illuminarti

The spool holder causes more problems than it's worth anyway. Just put the filament on the floor behind the printer, and unwind some coils so they hang in mid air for the printer to eat. Some kind of 'lazy susan' kitchen turntable will help, but isn't essential.

My own personal printer was an early model that took a much worse beating in transit, and is far more skewed. And yet it prints perfectly well. As Daid and GR5 mentioned, print problems are probably related to something else. Go grab the latest Cura and install the firmware, from that, and are if that helps.

Most of those issues that you mention sound like they may be related to the firmware's start-up and bed homing code - which are all things that have changed in the last few days. I suggest going to software.ultimaker.com, and getting the latest Cura (14.06.1 or later), and installing the firmware from that. The start up sequence still needs a bit of work (see also http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/6064-cura-1406-filament-grinding/page-3). You should really use tweezers to grab the initial priming extrusion, and get it out of the way at the start of the print.

The Ultimaker Original electronics fan was notoriously noisy, but on the Ultimaker², some users have had problems with noisy fans on the head. The side fans are 12V, the rear fan is 5V. If you really want to replace them, you might check for low-decibel (and for the side fans, PWM-controllable) fans made by e.g., Sunon in the appropriate dimensions. In the short term, a simpler fix might be to check if all of the screws holding the fans on are tight. Some people have been able to quieten the fans by tightening/replacing/removing loose screws.

The test print looks fine. It's skipping slightly at 9 or 10mm³/s. That's perfectly good. Just the way that the filament is coiled on the roll can affect the final few mm³/s of throughput. In practice, it's very unlikely you'd print that fast in a real-world print. The shrinking at the bottom is probably due to the bed being too hot. The printer defaults to 75º for the bed temp - try lowering that to 60º. What other problems have you had?

The printing in air might be caused by the first part of the print warping and curling, and the head catching on it.That could then cause the motor to skip steps, and lose track of its position - and then once it's printing totally in the air, all you're going to get is a mess. So what I'd do is start over, and post some photos of the first part of the print, so we can see how that goes. Until you get the hang of things, you might try printing with PLA - it's a bit easier to work with.

The disconnected cable is supposed to be that way. Let us know how the printer behaves now that you've wiggled the wires. Hopefully that's fixed it.

The error indicates a problem with reading the temperature sensor properly; it seems to be an intermittent problem, given that a reset sometimes fixes it. Does the error message mention the heated bed? If not, it's a problem with the head sensor. The first thing to do would be to remove the cover over the electronics board, and check that the sensor is properly connected to the electronics board. The cover is held on with two screws that go through the bottom of the printer, and into lock nuts. The head connects to the 'temp 1' connection, the bed goes to 'temp 3'. Where are you located?

Welcome! And congratulations on your new printer. I hope it's working well for you :-)

I won't hurt to relevel, but I don't think it's strictly necessary.

Just UM2

Mary's a regular at Ultimaker's New York exhibition appearances, and iirc was the first person to ever buy an Ultimaker² at retail... http://3dprintingindustry.com/2014/06/16/modern-myth-continuum-pret-porter-3d-printed-shoes

I made two comments on github; I think there are a couple of things that need cleaning up still.

I'm not saying you can't print at lower temps. But it is a lot harder on the equipment. I fixed the link now, btw. And yes, I googled it: Makerbot says 220 - 230º http://www.makerbot.com/support/guides/pla/ Matterhackers recommends 205 - 220 http://www.matterhackers.com/articles/how-to-succeed-when-printing-in-pla MakerGeeks says 195-215: http://www.makergeeks.com/pla-vs-abs2.html As noted above, Colorfabb says 195-220 (see the tricks and tips tab on any filament store page, although admittedly that's not pure PLA ) . Protoparadigm also lists 220 as the upper end of the range http://www.protoparadigm.com/about-3d-printer-plastic-filament I just looked the roll of green Ultimaker filament on the back of my printer. It quotes 260º (!!) as the top end. I have actually printed PLA that hot - and it basically works, but it does get brittle, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it as a long term strategy. The fact that the robot might have been printed at 203º doesn't mean that that is the optimum temp in general, nor the top end temp. It was just the temp that UM found worked well for that print when they wanted to print a bunch of robots as quickly as possible but with reasonable quality. And none of them suggest that anything bad is going to happen if you hit 230, or 240. I agree that you don't want to keep any plastic cooking in the nozzle any longer than you have to. And that at some point the PLA will degrade if it sits too hot. But that point is much nearer 250 than 200, and plenty of people routinely print PLA much hotter than 205º and don't experience any problems at all. Bear in mind also, that it is notoriously hard to compare temperatures between different brands of printers, and that the Ultimaker² is also more likely to need higher temps than many other printers because it has a very tiny melt zone; as a result the plastic spends less time being heated, and may not come to thermal equilibrium with the heater block before it gets extruded when printing fast.

