illuminarti

When you save a gcode file it embeds the settings profile in the end of the gcode file. So you can 'Load Profile from gcode' to get back the settings used for a specific print. I'm not sure if it stores the plugin settings or not.

A few thoughts... 1) Have you tried simply increasing the flow rate to make up for whatever under-extrusion you're having. There's going to be some back-pressure related under-extrusion at pretty much any speed; so trying to compensate for that might help. 2) You picture in post 106 - the single layer red square? It looks like the spacing of the darker patches is very regular in both x and y. What is the distance between the centers of the patches? If we can figure out what that corresponds to, then we should be able to figure out how to fix it. 3) Unplug the bowden tube from your extruder, and then use pronterface to run some filament quickly through the extruder, while videoing the motor shaft and tension bearing. Look to see if there's any visible oscillation due to the motor shaft not being straight. That might cause periodic variations in extrusion amount.

See my PM

Stepper motors in normal use are constant current devices. See here for a great introduction: http://www.geckodrive.com/support/step-motor-basics.html So the controller sets the current that is supplied to the motor, and the available torque is proportional to that. If the motor tries to step but stalls and cannot advance, then in falls back into a stable configuration - this is what is happening when the motor 'steps back'. Heating the filament makes it easier to extrude, lowering the pressure in the head, and hence the required torque at the exruder motor - and so makes it less likely that the motor will stall, given its fixed torque capabilities.

Can you actually print anything? Are you able to start a print at all? You might try installing Pronterface, and connect to the printer over USB. Start with the head in the middle of the print area, and try to move it left and right and back and forth using pronterface. See which directions it moves, and if, when it goes one way, you can get it to move back past the starting point, when going the other way. Also, try homing each axis separately, and see what happens (but be ready to hit the power switch if it crashes into the side). Since you've been working on the extruder housing, the first thing I'd check is whether you trapped and/or damaged the limit switch wiring that runs in that same corner of the printer (e.g., by getting the wires between the extruder motor and the frame, and or putting a screw through them).

Make sure you have the latest firmware that ships with Cura 14.07. Previous versions had some issues with bed leveling that could cause the first layer height to be wrong. Check your printer's firmware version in Maintenance -> Advanced -> Version. Yes, the firmware assumes an offset of 0.1mm when leveling is completed using the wizard. So if you level until the nozzle is visually touching the bed, you will be fractionally too close. But that's not really a bad thing most of the time; you generally want the first layer to be a little bit squashed onto the glass to get good adhesion, so being fractionally close helps with that. Just set a first layer height of 0.25 or 0.3mm, so that there is still plenty of clearance above the glass, and everything will be good.

You need to set the gantry height correctly in the 'Machine Settings' in Cura. For the later manufacture print head like you have (with the shorter bottom segment to the stack of black plastic parts in the head), the correct gantry height is about 48mm. Cura may still default to 55mm however, which was the correct value for the earlier Ultimaker² printers, which had a taller bottom piece in the print head. Once any part of the print is taller than the gantry height, Cura will no longer let you print one part at a time, but instead will print them at the same time layer-by-layer - precisely to stop the rods knocking over prints.

You don't need to use a 1mm spacer at all. The first, 1mm pass is only approximate. The one that matters is the second pass. Where you want to be 0.1mm from the bed - or less. The first thing to do is to make sure that all of your springs are reasonably tight. If they aren't, it's impossible to find the right height with a single sheet of paper, because the tension on the springs is minimal until they're compressed a bit. So, look through the bed from front to back, and adjust the back thumbscrew until the terminal block in the back left corner is about 1mm from touching the lower plate. Tighten the front screws about the same amount, to keep the bed roughly level as a starting point. Then heat the nozzle and make sure it is clean at the tip. Now run the leveling wizard again. When adjusting the rear height, just use the dial on the front of the printer. When adjusting the front corners, use the thumbscrews. I recommend not using the 1mm-then-a-paper-thickness approach. Instead, on both passes level the bed to the point where the nozzle just touches the glass. This is easy to see if you look along the surface of the glass; you can see the nozzle touch its own reflection. When setting each point, move the bed up until it just touches the nozzle tip, then back it off and allow it to settle untouched, and then gently close the gap again. If you find that you cannot compress the front springs enough to get the bed down to where it needs to be, then simply raise the back of the bed a few turns of the thumbscrew, and restart the leveling wizard. You want to end up with all the springs in a middle position, with a gap of about 10-13mm between the two plates of the bed assembly. The springs should be neither totally compressed, nor so loose that they aren't applying any meaningful upward force on the bed. By doing two passes at the same height you should get fewer surprises; the second pass around should only require very minor adjustments. And aiming for the point where the nozzle touches the glass is a much easier target than trying to interpret the feel of nozzle on paper tension.

If your printer is crashing in mid-print and freezing up, then I'd say it's most likely a problem with the hardware/firmware on your printer. The actual gcode that Cura generates is just a pretty straightforward collection of straight line print segments; it shouldn't cause a correctly functioning printer to behave like you are seeing.

Oh, and your bottom/top thickness should be an exact multiple of your layer height.

I'm not sure about the X on the bottom - it would be useful to see the STL file - perhaps there is something about how it's modeled that makes Cura do a strange move, rather than treating it as a continuous outline. I suspect that's also the cause of the trash sticking out from the surface of the print - the head is making long diagonal moves, and oozing while doing so. Do you have retraction turned on, and what is your travel speed set to? I don't understand why you're printing a first layer height of 0.1mm on something like this. You're just making things hard, for no real benefit. Set the first layer to something thicker, like 0.2 or 0.3mm, so you don't have to worry so much about the leveling clearance. You've actually gotten the bed almost perfectly level it looks like - just fractionally too close to the nozzle - perhaps as a result of leveling when cold, so that thermal expansion reduces the clearance when the nozzle is hot? Equally, a layer height of 0.06mm seems excessively thin for a mechanical part like this.

