codemaven

Hi RonP, Where in the UK are you? I'm located in West London (and work in the City) I would be happy to print something for you. Cheers, Troy.

Post-processing the G-Code from NetFabb is harder than it may seem... I took a look at it with that idea of hacking together a Perl script to do this, but there is no easy way to identify the retractions in the code because they are not all the exact same pattern. it depends on where in the model the retraction is occurring. You need virus-scanner style heuristics to identify the spots where Netfabb tried to retract. You would have to read the lines above and below to find the correct new E Values and modify a few lines after... It could be done, but it's just not worth it my opinion... Now the Harware retract... that's interesting. I doubt it works or we would have hear more mention of it. I can't see how the GCode interpreter could know what is supposed to be a retraction vs a bridge. It could assume that a fast jump above a certain threshold should be a retraction and automatically insert a retraction there... that would create a lot of unnecessary retractions over in-fill and would also be problematic for something like fluff supports... and what would you set the threshold at? When the machine is interpreting G-Code is has no idea if a movement is over empty space or not so even if it works at all there's no way it could be optimal. NetFabb needs to be fixed. I think that is the correct and proper solution. Regards, Troy.

Now the spammers are spamming the topics about clearing the spam... This forum has to be locked down immediately to prevent further damage... I personally do not like Google Groups and would really like everything to centralize here (and drop the google group)... but right now this forum is completely unusable.

We are drowning in spam... make it stop... Pleeease make it stop!

I've not had this particular issue with OpenSCAD / Cinnamon, but I have had other window / icon issues with Cinnamon on Mint 13. To resolve the missing icons try restarting cinnamon by right clicking on your taskbar, select troubleshooting, and restart cinnamon. As for OpenSCAD freezing, I can only suggest following Daid's advice and getting the latest version. Cheers, Troy.

I too have submitted a ticket with a similar snippet of GCode. The response I got back was pretty much along the lines of "Yes, we're working on it, but we have many customers and the Ultimaker Engine is only a small component. It'll be ready when it's ready". I also tried manually editing the profile in the XML file to put a negative number in... which strangely enough made no difference. The model sliced just fine and the resulting g-code was the same. Regards, Troy.

Do you mean that your circles come out oval shaped? This is usually caused by loose belts. Especially the short belts that connect the motors to the rods. Make sure they are as tight as you can possibly make then by moving the motors down. Cheers, Troy

The original post seems to have been deleted or something... But just to note, while I do not disagree with the fact that the post was a blatant advertisement for commercial software it does appear to be a legitimate company. They had a booth at the recent London 3d PrintShow with a demo of their product and a number computer running it and inviting people to try it out. Cheers, Troy

The wood material is quite different from PLA though. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but it feels to me like the binder is more like a waxy material with wood particles suspended in it. Indeed there is no warp as the wood particles don't change shape at all. The wood material is very cool indeed, but it will never replace plastic and I don't think the non-warping property of it is something that can be translated to thermoplastics. PLA is a huge improvement on ABS, so maybe some day they will come up with an even better plastic. Cheers, Troy.

A heated printbed itself is not so complicated, but from Ultimaking Ltd perspective it's something you have to get right. Firstly, you have the safety issue to worry about. But additionally, how to actually design it as a retrofit that anyone can adapt without problems. It has to be step-by-step with no drilling, cutting, or significant modification of the chassis and it needs to be easily installable by anyone without any electronics or advanced mechanical skills. There's the question of a power supply - running it off of mains means that users need to correctly wire mains wiring (and probably a relay) which is very dangerous for the inexperienced. It also means that they need to support multiple line voltages around the world. Plus, the end result would have an extra cord and that's not something you want from a commercial product. The other alternative is a single PSU. However, for that to be absolutely reliable they would need to change some things on the electronics like the switch (which has always been under-rated and would certainly overload) and the regulators. Then they would need to actually find a suitable psu that can be provided in an enclose (without having to wire the cord on yourself). Most suitable PSUs are designed to sit inside product enclosures and be wired directly into a device. Integrating a PSU into the chassis would require moving the electronics board and thus changing the whole bottom of the chassis. Basically, if a person is going to attempt a home-brew heated bed then they are likely to know what they are doing with the wiring and would be willing to put up with the inconvenience of a second cord, two power supplies, or the unreliability of the electronics with a single higher power PSU. And they take all of the fire, and electrocution risks on themselves, but these sacrifices are not acceptable for an 'official' retrofit. I think it will be a long time before we see an official heated bed option for the Ultimaker, and in fact I'm not sure if it's event reasonable for them to offer a retrofit for existing machines.... It may be better to re redesign the machine and release an Ultimaker 2. Cheers, Troy.