You should be able to set the travel speed to 250mm/s. That will help a lot with stringing. Check your retraction settings, also. The default settings require a minimum extrusion between each retraction. In your test 1) photo above, the print of each circle may be too small to always trigger a retraction. You could try changing the retraction settings to say 1.5mm minimum travel, no combing, and 0 minimal extrusion. That should make it retract for each move (you should hear the double chirp of the retraction and de-retraction for each move). You run a risk however, that lots of retraction might strip the filament - especially on newer Ultimaker² units that have a weaker extruder spring than the first batches did. You might also change the retraction settings on the printer, to 5.5mm and 35mm/s. The default of 4.5mm at 25mm/s for the Ultimaker² can be a bit too short, and too slow. The extrusion test cylinder is calibrated in mm³/s. That's the volume of plastic being extruded, and that is what really matters for print capacity and quality. The volume is calculated in terms of the layer height, extrusion width, and linear speed. The cylinder prints with 0.25mm layers, and a 0.4mm wide bead. So, when printing at 30mm/s linear speed, the volume per second is 0.25 x 0.4 x 30 = 3mm³/s. The higher the volume per second, the harder the extruder has to work. If you print with 0.1mm layers instead, you could print with much higher linear speeds - say 70mm/s - without making the extruder work so hard (70 x 0.4 x 0.1 = 2.8mm³/s).

It's certainly not necessary to print at 230, but it's perfectly reasonable to; it doesn't start to break down and become brittle until somewhere around 250 - and then it seems to require the plastic to sit hot for a while. On the other hand, temps around the low 200's or less can definitely cause problems if you're trying to print more than a few cubic mm per second. At higher temps, the extruder has to work much less hard, but the low viscosity of the plastic, and longer time to cool below the glass temperature can cause their own print quality problems. It definitely varies by manufacturer as well, but pretty much every manufacturer gives a guide range that goes a lot higher than 205º. I think the last 'recommended' temp I saw on an Ultimaker reel was 220º, in fact. Colorfabb quotes a rough range for their filaments of 195-220, and says that users should also experiment with higher and lower temps than that. Protoparadigm quotes 180-220.

Print several at once, so the layers have plenty of time to cool.

That looks like a bug in Cura, but I'm not sure, as virtually no one uses raft on an Ultimaker that I know of. Even for something like this that has a lot of fine or support pillars that need to be stuck down, enabling brim is usually sufficient. I'm more curious though why you're printing that piece with support? Isn't it designed to be printed without support, standing up?

Try to reduce the infill percentage to 24% or less. That will make Cura put a full grid on each layer, instead of doing alternating layers in a alternating directions. Usually that gives a far more cohesive infill, as you are always printing on top of solid plastic.

Personally, I rarely print PLA at less than 230º (as measured on a Ultimaker Original or Ultimaker²), and am notorious for having had no problems with under-extrusion. The increased viscosity of PLA at lower temperatures makes it much harder to extrude; in the http://www.extrudable.me/2013/04/18/exploring-extrusion-variability-and-limits/, I found that it was markedly more difficult at 200º or below. Only for very detailed prints at very low speeds would I print PLA in the 180-205º range you are quoting.

There is no 'exact value': it depends on the exact configuration of your machine, including the tension on the extruder spring (since that determines how far the teeth press into the filament, and hence the effective diameter of the bolt). 830 is close enough. If you have an Ulticontroller, the steps value is shown, and configurable in the control->motion menu. Otherwise, it might be displayed in the status output that gets dumped out when you first connect to the printer with pronterface. Rather than configuring it in Cura and having it be written out to every file, it would be better to set the steps value with the Ulticontroller, or via gcode, and then save it to the EEPROM.

Take a look the free Netfabb Basic. That will let you do cuts across planes, and then seal up the holes it creates. http://www.netfabb.com/downloadcenter.php?basic=1

I presume this is an Ultimaker Original? With a standard v2 bolt, the 'correct' value is about 830. So if the gearing is still the same, and just the diameter changed, you could calculate the new steps in the ratio of the circumferences of the two knurled bolts. If the new bolt is twice the diameter of the old one, the circumference will also be doubled, so the distance moved by one rotation will be doubled, so halve the steps-per-e. Once you get in the right ballpark, load up filament and unhook the bowden tube, and use pronterface or similar to feed 100mm of filament in. Measure the distance it actually moves, and fine tune the setting accordingly.

What firmware are you using on your printer? Also, if that's all one STL that you're printing, I don't think you can get rid of the lines between the skirts, as Cura doesn't do retraction on the skirt/brim areas, if I remember correctly. Lower print speed and faster travel moves might help.

Hook your printer up to Cura, like you're going to do a regular firmware upgrade. But then, instead of picking the 'Install Default Firmware' option, pick 'Install Custom Firmware' and then point it at the hex file.