Yes, but the height of the nozzle, angle of the ducting, exact response curve of the temp sensor etc etc could all be contributing to your machine responding differently when the fan starts running. Monitor the temperature, and see if it dips around that height on the print.

There's no spacer used; however the fan blade piece should be facing outwards, so the back of the fan housing provides a little bit of spacing. I've seen some installed backwards. If it's a good quality fan with good bearings it can be almost totally silent in operation, without any additional spacers etc.

Perhaps this is the result of a temp swing as the fan kicks on?

Do you have 'Cut off bottom' configured with a negative value? (on the 'Advanced' tab). That will raise the object above the bed. Or conversely, after you manually rotate it, can you set a 'cut off bottom' value to bring it down onto the bed?

Oh, and I don't recommend going back to earlier firmware. 14.07 has a bunch of fixes for the bed height, in addition to the priming stuff.

Ultigcode is turned on in the firmware, if the file has ';FLAVOR:UltiGCode' at the start. If the file is Ultigcode, the startup sequence is: 1) Home everything 2) Move head to (5,10) with bed lowered still 3) Heat up bed and head 4) Raise platform to priming height (z=20) Then, for any extruder that is used in the print (as determined by the presence of a non-zero 'Material' value at the start of the file), prime the nozzle as follows: 5) Advance 20mm of filament at 5 linear mm/s (this should be undoing the standard end-of-print retraction) 6) Prime the nozzle by flushing 50 cubic mm of plastic through it, at 5 cubic mm per second 7) If the extruder in question isn't the first one, do the standard end-of-print 20mm retraction. If the file is not Ultigcode, then steps 1,2 and 3 don't happen. But step 4 does still happen. This is arguably a bug, especially since the bed isn't guaranteed to know where it is until a homing has happened. Steps 5, 6 and 7 will only happen if there is a 'Material' line in the file header, which usually there won't be. At the end of the print (or when a print is aborted), the head and bed heaters are turned off, the head is homed, the current extruder is retracted 20mm (the standard end of print retraction) and the steppers are released. This happens for either type of gcode. There is no way around the initial bed raising for now, but I'll put a fix in the firmware to stop that happening when using normal gcode. At the end of the print, you should be able to just change your ending gcode to just do the mini retract and lift etc, and then let the firmware turn everything off and do the final homing. You can't avoid the final retraction of 20mm, but I'd be inclined to just go with it. It keeps the filament out of the hot end during the cooldown, and is going to happen automatically after a filament insertion as well. So, I'd be inclined to expect it to happen, and add the same de-retraction that the firmware does automatically, as part of your start gcode.

Yes... with too little tension the print will complete but there will be some under-extrusion due to slipping. You may also find that the filament gets ground to a flat finish without clear teeth marks in it. At the other end of the spectrum, the filament gets distorted and gouged. In the middle is a sweet spot where the filament just gets clear teeth marks in it, with no abrasion.

Zews, Aroth - Both of your posted prints look basically fine. The higher levels get goopy looking because the plastic doesn't have enough time to cool, plus the pressure is so high that the slowing down to print the detail of the lettering tends to cause over-extrusion. The purpose of the test is only to check that the extruder keeps working, and doesn't click backwards, causing large gaps in the print. That said, failing at 9 or 10 is certainly not a problem, especially if you haven't adjusted the temperature on the printer to print at the correct temp (230) - which you said in the other thread that you hadn't.

Yes, you can do it fairly simply by editing the gcode. Immediately before the skirt starts printing, just add a move to where you want the part to be centered. (0,0) is front left (even though the head homes back left). So to print it over to the right front, you could probably do something like: G1 X160 Y 40 Then add one more line to make the printer think this point is the center of the bed: G92 X115 Y112.5 You might need to tweak the coordinates slightly, but that approach should work. That's how we print multiple pieces for automated testing.

The left-right cross rod through the head was catching on the left side panel.

210 in all the recent firmwares.

Yes, I've been testing this print extensively the last few days. On my early Ultimaker², with the original extruder design and stronger spring (with the indicator set to the highest position), it prints fine. With later printers, that have a different spring, it's a bit more of a challenge. If the spring tension is too weak, the filament gets sanded flat by the constant movement of the extruder knurled sleeve. The print does complete, but because of the wearing away of the filament, you tend to get noticeable under-extrusion (just general, less-extrusion-than-there-should-be issues not the specific 'click-back' periodic failures that we normally refer to as under-extrusion). If the tension is too high, then the filament gets deformed to the point that it no longer fits properly in the Bowden tube - and I think that's what aroth is showing in his photo. Eventually the filament stops moving, and likely gets gouges dug into it. The plastic may even partially melt in the extruder from the friction of the knurled sleeve on it.

As George said, the extrusion test is designed to print at 230º. So I suggest that you increase your temp to 230 (the default is and try it again, so that you have a meaningful benchmark.

If you just have the demo version of netfabb, you probably can't save the gcode. Pretty much no one uses Netfabb with an Ultimaker any more - the support for Ultimakers isn't that good any more, and people had poor experiences with it and with their support. AFAIK, nothing has been done to support Ultimaker 2's. There are plenty of other free slicers inluding slic3r or Kisslicer. Another alternative is Simplify3D, which (like Netfabb) is a paid program, but works nicely for me.