I briefly spoke with the UM guys at their booth at the London 3d Printer show and they told me that they are working on a heated bed now, but it sounds like it might be still be quite a ways off. They're apparently still evaluating different potential designs but it does sound like an official UM Heated Build Platform is at least on the way. Cheers, Troy.

Hi Danluc, Despite what they say, there is more than one way to mount it... But if you look at the pictures on the wiki it should be pretty clear. http://wiki.ultimaker.com/Hot_end_v2 The flange should go against the PEEK part, leaving a gap between the PEEK and the Aluminium block. There should be no gap between the nozzle and Aluminium block. I've had the V2 nozzle for a while now and have not had any leakage, with no teflon tape. I did have some on leakage the previous hot-end version. The design of this nozzle should reduce the opportunity for leakage because of where the joins are. I think it is still possible for some leakage to occur on this one, but it is much less likely. In any event, it was never much more than a cosmetic issue as I'm not aware of a little leakage around the nozzle causing any serious harm for anyone. Cheers, Troy.

That is true. I noticed absolutely no warping with my wood prints. I usually always have some small amount of warping with PLA, but this stuff stayed perfectly flat and stuck well. PeggyB: That second picture looks great! It's like it's carved right out of wood. I found the lead of a 1/8W resistor was the perfect size to fit in the nozzle to clear it. Cheers, Troy.

Well, my main issue was that I had to print faster. It needs more experimentation to determine the actual parameters, but it appears that it melts as low as 170 degrees on my extruder, and works fine as high as 245. However the binder in it is somewhat oily and if you let it sit in the hot-zone too long it appears to evaporate away, forming a hard lump of wood that will not extrude. I've found that the extruder must continue to run while it's hot. If you leave it for more than about 30 seconds without moving some filament through the extruder then the nozzle will plug. If you leave it long enough (a minute or so) you end up with a charred mess. I had to remove the nozzle and clean it out inside with a wire a few times. It also tends to ooze more than PLA, even at low temperatures. It's like there is no glass transition, it goes straight from solid to liquid without much of a "soft" zone that I can see. I don't know what the binder is, but it also feels oily when the part is warm so it's more like a wax than plastic. Another interesting thing that I noticed is that the part feels oily and very flexible to me after it's finished, even when it's cool... But after about a day (or at least 8 hours later) that oily sensation goes away and the material feels more solid. It's almost like the binder needs to settle, cure, or evaporate away. My experience with it is very limited so far, I've only managed two successful prints (the Maple leaf and the Yoda) so my observations could be way off base. I'm looking forward to hearing reports from other users. This is a very cool material. Cheers, Troy.

It looks basically the same as Bertho's extruder design which is on Thingiverse ( http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:26094 ), except that this uses some lasercut parts instead of the printed parts. I was planning on building Bertho's extruder upgrade next, but maybe I'll just buy this one... Again, it's just that shipping.. Even with the recent reductions its still awfully expensive to get stuff shipped from UM and I'm just across the channel in England. Cheers, Troy.

