Daid

It's just the extruder driving, firmware+electronics. Cura will generate GCode for 4 extruder models just fine.

Which OS and version of Cura? I had a report like that for 13.06.3 on Mac

Official word is somewhere in October.

The new menu implementation has a totally different menu when you are printing then when you have the "main" menu. Basic menu structure is: Main menu: "print" - "material" - "maintenance" (shown when you turn the printer on) Print menu: Select a file on SD card. (After selecting the file you enter the printing menu) Material menu: "change" - "settings" (Allows you to start the material change procedure, and adjust material settings) Maintenance menu: Allows you to re-run the bed leveling wizard, as well as going into an advance menu where you can do stuff like heating up the bed and turning on the fans. Printing menu: Allows you to goto the tune-printing menu, as well as aborting the print. Tune menu: Allows you to tune speed, temperatures, fans and retraction settings. I still need to make some final tweaks, as there is still a "..." menu somewhere that takes you to a "not implemented" screen. But I'm quite happy. Also, the material settings are things like print temperature, bed temperature, filament diameter, material flow and fan speed. You can adjust these, or select presets (and add presets later on, still need to finish that bit)

I rather not give time scales, as people will be disappointed if we do not deliver in time. However, do not expect it in weeks, more in 2 months or so I guess. (The UM2 is still taking up a lot of manpower right now)

I think only Protospace (FabLab Utrecht) made a 4 extruder machine as experiment. The reason why you can select it in Cura is because I wanted to design Cura around multiple-extruders, not just dual extrusion. So by already having the option to select up to 4 extruders I forced myself not to be limited to only dual-extrusion and this gives hardware tinkerers the option to move up to more extruders if they want. Ultimaker however, only supports up to 2 extruders right now. The electronics are only suitable for up to 2 extruders.

The heated-bed kit for the UM1 will be made. I'm making sure of that. The heated-bed of the UM2 cannot be directly fitted in the UM1. But we learned a lot from the UM2 heated bed and we can re-use bits an pieces. As the UM1 power supply is not really up to driving a heated bed directly it will most likely be a kit with a 2nd power supply. I officially cannot specify a price (as I do not set prices and have little view on the economics part of making kits) but I hope it will sell somewhere between 150 and 200 euro's. And will be compatible with the current UM1 electronics, just plug it in, load new firmware, and it works. (No soldering needed, as always)

Thanks for all the extensions. I've added the missing extensions. There are no end-caps at all. The front is only milled "half deep" and there are plastic spacers between the pulleys and the casing that keep the rods in place. This also keeps the bearings in and no longer causes the rods to grind against the end-caps.

Shame that the text features are stripped out. Then the "document" features are most likely also stripped. It's extremely easy to make technical drawings in SpaceClaim. I did a bunch of them in a morning without any pre-knowledge. They are not the best drawings, but it was super easy to get different projections and add measurements.

Could be a bug in your version of Marlin, there have been quite a few issues in the display code a year ago.

Retraction is better, cooling is better (from both sides really helps). The belts are GT2 instead of MXL. This all improves printing quality a bit. Bed leveling is a 1 time thing, as the new bed is much stiffer and no longer deforms. More printing volume, for the same printer size.

We have a desk full of ABS prints ;-) also to test best platform adhesion (sanded bed glass with glue stick works best. However a sanded bed can grind your nozzle ruining it. Which is why we did not go for a sanded glass plate) We did not test nylon, PET or other materials. But I do think the UM-Original is a better printer if you want to tinker with stuff. (Buy both! one for printing one for tinkering ;-) )

It is the linear speed of the filament. However, in the firmware that ships with Cura for the Ultimaker-Original there is a bug that makes retraction slower then entered. Which is why 45mm/s is the default for the Ultimaker. After the fix a value of 20-25mm/s is more accurate. Repetier lists mm/minute because that's what the firmware is actually reading. Cura uses mm/sec everywhere as those values are smaller and easier to comprehend in my book. mm/minute is a left-over from CNC milling which is much slower in movement then printing.

If you are unsure, it's better to enter a slightly larger then smaller nozzle diameter in Cura. What the nozzle size effects is the extrusion width, so the with of the lines it will try to put down. As you can easy put down 0.8mm lines with a 0.4mm nozzle entering a slightly larger nozzle is no issue. (I hear Paul Chadler, the kind&queen of 3D printing quality, also uses makergear nozzles in his Ultimaker)

I'm sure someone will design a printed addon for manual drive. But during testing we did not find a need anymore for manual pushing the filament. With the new hotend design and the direct drive you get a skipping motor instead of overflowing hotends during the priming of the hotend. (Also, dynamic motor power, you can adjust the motor power on the fly in the firmware :-) )

245C it is then!

