illuminarti

Either is fine; both are direct 5V out, unswitched. The central position was intended for the fan. The outer edge one for other general purpose connectivity, but both work just as well. Some early units came with the fans connected on the end - like mine. I'm not even sure if those had the the other connector - I haven't taken mine far enough apart to see. But, yeah, don't worry about it.

You can quite easily adjust the alignment of the rods, by loosening some of the pulleys, positioning the rods correctly, and then re-tightening the pulleys. For instance if you want to adjust the left-right cross rod that goes through the print head, relative to the other one... The movement and orientation of that rod is controlled by the two long belts that run along the left and right sides of the printer. Therefore you need to adjust those belts. To do that, loosen two of the pulleys that those belts go around by using the supplied Allen Key to loosen the set screw in the pulleys. You need to loosen just two of the four pulleys that those belts go around, and they need to be diagonally opposite one another. I recommend you loosen the front pulley for the left long belt, and the back pulley for the right one. Once they are loose, the sliding blocks at each end of the left-right cross rod can now be moved independently. A good way to adjust them is to move the head all the way forward and/or back, and measure the distance from the sliding blocks to the pulleys on those axes. With the head all the way forward, and properly squared up, you can tighten the rear right pulley. Then move the head towards the back, and tighten the front left one again. You may need to move the head slightly to orient the pulley set screws down into the body of the printer at about 45 degrees, so you can get at them easily. When you tighten the pulleys, tighten the screws hard, and make sure that the main axis rods that the pulley sits on are correctly positioned, and the pulleys (and spacer, if it has one) are tight up against the wall of the printer, so that the axis itself cannot slide back and forth. (It is the pulleys at each end of the rods that keep the axis rods themselves in place).

The good news is that you pretty much never need to adjust that one, once you have the level set. Tighten it down until the terminal block is about 1-2 mm above the base plate, and then leave it set that way. When running the leveling wizard, the rear adjustments are always made using the wheel anyway.

They should just be barely tight... tighten them until they just start to feel snug. As George said, the main thing is probably that the Bowden isn't too tightly forced into the teflon coupler, or squeezed between the collet at the top and the coupler at the bottom - that can cause the end to deform. The screws should be fairly loose - then push the Bowden down into the coupler, and see that it seats all the way down. If you pull up on the bowden (without the blue clip inserted) the collet and tube should move up and down a mm or two. Make sure that the end of the Bowden tube doesn't come up above the top of the teflon coupler as you do that. Then lock it in place by pushing down on the Bowden tube, while lifting the collet up around the tube, and then sliding the the blue clip into place. You should end up with the Bowden seated all the way down into the coupler, but not under appreciable stress. And the collet should barely move in either direction if you tub gently on the Bowden.

Does it work better if you turn off 'enable combing' in the expert settings for retraction?

Congratulations, and welcome to the club! Resistance is 100 Ohms at 0ºC. It should be around 108 Ohms at room temp. How did you fix the problem?

You're skipping steps during fast travel moves it seems; I don't really see anything in the video, but then again at the key moment the head pretty much obscures the whole of the back of the printer and the belts and motors which might have something interesting going on. If you could get some video of that right back corner when it's happening, that might be helpful for diagnosis. One thing I noticed is that the sound seems to happen right as the head passes in line with the camera. There's no chance that any about the camera or its mounting hardware is catching on the sliding block, is there? What travel speed do you have configured in Cura's advanced tab? If you power off the machine and move the head by hand, do you notice any tight spots? You can add some light machine oil such as sewing machine oil to the cross rods and axes to help lubricate things.

