly at 240C. And my head was slightly lose due to vibrations. Even my 2nd printer head is not producing any problems... Actually, I found a lower printing temperature to cause more problems then a high printing temperature. Around 220 seems to be my sweet spot for consistent prints.

A bit more info. There have been quite a few people with problems lately, and every single one of them had the same silver color filament we see you use for printing. It seems this filament has an inconsistent thickness. If you have digital calipers, measure the filament at a few points, it should be the same about thickness, not differing more then 0.1mm. It should also be very round, if it isn't then you'll also run into issues.

The message is generated when the step motors are released. It does this at the end of an SDcard print. The message is kinda wrong, but it's not partial, it's a full release as it released all step motors. It's done with the M84 command. Oh, and with released they mean that the power is removed. Normally the step motors are still powered and kept in place, preventing movement. After the release you can move the head by hand.

My mech is not a fluke, I'm printing that quality all the time. Scale up the mech to Thor: http://daid.eu/~daid/IMG_20120425_000441.jpg for example. It's also not my machine that's tweaked till insanity, I'm switching colors all the time, I installed a 2nd extruder. And the 2nd extruder is outputting the same quality, without any calibration or anything. I'm not even measuring my filament at the moment (but my faberdashery filament has a consistent quality). I printed 2 boxes one after another, with my updated project planner. Where you can now select which extruder to print with now. http://daid.eu/~daid/IMG_20120427_202613.jpg Both look almost exactly the same. Only the black one has slightly less infill. My settings for printing are Cura RC2 defaults, with the first layer set to 20mm/s and 0.1mm layers. Really, I'm not doing anything special. I'm also giving away a lot of prints, because people want to have something special. I should get my quality of the 50% gear cubes up, because people love those. They cannot stop playing with them. Also the 2nd extruder has a rev3 bolt, while my other extruder has a rev2 bolt. Both seem to work very well, but the rev3 was much easier to install (I should take some photos and write some instructions)

have you guys seen this http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:16343 Seems like printing with PVA does work... Hard is not impossible ;-)Jelle at protospace is experimenting with it I think. But they are experimenting with a lot of things there.

It's also hard to print with PVA. Apparently, it kinda refuses to stick very well. Their own version of ReplicatorG, which slices twice with Skeinforge and then merges those files. Same I am currently adding to Cura. But they also have a heavily modified firmware, as they use a lot of MCodes that do nothing on our machine.As I understand from the instructions on this thing: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:21773 I understand that they don't have a good preview of the dual print. Classic ReplicatorG being very usefriendly ;-)

This is my biggest fear. If you want Skeinforge, use Skeinforge ;-) It has only 260 configuration options, should be easy to use.The different speed for infill has been requested before. But there is an issue with it. The "upskin/downskin" as it's called in NetFabb is also infill in Skeinforge, so that will also get a new speed then. I also hate ratios. But I also hate filling in the print speed in 2 fields. Code wise it's a simple change, but keeping it simple in the GUI isn't. Next to the "save profile on slice", in the development version you can use setting tags inside start/end code. The new start code has: ;go to the middle of the platform, and move to Z=0 before starting the print.G1 X{machine_center_x} Y{machine_center_y} F{travel_speed} But you could also add comments about settings yourself: ;Used layer thickness: {layer_height}

In GCode you can switch between printer heads with T0 and T1. That's the easy part. As for slicing... I'm working on it. Currently it slices twice, and then joins those 2 files together. It was quite low on my list too, but I made a deal. Also, people are saying "but the Replicator has dual head!" yeah, so, now do we, and we're having a bigger build area Also, I'm printing more and more small parts in plate form with my Project Manager. See: http://daid.eu/~daid/IMG_20120422_233737.jpg http://daid.eu/~daid/IMG_20120423_184029.jpg With dual head I could load in 2 colors and print that in 1 go. The possibilities don't end with a dragon holding a hearth: http://daid.eu/~daid/IMG_20120404_233539.jpeg (not a dual extrusion print, 2 normal prints put together) Also, I got flexible PLA now, that would also make a interesting dual head print. Funny. It's the none-functional things where I got best results so far. See: http://daid.eu/~daid/IMG_20120418_213851.jpg for example. It's crowded down there: http://daid.eu/~daid/IMG_20120426_202040.jpg http://daid.eu/~daid/IMG_20120427_144014.jpg

PLA does not give off toxic fumes, ABS does. Very important difference for me.A 15x10x2cm building floor would take a few hours to print on high quality I think. Maybe you should have a talk with Ian from this forum, he is getting an Ultimaker for exactly the same reason.