In injection mold tree on YouMagine is for the Ultimaker-Original. So no UM2 sliderblocks in there. These are the TITAN sliderblocks: http://daid.eu/~daid/titan/sliderblock.stl

The slider blocks are not printable, as they click together. (There is the bushing and a spring in there for belt tension) I recommend looking at my TITAN slider blocks: https://github.com/daid/TITAN those are printable and about the same size and design as the UM2 sliderblocks. In the UM2 we did extend the X/Y 6mm rods a bit so they hit the endstops. So you might want to think about that.

The UM2 parts are difficult to source. But some parts are easier then from the UM-Original. Most of the injection molded parts are printable, except for the slider-blocks (which are not strong enough when printed) The dibond panels are difficult to source in 6mm, but can be replaced with other materials. The hotend bits are custom, will be expensive in low amounts. Rods, belts, motors, doable. Z motor is a difficult one. But pretty much, you are better off self-sourcing an UM-Original, it's cheaper. But the thermocouple has been replaced with a PT100 for example, which is easy to source. Anyhow, I think you all know I do not like marketing too much. And yes, we are planning to OpenSource all the files of the UM2, but not from the start. But we will put up the UM-Original files (All of it, 3D files, documentation, BOM) within the next few weeks. Source-code of firmware will be released when we start shipping. And Cura is already OpenSource (hell, those who has been paying attention will notice that I already pushed UM2 info into the github repository)

I've used 3D text. First you need to add 2D text in a plane (from the display tab) and then "pull" that out, or push it trough an model to carve out text. The tool from RS looks like a slightly stripped version of what we have. As our version also has sheet-metal tools, and some more things.

Sharing is important in our eyes. And one of our main issues with thingiverse is easy to explain, the lack of source files. I scraped the first 40.000 things of thingiverse, I downloaded all the file names. There are on thingiverse, in the first 40.000 items, 51381 STL files. Which are raw files, mostly only good for printing and minor modification. 6917 SCAD files, which are great for a select few of us. But then the numbers get even worse, only 1123 sldprt files (which are solidworks parts) 476 step files, 568 blender files, 128 123D-design files, 3448 sketchup files. So in total, there are about as many SCAD designs are other designs, and design files are dwarfed by the amount of raw STL files. (And the customizer most likely made this numbers worse) With the YouMagine upload from Cura we hope to combat this. As it assists in uploading your design files with your STL files in a few simple clicks. Now, the extensions that I know for designs are: ['.scad', '.blend', '.max', '.stp', '.step', '.igs', '.iges', '.sldasm', '.sldprt', '.skp', '.ipt', '.dwg', '.123d', '.wings'] But if people know more, I would love to know them. Same for photos, we think photos are important, so the upload function also allows you to quickly take photos with your webcam, as well as select photos from your disk. Another idea is a phone app to quickly take and upload photos to YouMagine. (So many ideas, so little time)

In our defense, it has been in development for over a year. (Yes that long, lots has gone wrong) Imagine if we told everyone "something new is brewing" for a year long. As for Dual extrusion. After a while with the UM2 development, we found out that we where putting a lot of new things in the UM2, and that it was delaying the development of the UM2. So we had a good talk about it and instead of putting even more new things in the UM2 we are going to change tactics. I hope this will work out. But the plan is that new development will happen on the UM-Original as upgrade kits. So UM-Original users are the tinkerer crowd. And once we have enough experience in this new part and are confident in the operation we will put it out for the UM2. So: UM-Original = Tinkerers = Possible slightly unstable upgrades UM2 = Pro-users = Stable machine Which brings us to the Dual extrusion. We're not happy enough about dual-extrusion to say that it's at a pro-level. I think Makerbot is the perfect example. They sell dual-extrusion but never demo it. Now, we have a new hotend in the UM2. And it's difficult to see, but the UM2 hotend allows you to adjust the nozzle height very easy. Which was an important part of the hotend design for dual-extrusion. We have NOT decided yet on the possible upgrade kits for the UM-Original. But heated bed will be one of them for sure. We would also like to upgrade the electronics (as the new board is better in almost all ways). No idea about the hotend and direct drive yet. And we'll be releasing all the design files for the UM-Original as OpenSource very soon. We did not have proper files for this before, and while we where doing the UM2 development we also fully documented the UM-Original. So expect those soon, and if you need a certain file right now for something, just ask! (But remember that we are very busy with the UM2 release, so sometimes might take a while to respond)

We've pushed the hotend up to 350C without a problem. But the default firmware limits to 300C

Cura and YouMagine already support the AMF format. And I am planning to add features like this to the AMF saving. However, this will violate the AMF standard, as they do not allow custom tags or meta-data. (In theory you could also put binary data at the end of a binary STL file, but those are all ugly hacks which I would not recommend)

Type-B will also remove internal "holes" in the 2D slice. Simple example. If you would have the model of a hollow cylinder, type-B will remove the hollow inside and just make a cylinder.