codemaven

I'm afraid I agree with Ian... I would rather that it opened in the same window instead of a new one. With this site I come here to go to the forum. When I click on the forum I want to go there, I do not need the homepage to stay up... It's just an extra thing to close. To me, the navigation bar should be navigating the site - i.e. going from one page to another. Also, I _hate_ tabbed browsing... I have 3 large monitors and I work with my desktop like a real desktop - I spread my windows across it..... I always disable tabbed browsing and open things in new windows when I want them, then I can tile my windows and just move my head/eyes to read them... I move my windows around to stack them in whatever way is most efficient for the task at hand... Often I stack related windows on one monitor and windows related to something else on another monitor like stacks of paper on a desk.... So basically, when I'm navigating from page to page on a site and it opens a new window it just ends up polluting my desktop. To me, this is like reading a book, but instead of flipping one page over to the next I'm ripping each page out when I'm done so I end up having a lot of loose pages that I don't want and just have to toss in the garbage bin.. Sorry... I'm rather nit-picky when it comes to user interfaces. Cheers, Troy.

I'm surprised that people here actually manage to change their nozzles.... Last time I tried to take my nozzle off to fix a clog it took me two hours to get it off... and it was up to temp... Then when I tried to put it back on I realized I had damaged the thread on the brass tube so I had to buy a new one. My threads over time had basically become welded together... I don't think I could remove my nozzles now again without damage. Regards, Troy.

Hi Gijs, Looks really nice. Does it exhibit the same temp / colour relationship as Laywoo-d3? I can't speak for others, but personally I don't think I would be willing to change nozzles for a single material. It's just too much hassle. I like the idea (with dual extrusion) of having a larger nozzle for doing support and infill quickly and a small one for the skin of the object.... but unless changing the nozzles could be made as easy as changing a drill bit on a drill I'd rather just stick with two 0.4mm nozzles all the time. Regards, Troy.

Hi ePower, I've not changed that option in NetFabb. I leave it as "No Heated Bed". I believe that only affects the manual control options. Which, I suppose could be an issue if you don't have an ultracontroller... but I do not connect my UM to my computer anymore, I do all of my printing through the ultracontroller. Regards, Troy.

I havn't done much dual extrusion printing since I got it, but with the printing I have done I've changed the m109 for the second extruder to an M104 and placed it a few layers before it is required so it doesn't heat up until just before it's needed... Just have to put it far enough ahead to give it time to reach temperature when it's required. I believe Daid intends to add a 'wipe/prime tower' feature to Cura which will also help this... But I have no idea when this would be available. A primetower basically just ensures that both extruders print at least a little bit of filament on each later. You can manually add a prime tower to your model by just creating a couple of objects off to the side (for each color) that are the same height as the model so they get printed along with it. Regards, Troy.

Hi Roo, It's called a "Rotary Encoder". They're common parts and easy to find with the integrated button. Cheers, Troy.

ahhh... for some reason I first read petting as 'pelting'... i.e. throwing things at your cat. What a horribly cruel thing to do while you're thinking... glad I re-read it before calling the animal welfare people

Welcome! I think we generally frown on people who sell and buy the various clone kits that are for sale... But people who have built their own Ultimakers themselves are very welcome here. It is opensource after all. There are a few people here who have made their own. Cheers, Troy.

I can't say for sure, buy my guess is that this was on their minds when they originally designed it. There are now 3 and 4 extruder printers out there, but when the UM came out dual extrusion was rare and anything more was unheard of. I think that the designers of the UM originally may have planned for up to 4 extruders when they were initially designing it. However... moving from concept to implementation is a whole different story... They originally only brought out a single extruder machine and though they may have intended it to be upgradeable to multiple extruders I think that proved in reality to be more difficult than expected. There were multiple changes to the print head during the course of the revisions which involved moving around the thermocouple amplifier and such... These incremental improvements were necessary just to get dual extrusion working. I don't think there is room (when you consider wiring, thermocouple amp, etc) for any more than two. Also, the addition of more bowden tubes will put extra strain on the movement of the head and could limit the speed that's possible. That's not to mention the complexity of aligning two print heads... It just gets more complicated the more you add, and for little benefit.... Two extruders is a huge improvement over one... But, although 3 or 4 extruders would be cool, I don't think there are really that many practical uses that would justify the extra complexity. For me the biggest use case of dual extrusion is dissolvable supports. I can't see ever wanting to print more than two colours enough to justify the complexity... maybe 2 colours and a dissolvable support structure... another possibility is a head with a larger diameter nozzle for quicker in-fill printing... But I think I'm quite happy with two extruders for now... Cheers, Troy.

Or we could encourage the adoption of the AMF file format which supports this, instead of stl. Cheers, Troy.