Oh, and that was the initial response to your ticket :-)

I think what you are seeing is speed/pressure-related under-extrusion. To some extent this is always going to happen (see, for instance my study of the effect with the Ultimaker Original). The extrusion cylinder test shows that your printer has plenty of torque to keep pushing the filament continually - it just doesn't push it as far as it should, hence the thinness of the infill lines. The question is, what is causing it to be so severe on your machine, now? Do I interpret your comment correctly that the problem goes away if you print hotter? If so, then my first advice is definitely to print hotter. :-) I'm not sure why the behavior of your printer has changed over time. Has the environment that it is in changed at all? It is now hotter or cooler than it was? And what about the filament that you are using - are you getting further down the roll now, so that the filament has a tighter radius of curvature on it, leading to more resistance in the Bowden tube? I'm curious if the problem is less severe when you first turn the printer on from cold, and then gets worse with multiple print attempts, or does that not seem to make a difference? Also, have you tried doing a factory reset? (Maintenance -> Advanced -> Factory Reset). Take the filament out first - since it will make you reload it.

If it's legal to buy them in Texas, get a 28 or 29 gauge hypodermic syringe needle from Walgreens. You can get a pack of 10 for just a few bucks.

Not sure where to post this - or even if it's already been posted here somewhere. But this is a 'film', and it was 'MADE' - albeit, but not by me. So this section seems to be as good as any. :smile: I thought I'd share this short film of stunning timelapse nature and landscape photography that was made by one of my customers, Doug Urquhart from The Upthink Lab. Much of it was made using this rig that he made available on YouMagine, and which he printed on his Ultimaker²: https://www.youmagine.com/designs/ultralight-pet-timelapse-motion-control-dolly Here's the movie:

You can just manually grab the print head and move it. If you have been printing recently, the x and y motors may be powered still, locking the head in place. In that case you can either power the printer off, or just wait a minute or two for the motor lock to time out.

Volume per second is definitely the primary constraint on the extrusion system, but linear speed is also relevant for the mechanics of the system and effects like resonance and ringing. So you need to think about both; really. Kisslicer has a nice feature that allows you to set a limit on volume per second, and will then adjust the gcode (linear speed) to keep everything below that limit. That can easily come into play on things like infill, if you try to print infill faster and in multiple layers at once.

Printing over USB is not a supported option for the Ultimaker². I'm not sure if Cura deliberately prevents you from trying to do it... if you really want to, you try using Pronterface or another printer control program to submit the gcode. However, you'll need to make sure that you have Cura set up to make regular Marlin gcode, not Ultigcode - as the latter makes assumptions that are only honored when printing from SD card. And printing over USB is slower and less reliable than working from the SD card, so I recommend that you just use the SD card.

Hi Lance - The direct price on an Ultimaker 2 is 1895 Euro with a 37 Euro shipping fee to the US. At current nominal exchange rates, that's $2391 US. You might pay a foreign transaction fee (usually 3% - but some cards waive it) to your credit card company, if you use a credit card. And the exchange rate they use might favor them a bit. Plus it's possible there might be some import duties or customs fees to pay for the importation. All in all, it should be about a wash with Dynamism's price. Plus, sometimes Dynamism and the other resellers have stock when Ultimaker themselves don't, because they got their orders in several weeks ago. That said, a direct purchase shouldn't cost you anything like $2860, and if it does, that extra is, to be fair, down to your bank not Ultimaker. Whether you purchase directly from Ultimaker or from Dynamism, or another US reseller, you'll have access to me and my team in Memphis, TN, providing warranty support and repairs service. (The resellers may also offer their own support as well, but it is ultimately all backed by fbrc8's service, and you always have the option to come directly to us).

The printer includes: - The printer itself - Removable Glass bed - Power Supply - Power Cable - Miscellaneous accessories such as spool holder, filament guide, allen keys, manual, grease, glue stick - A roll of PLA filament to print with - SD Card Cura software to convert models to printable files can be downloaded from software.ultimaker.com, or other slicers are available for free such as Slic3r and Kisslicer.