The head is pretty full with 2 hotends in there. I don't think you could add any kind of extra duct in there. Here are some more photos (many thanks to Harma) http://www.flickr.com/photos/protospace ... otostream/

I solved the USB issue by getting rid of USB. Pretty much a solution in my head. Playing music on my USB headset was a workaround. No amount of software will fix the buffering problem. And no amount of software will fix flakey USB hardware. But there are ways to improve the USB connection, first is to make sure you are as close to the main hub as possible, every extra HUB hub adds delays and problems. Usually there are a bunch of hubs already in your computer to supply all the different USB ports. Finding out how they are connected is not an easy job. Also make sure there are no power saving modes enabled on your PC. Finally, the USB driver of linux might work better, but that means running a whole different OS for just printing. Still, when I got a UltiController I didn't think I would use it much, printing from my computer was pretty easy. But now that I have one I stopped using a PC to print. Until yesterday, where I printed some experiments from my laptop, and, the laptop decided to go into sleep mode during a print. MakerBot has switched to always print from SD, just to avoid the USB problems.

No. Main problem is getting the 2 printer heads level, they need to be exactly on the same level for real proper dual extrusion.And there is no room for any of the current available fan holders. I need to design something that doesn't use the front 2 bolts, and fits around everything. And still provides proper cooling. Software is a mess. There is 1 E value, and T0 and T1 to switch between extruders. You can only monitor the temperature of the current active extruder, the UltiController only shows the temperture of the first extruder.I've been updating Cura to support more then 1 extruder, which starts to work, but switching between extruders is quite difficult still. You need to retract the old extruder, push filament in the new one, and make sure the 2nd is printed at the right offset. And all this without creating blobs. So far I haven't been able to get real results except for printing something with only 1 extruder. My dual extrusion results have resulted in lots of blobs so far. But we had only a hour or so after we assembled it. Note, you could already build this if you wish, you would have to order a bunch of parts from Ultimaker, lasercut some others, and get a few parts from other suppliers. However, you will have problems with it, it will be a lot of work, and the software is nowhere near ready. The main reason I have this is because I can get the software to work (I hope)

(Thanks everyone at Protospace for the help so far!)

https://shop.ultimaker.com/en/parts-and ... panel.html It seems to be in very high demand, as they put it on pre-order now. (it was a normal order a few days ago, guess they sold out) It allows you to put GCode files on the SD card and then print directly from the machine, without having a computer attached. Really useful for long prints.

If python doesn't work then skeinforge doesn't do anything. Not sure about slicer, but for Skeinforge 40, make sure "dimension" is enabled. Or, I can throw another software option at you which is Cura. https://github.com/daid/Cura/wiki

Thanks for the software awesome I've indeed done my share of Skeinforge hacking already. However, the infill is the part that confuses the hell out of me, I have no idea how it works and why it works. So I stay away from it. So I cannot make this feature. The first time I notice the NetFabb infill I already thought, now that looks pretty! But I have no way to implement it in SF.

Your laser is only as good as your optics, so to get really high resolution you need very good optics. But that's solvable. Anyhow, there is a ZBed adjuster on thingiverse already, you might want to take a look at it. There is also the tip to remove your metal lip from the end switch to improve accuracy. In Cura I solved the uneven bed and hard to get right start height, by having a different layer thickness for the first layer. A 0.3mm first layer is easy to lay down, and you can lay 0.1mm layers or thinner on top of that without much problems. Simple and effective. Objects printed with a first layer of 0.1mm are also hard to remove from the printer bed, while 0.3mm first layer pops off quite simple. So replaced a lot of tape after every print with 0.1mm first layers, and now that I've switched to 0.3mm first layers I only had to replace a few strips so far because the printer head had dug into it, which was my own fault.

You can edit the GCode, remove everything up to the correct Z height, but leave the start code intact. Then insert an M92 Exxx where the E is the first E value you see in the code, so the extruder knows where to start. Note, the end result might not be very pretty as you will always see on which layer it went wrong. But it will allow you to continue the print. Note2: The UltiController with SDCard printing is much less prone against freezing.

Silly german ;-)

Pretty nice right I've been printing at 220C, but 200C seems to be the sweet spot for string reduction (with retraction) and strong parts. If you are looking for a new challenge, get some flexible PLA. I got some yesterday, and that stuff is weird. It feels odd, and it's not easy to print with it. I've only done a single print with it and it had trouble with the infill. I'm not sure how to describe it, as it's not soft like rubber. But it's also not rigid like normal PLA. It flexes quite easy, but it does not compress I think. I should do some larger prints to see how this stuff acts.