You can't do much with 1 watt of laser power other than pop balloons and melt thin black plastic bags... slowly. However those lasers are fun to play with if you are _very_ careful. Infrared Solid State lasers are available up to about 15W, Which may be approaching usefulness... Typically laser cutters are at least 30 Watt or higher. I would think that you could possibly do practical SLS (Selective Laser Sintering) with dark plastic using a 15W laser, but not metal. Also, they're only 808nm and unfortunately there are a lot of materials that are quite transparent to that wavelength which means that they cannot be cut or processed in any way. Laser cutters typically use CO2 lasers that are aroun 10,600nm wavelength... And much cheaper and more efficient than solid state... The problem with CO2 lasers is that they tend to be large. A 100watt CO2 laser is around 6 feet long I think. Regards, Troy.

Interesting... But Electron Beam Melting is much more promising... It turns out that there are people working on amateur EBM setups. It's almost as complex as what you're describing above, but having some previous experience with electron guns and high vacuum I know that it is possible... The difficulty is the vacuum system... I'm not sure what range you would need exactly... It would probably start to work as high as 1x10e-3 torr, but I would think that to get any serious efficiency you would need to get down to 1x10e-5 or lower which requires a turbomolecular pump or a diffusion pump. I would be worried about getting metal powder into the pumping system then... especially with a turbopump where it could cause catastrophic (explosive) failure if a particle hit a turbine blade on edge or got into the bearings. I have 3 turbopumps, not sure I'd want to risk any of them in this.. Construction wise, it's similar to my fusor that I built a few years ago. I actually etched a nice gouge in one of my bell jars with a stray electron beam that escaped from an uneven grid... That e-beam would have easily melted metal powder. Unfortunately all of my fusor equipment is back in storage in Toronto. I think this should be the URL to my fusor pictures on picassa... https://plus.google.com/photos/102544598518008997408/albums/5446036776929888833?banner=pwa&gpsrc=pwrd1 but it seems that they've migrated it to Google Plus... and I've never used Google Plus (nor did I ever intend to).... and it's blocked here in the office anyway... so I have no idea if this URL works or where it will take your really... Cheers, Troy.

Wouldn't miss it.

By the way, will the UM2 be on show for the London 3d Print show on 7-9 November?

Here's an interesting related page: http://reprap.org/wiki/FutureToolIdeas By the way... If anyone can come up with a conductive polymer or extrudible metal suspension that works it would be Kai Parthy... He seems to be a genius when it comes to inventing new (and unlikely) FDM printing materials. Cheers, Troy.

This has been discussed many times... Unfortunately there is no practical solution yet. A cnc router for track isolation routing remains the easiest turn-key prototyping solution. People have tried fdm printing with solder and eutectic allloys such as Wood's metal or Field's metal... But apparently not successfully. If memory serves there is an issue with current nozzle designs, which are typically machined from brass. I think these metals in a molten state actually dissolve brass. Conductive polymers so far have too much resistance as mentioned. The currently available conductive ABS has very high resistance and it would be very difficult to get a metallic suspension that's extraditable while maintaining contact between the particles. Even the best conductive inks that are designed for repairing PCB traces have quite high resistance, although I have heard of some success with people using conductive ink pens on pen-plotters or cnc router gantries. But you really can't solder on to these. Perhaps a syringe of solder paste could be used in a paste extruder and then the result heated to fuse the solder paste... but solder paste is very expensive. Cheers, Troy.

Unfortunately, that's how it goes... Like a new TV, or Computer, mobile phone, or any other form of technology as soon as you buy something it's already obsolete. I was always surprised at how slow 3d Printing was moving in this respect. Makerbot has now started to release new versions almost annually. I think endless upgrades to a product are limited... In software terms that's how 'Spaghetti code' happens. It gets to the point where you really need to take what you've learned and start fresh with something new. I don't think you should worry about it too much... yes it's a shame, but I don't think Ultimaker is going to cut you loose and leave you without support. The community is still here and and you still have the best 3d printer on the market. It's just soon to be the second best. Cheers, Troy.

Ahhh, at last. I've been saying for a while now that it's time to bring out a new version. Too bad I can't afford to buy it at this time .. It's certainly on my wishlist. Can't wait to see it! Will it be available as a kit as well as pre-assembled? Cheers, Troy.

A new PCB with either an embedded ARM, or driven by an external ARM SBC like a BeagleBone or Raspberry Pi running Cura / SteamEngine so that you can upload an STL file directly and let it slice/print? The concept I've been toying with is a BeagleBone driving the electronics while at the same time hosting a web page with an ajax web based GUI similar to Cura that can be accessed by any machine on the network to upload, slice, and print. Considering WT (WebToolkit) for this task as it can run on Angstrom Linux without the need for Apache or anything like that... and could call the slicer with no overhead. You could operate the printer from your phone, tablet, whatever.... and monitor the progress on your phone from anywhere in the house by opening the webpage for the printer and taking a look. Cheers, Troy.

