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Cura is frequently being updated with new features and possibilities, but rarely with features of this value. Today Cura Connect is made available to all of our Ultimaker 3 and Ultimaker 3 Extended users, whether you just got your machine or you already have one for a year. Cura Connect is our print management system, which is aimed to make your life easier. It enables you to control and monitor a group of prints you have configured through Cura. Thus providing an efficient production solution for your office, studio or work space. Just like Cura itself, Cura Connect will receive continuous upgrades over time. But it is already a powerful tool to help you streamline your workflow. Spread the workload. Print jobs are shared between a group of Ultimakers through a centralized queue. When one printer is occupied, other scheduled jobs are assigned to available printers with a similar configuration in the group. Flexible scheduling When a print is completed Cura Connect will send you a notification. After removing the print the next print job in line will print automatically. Prioritize print jobs as needed Since there is one centralized queue, there is a clear hierarchy. A new print job has a higher urgency? Just move it up the line! Prepare for the settings you need No need to slice your prints for a specific printer. Cura Connect will find the printer in your group with matching configuration (print cores, materials). If it can't, it will ask you to set it up when a printer is free. But there is more! Scale up your operations Group multiple printers with a matching configuration into one group. Each group will have its own centralized queue. If you want to expand your operations later, it is easy to add or remove printers from existing groups. Maintenance Cura Connect monitors your printers and schedules maintenance tasks to keep your hardware in the best condition, eliminating problems down the line. Notifications Browser notifications will update you about a job's status. Printer frame lights notify you when a printer needs attention by dimming its light. Ready for the future Thanks to the embedded system and Wi-Fi connectivity of the Ultimaker 3, new software updates will continuously offer you new features, empowering your 3D printing experience further. It may also be good to know that installing Cura Connect requires no server, no extra software and no complicated setup. Install the latest Cura, update the firmware on your Ultimaker 3 (Extended) and you are good to go! A few tips for the early bird: When setting up your first group, think about how it would work best for you. Are various printers spread over a larger work floor? Then you may want to group some based on location. Try to match as many printers with a similar configuration for the smoothest experience Within a group, one printer will be the host. This host will forward print jobs to all other printers in that group. If you are going to include Ultimaker 3's and Ultimaker 3 Extended's into the same group, make sure the Ultimaker 3 Extended is the host. Although if possible, you may want to group your printers with the same build volume too. And the best tip of all, before you start make sure to read the manual Let us know what you think, as always we're eager to hear your feedback!

@shurik and @lepaul, the 'hexagon' issue that was blocking you from downloading Cura will be fixed early November

If you are interested in dual material print with an Ultimaker 2, I would recommend to look into the 'Mark 2 project'. It has a lot of community support and the people involved are really talented

And have a flourishing and vibrant community

Let me just say first, don't ever let anything hold you back from sending Jaffa cakes Regarding your request, do you have a specific reason why you would want to implement this, or what problem you'll solve? Is 'your problems' Ultimaker problems, or a users problem? In the past we've had a few 'hidden forums' where we invited users from the community to share their feedback on subjects. Sometimes this was beta testing other times it was when projects were still in development. This will continue to happen. Although users will most likely continue to be invited, instead of electing themselves because I guess everyone always wants to know 'whats behind the curtain' and the list would be endless Also not unimportant, not inviting someone is also way less 'offensive' then saying 'no' to a request to join, which is what you'll have to do if there would be a difference between it being restricted or publicly available.