I got my wooden Yoda to print last night... It's got a few defects, but all-in-all it's a 3d printed wooden Yoda... Very cool. This wooden filament is a little more difficult to work with than regular PLA, but it's not bad once you get the hang of it. Now to come up with some real things to print in it. More pictures: https://picasaweb.google.com/102544598518008997408/3dPrints#5800189893445346018 Cheers, Troy.

Here's my first successful print with Wooden Filament. I had some serious jamming issues that required me taking the nozzle off and cleaning it thuroughly. It seems that the wooden filament can char into clumps that are impossible to extrude if the temperature is too high, or if it sits in the hotzone for too long. The higher the temperature, the darker the extruded wood - however, the slower that you extrude it (or rather the longer that it's exposed to heat) the darker it gets as well. Even at 175, if you leave the heat on in one spot then the wood gets dark and will eventually burn. I had quite a few jams when trying to print Yoda. To get this to print I upped the speed to 200mm/s in NetFabb at 180 degrees, which I think is effectively pushing the machine as fast as it's acceleration profile will allow. I did not do any temperature variation this time, however with the contour infill an interesting pattern appears on the corners where the head tends to spend a split second longer in one spot, causing darker lines. More photos on picasa:https://picasaweb.google.com/102544598518008997408/3dPrints#5799851395013919490

Hi Daid, I didn't realize you attempted a slicer... I might take a look at what you've done. I've been toying with this idea for a couple of days, but as soon as I put any serious thought into it I always run into great difficulty in conceptualizing how to actually accomplish certain aspects... One of the most troubling for me is how to determine what areas need regular in-fill, vs downskin / upskin. I wrote a OpenScad like compiler recently in Java with all of my own CSG code using BSP math... it works, but it's slow when it comes to large models as it tends to multiply the number of triangles with each operation. So after a few differences I end up with millions of uneccecary triangles that could (should be merged). Without any optimization it uses a lot of memory and each additional operation has more and more triangles to sort... Not sure if I'll ever release the code for this or not. However, I was thinking that slicing is basically the same thing as intersecting a plane through the model using a Union operation and calculating a BSP tree for the points that it pases through.... So I might just attempt this. I don't have much time to work on programming projects these days. I have so many different projects on the go (like yourself), but I don't know how you can manage to make any progress... Betweek work, commute, girlfriend, etc I only get about 2 hours a month to work on my own projects... Anyway, it's great to see this. Cheers, Troy.

I hand edited it in a simple text editor, however I think I'll write a simple shell script to post-process the g-code to get some nice looking rings. It should be fairly easy to add this kind of support right into Cura. With NetFabb unfortunately I don't think there is any way to integrate this as there is no plug-in or post-processing script support. I like your idea of burning logos into the side of a print. If you use m109s instead of m104s for the temp change you could get precise changes in colour. However, I think you'd need to retract and move the head away before a temp change or you would get a nasty blob each time. Cheers, Troy.

Here are some photos: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/z ... directlink https://picasaweb.google.com/1025445985 ... directlink