As Gr5 pointed out there is another option called NetFabb, which is the slicer I use. I just wanted to write about it here for completeness. NetFabb is a commercial application that is designed to work with the big (expensive) professional 3d printers like the Statasys machines, etc. However, they've also added some support for a handful of hobby/consumer printers like the Ultimaker. When you buy a license for NetFabb you get the basic software plus an 'Engine' for the specific printer that you are using. Because NetFabb is targeted at the comercial printers it has lots of advanced features that are not found in the free slicers. Back when I first got my Ultimaker it was before Cura was available. The de-facto standard at the time was a program called Replicator-G, which used Skeinforge as it's back end. There were serious problems with Replicator-G and Skeingforge... They were VERY slow, tended to crash on large models, and generally produced pretty poor surface finish on the printed objects. The only viable alternative at the time was NetFabb and people were showing off some amazing prints that they had done with NetFabb that just were not possible with Rep-G. That's why I bought it. However, since Cura has come about with it's new SteamEngine the advantage of NetFabb is much less than it used to be. The focus of Cura is simplicity and ease of use so it probably will never support many of the advanced features of NetFabb.... But really, most people will never need those features. Here are some of features of NetFabb that you won't find in Cura (yet): - Concentric fill on top/bottom surfaces (instead of crosshatched lines back and forth it does circular fill). Also can do crosshatch fill. - Configurable different speeds and line thickness for outer shells and inner shells... So you can print your outer facing side slow to get high-quality and then print the inner shells faster. - Configure the fan to turn off and on at different heights - Create regions in your model that can have different settings. I.e. Print slower in a certain part of the model and faster in another part. Also control the infill density in different regions so some parts can be hollow or sparse infill and others more solid. - Because you change the line thickness of your shells and infill separately you can use very thick infill lines to make parts really strong. - Half-height slicing... Lets you slice at twice your print height resolution and perform a sort of 'interpolation' in between to improve quality... The default 'Ultra' Profile is 0.08mm layer height, but because of this feature it really is more like 0.04mm. You can see some of my prints that show these features here: https://picasaweb.google.com/102544598518008997408/3dPrints?authuser=0&feat=directlink Most of those prints were done with NetFabb. However.... NetFabb is a commercial product and their commercial clients come first... They are very slow at adding features and fixing bugs on the Ultimaker engine. They took ages to change their calculation engine to Volumetric after that had become the standard approach on Ultimaker.... and although NetFabb always had an option in it's configuration for retraction, this never really worked on the Ultimaker Engine... It took them almost a year to fix that. It also works on Dual Extrusion, but I think there are some bugs with retraction when doing dual extrusion (I haven't played with it enough yet to be sure)... but I don't think these bugs will be fixed any time soon. And it's very expensive at €150. You can buy it in the Ultimaker shop if you are interested... but after all that, my suggestion is to stick with Cura. It's come a long ways.... And though it's not quite as advanced as NetFabb, it is free and pretty damn close in the quality you can get. I still stick with NetFabb because I like it and I paid for it... but now I think it's not worth the price and Cura gives you a lot of functionality, is easier to use, and best of all it's FREE. Cheers, Troy.

The orientation of the aluminium block doesn't matter for single extruder... However, for duel extrusion you will have a hard time getting both extruder to fit unless they're oriented the same as the pictures. As for the set screw... It should go in all the way, but as long as it's pretty tight and holding everything in place then I don't see it being a problem if it's not quite in the whole way. Cheers, Troy.

I set Cura to use dual-extrusion in the preferences menu, but I did not use the first-run wizard or re-load the cura firmware was I have a custom heated bed so I use my own build of Marlin that was originally generated with the Daid Marlin builder. When I first installed the second extruder I tried both NetFabb and Cura and was unable to get the machine to respond to any commands for the second extruder. Setting it's temp didn't do anything and it always returned 0 as the temperature. I connected on Pronterface and tried sending a T1 command to it, which returned a message saying that 1 was an invalid extruder number. Anything for extruder 0 worked, but extruder 1 returned an error. So I took a look in the Marlin configuration.h and found this: // This defines the number of extruders #define EXTRUDERS 1 Changing that to 2 and rebuilding marlin got everything working just fine. Cheers, Troy.

Hi Jim, When I installed my second extruder I had the same issue. I had to manually rebuild marlin with #EXTRUDER_COUNT set to 2 in configuration.h. I don't think this is documented, but it should be. Regards, Troy.

Hmm... Looks great. But unfortunately no Linux support. I would actually be willing to pay £2k for a good commercial modeller that works on Linux. Cheers, Troy.

gr5, I noticed on my recent Dual Extrusion kit that they've moved from laser cut Delrin to injection moulded parts on the extruder. Cheers, Troy.