You seem to be printing incredibly fast and cool?? 0.25mm layers at 100mm/s is 10mm^3/s - which is pretty much right at the limits of what an Ultimaker can do - with PLA at least. ABS probably behave a little bit differently in terms of extrusion rates/ You might just about be able to print PLA at that speed at temperature, but it won't be pretty. But ABS generally requires much higher temperatures, and 230 is the lower end of the print temp range for that - so combined with the very high extrusion rate, I'm not surprised that you're getting some under-extrusion and print failures. I'd definitely go hotter and/or cooler to avoid pressure-related under-extrusion. See here for details of how the Ultimaker Original handles PLA at as you increase the extrusion rate: http://www.extrudable.me/2013/04/18/exploring-extrusion-variability-and-limits/

If you have built your own firmware from the source, you can install the hex file of that, by using the 'Install Custom Firmware' option in any Cura. Otherwise, the firmware that comes with Cura gets installed when you do 'Install Default Firmware'. In order to get a later firmware pre-built, you need to download the correspondingly newer version of Cura. Currently, the official release of Cura is 14.09, although there are newer beta versions available at: http://software.ultimaker.com/Cura_closed_beta/ Those include some newer beta firmwares as well.

If the computer goes to sleep, that will happen - so first check your power management settings. Also, USB connections tend to be quite sensitive to various forms of electrical interference such as power spikes from turning on or off nearby devices etc, so that can also cause freeze ups even if it isn't directly related to the computer itself. As Don mentioned, printing from an SD card in an Ulticontroller is a more reliable, and faster, way to print.

As others have noted, given the small size of the object, you may also be keeping the nozzle dwelling rather too long over each layer, so it doesn't have time to cool properly. You'd probably do better to print it with a faster head speed, and print multiple copies at once, so the head can finish one layer and allow it to cool while it is printing the next copy.

You need to remember how Cura, and the modeling process works. Cura has no direct way to know that you modeled that piece with a 0.8mm wall. That info is in your original CAD file, not in the STL. All the STL has is lots of triangles that conform reasonably well to a couple of curved surfaces that may or may not be 0.8mm apart. Cura has to take all those triangles and load up the coordinates, then intersect that with a series of planes corresponding to the layers that you are going to print. That gives a series of many sided polygons, that Cura then has to approximate down to something that it can actually print - your original STL files have many thousands of triangles around each layer - which would give an incredibly over-detailed path that the printer probably couldn't process fast enough while trying to draw a ring that is just a couple of cm across. So Cura is simplifying and approximating these many-sided polygons that correspond to the inner and outer surfaces of your funnel. And then trying to figure out how to print it. All without actually knowing anything more about it than the coordinates of a random assemblage of triangles that describe the shape it is starting with. When we as humans look at the shape, we can see that it's intended to be a tapering tube, and have your description that the wall is 0.8mm thick. Cura has none of that. Only the coordinates of the corners of 40,000 triangles that aren't even listed in any particular order. Cura has to try to generate a tool path for the outside surface, and then another one for the inside. And then compare the two, and try to figure out if any infill is needed. Technically, you are wrong to ask for 0.8mm shell thickness in Cura - that is how thick to make both the inside, and the outside surface - and there isn't room to put two lots of 0.8mm inside a single roughly 0.8mm thick object. You would do better to just set the shell thickness to 0.4mm so you are only asking for 1 pass around the outside, and one around the inside of the shape. Rather than asking for two, and then having to have Cura decide not to do one of them. Secondly, there are inevitably going to be some slight rounding errors that might cause Cura to get a bit confused as it tries to match up the two paths, especially as they won't exactly line up within the limits of the resolution that the STL gets mapped down to for printing. If Cura thinks there is a slight gap, it might try to fill it. Probably Cura could be smarter about this, but if you simply turn off infill, then it won't try to fill in any slight gaps that are left. A much better approach for this kind of print would be to model the shape as a closed solid, that just defines the outside of the cone, and then print it with a 0.8mm shell, and no infill. Then you are explicitly telling Cura that you just want it to follow the outside contour of each layer, and do two concentric passes to give the desired shell thickness, rather than asking it to print an outside edge, and an inside edge, and then figure out if there is any space between those two, and to put 20% infill into any space left.

Yes, good point about the resonance changing. Siert and I were playing with that a few weeks ago when he was in Memphis; seems like it should be possible to do something with that to assist the leveling process.

Would you care to share the gcode and the STL so that others can try to reproduce your results?

And yes, it is typically cut by milling it, although it can be sawed as well I think.

It's polyethylene sandwiched between aluminum panels. The material is called Dibond, and is commonly used in the sign-making industry.