Hi All, I received my order of the new LAYWOO-D 3d printable wood filament yesterday so my first order of business was to print a Yoda. Here is a brief run-down on my first experience with this amazing material. Firstly, it feels funny in filament format, it's certainly not like the PLA that I'm used to. I also noticed that it felt too thin. When I got home I measured it and found that indeed the end of my roll was only 2.01mm thick. Measuring at various spots throughout it I found variation between 2.00 and 3.2mm. That's a huge variation that may cause problems with some people. I do not have Bertho's extruder fix yet, but it looks like that might be an essential with this stuff. I sliced a Yoda using NetFabb and then opened up the resulting Gcode in a text editor so that I could manually insert some m104's throughout it to get that nice banding effect that they advertise. I inserted an m104 about every 100 layer and alternated temperatures between 190 and 240 (the Thingiverse page suggests 180-245 variances). However, it turns out that the approach of alternating every 100 layers is not a good way to go. I thought the temperature changes would be graudal, but in fact they are sharp. My printer only takes a few seconds to change temps so instead of the temperature gradually (and colour) gradually changing over a few layers it happens immediately at a layer. Some more gradual changes are required for nice effect. It extrudes easily... and is very liquid like PLA. At about 175 it started to freely ooze from my nozzle as PLA does. At the higher temperature above 220 there was a bit of smoke that smelled kinda like wood. I actually found that it smelled like freshly popped popcorn to me. It printed beautifully. however, about 1/3rd of the way into the Yoda I realized that it was no longer extruding (I'm on a V2 hot-end btw). The Filament was grinding and I had about 4 or 5 layers of no extrusion so I had to stop the print. I could not push the filament through, but pulling it back was easy so I removed the wood filament and ran through some regular PLA. It took a bit of force, but then with a big puff of smoke out of the nozzle whatever was blocking it cleared and it flowed free again. I don't know what cause the jam, but there was no plug as we used to see with PLA in the V1 hot-end. The nozzle just seems to have been jammed with a particle. I don't know if it was a one-off thing or could be an issue with this filament in the Ultimaker nozzle. It also might be the temperature (maybe it was too high and burned the wood into a charred blockage?) Or it might have had something to do with the variation in diameter that I noted. My best guess right now is a combination of the above - I think a variation in thickness caused trouble with the filament feeding which in turn caused the wood that was in the nozzle to stay in the hot end too long and become charred and stuck. But that's a guess. There was no warpage of the part and it came off the blue tape very easily... but there was very poor adhesion at my first temperature change (from about 230 degrees to 190) and the part separated cleanly on a layer there. It may take some tweaking to get the adhesion to be perfect on temp changes. Perhaps a gradual change would help again. The rest of the temperature changes worked fine and produced a solid part. The results are very cool. It does feel like wood, and it smells like wood. The bottom surface of he part definitely looks like wood, the rest of it is a little strange looking - more like a dark baked biscuit with bands in it, but it could pass as natural wood if I had the banding a little less sharp. The part overall is very solid. The bottom bit where (the downskin and about 100 layers where the layer adhesion issue separated from it the rest of the part) is quite flexible, but the main in-filled part is very rigid. Anyway, I'm loving this stuff so far. Can't wait to hear other's experience. I'm going to make a few tweaks and see if I can get a complete wooden Yoda this weekend. Cheers, Troy.

It's been a long time since I've used replicatorG, I use NetFabb these days... but I believe that it's normal start routine is to lower the Z-azis and extrude a bit of string to clear the nozzle. It will wait for a few seconds, then raise the bed and start printing.... At least that's how I remember it working last time I used it. Cheers, Troy.

The theoretical maximum resolution of the z axis is much higher then you'll ever be able to achieve in practice... I think the z axis is technically capable of about 0.005mm resolution in theory (the distance of a single step on the motor), but getting reliable and precise extrusion to work without too much back-pressure below about 0.04mm is very difficult. I typically print at 0.08mm per layer, but I have managed to do 0.04 myself in the past and I've seen others achieve this. I've heard rumour of people going as low as 0.02, but that's really pushing it and I can't recall where I've seen that mentioned or if they had any success at that. There is a noticeable difference between 0.1 and 0.08, but even at 0.01 the detail you can get is incredible. You have to look really closely to see the layers. Cheers, Troy.

Try Bricscad ( http://www.bricsys.com ). I've used the trial for 2d cad for lasercutting and found that it worked great. I have not tried the 3d capabilities yet, but it looks promising... My 30 day trial is almost up though. It's not exactly cheap, but it's much cheaper than SolidWorks... Cheers, Troy.

I find communication with UM support is still slow. I'm still waiting for my replacement thermocouple, which hasn't even been shipped yet. If it was just an off-the-shelf part I could have a replacement at a fraction of the cost today by just going to my local RS Components outlet or at worst next-day delivery from Farnell or Mouser. Communication with support has pretty much been one email a day simplex... as in I send an email (at 9:00am CET) and don't get a response back until the afternoon the following day. Cheers, Troy.