As promised I can share some more information with you guys today that will hopefully put some light at the horizon given our forum situation. This forum was once intended to fit our ambitious vision and function as a collaboration platform to ignite projects, but we feel most of these functionalities are no longer relevant. Adding to this some stubborn bugs which have proven very difficult to solve for a development team which has to focus on many things. We feel it no longer contributes to the best interest of our community. Anyway, I think you are fully aware of all reasons. But what is going to happen? We have decided to look into a forum migration and move the community to an established forum software. In order to facilitate and stimulate growth, a valuable future and a pleasant user experience, I think this is a necessary step. We're currently still preparing to make sure it will go as smooth as possible and everything is done right. When the test migration is a success and all legal details are sorted out a contract will be signed and its official. The forum software we're currently considering is IPboard. IPboard came out as a clear favorite after excessive testing with both stakeholders from within the community and Ultimaker itself. Do note that IPboard is not set in stone yet, by the simple fact we are still sorting out some details and no contract is signed yet. When it is official and the test migration looks promising (it will probably require a few iterations to optimize the migration algorithm), I will make a more prominent post for everyone with approx a 3 weeks heads up before the actual migration so everyone knows what is coming and there are no surprises. Hopefully, this puts some light at the horizon and you know better days are coming. I'll also go ahead and tag a couple of people who have provided a lot of feedback in the past and might be happy to get this update; @nilrog, @shurik, @lepaul, @korneel, @geert_2, @mastory, @titus, @zerspaner_gerd, @bob-hepple, @rebekah_harper, @amedee, @darkDVD, @peetersm, @yellowshark.

@Nallath, what do you think?

the BOM is pretty clear and usually enough, but for convenience why not just share the PDF picture books with parts? I mean the one's in use by the re-sellers. Let me find out what the status is of this, and if it can be shared.

Hi, small update-time! As @UltiArjan also discovered, in the files we shared for the Ultimaker 3 you might find some parts in the printhead which are different from what you have in your Ultimaker 3. Partially fuelled by the feedback we receive from our users, but also driven by our own motivation to make our products better we continuously try to improve them. Upon sharing the files, let's say.. by coincidence, one of the experimental research models (WIP) made it in the repository. It holds some small iterations we are investigating which could make the product better. If I am correct they evolve around the silicon padding and the front fan. As we speak (today or tomorrow) the files are being updated to the correct ones so you can actually use them to learn more about the product you have. But by chance, you are also in the opportunity to learn something more about our ongoing research. In case you missed it, even though the files you see at first will be the 'real' ones, in the history you will be able to continue to see the research model. Enjoy!

Do you mean who determined the look and feel of the product, or the / a mechanical engineer / designer?

@FBRC8-Erin knows. Did you not also have refurbished models?

Hi @Dim3nsioneer, quite some work actually. That is also the reason why they were not added this round. If I understood it correctly, we actually don't use them anymore and we would need to draw up every part for the pdf specifically. I fully agree it would be convenient (I also used them as a reference occasionally), but the time investment necessary to have all of them made was quite big for now. Perhaps, as a second best, there is a pretty descriptive BOM in the repository which should provide a user with that answer most of the times as well I think.

We're working on the firmware, this was outside of the scope of this file sharing a year after the Ultimaker 3 was released. It requires a little more time to prepare, but we'll keep you updated about the progress and planning when this is more clear.

90 minutes have past, pfew that went fast! I would like to thank everyone who contributed and asked their questions. Hopefully all of them were answered. @Nallath and @Msuurmond will keep a close eye on this thread for the next few days in case any late followup questions come in, in case you had to work late, sleep in or it was just an inconvenient timeslot all together. If you have any feedback regarding this 'Ask Me Anything' I would be happy to hear from you! If you have an idea who you would like to ask questions to next, let me know in this thread! Thank you all, and have a great day!

If I understand your question correctly, the fast iteration cycle does not make it easy to write manuals and documentation because they are easily outdated. We are putting more and more effort in making screencasts which can be made relatively fast and are very informing. These should allow us to explain more features which may live in the shadow today. Although I am not directly in the team that coordinates this, if you would like to see some features explained I would be happy to put in a good word for it

deleted. Lol, I don't see the point in that spam message.

While we still have 15 minutes on the clock, this 'futuristic/visionary' question appeared as well: 'Nowadays most of the software has moved towards the cloud (partially or completely). Is Cura going to get some features related to the cloud? I'd like, for example, to have a Cura Cloud with a personal account where I can save all my machines, settings and profiles, being able to access/share no matter where I am.'

I think a lot of them could benefit from it. You already named a few, but i've myself already used it to repair the wheelchair of my niece (an arm rest had broken off and it would have costed a few hundred euro and weeks to fix it. I could do it in one day for a few euro) I think that imagination is the only limit. for the partial to none sighted people aids that make items some easily manipulated or found. For deaf people using color and system to highlight something has happened. for the physically impaired there is already a huge modding culture. there is no end to the possibilities just the limitation of the means to achieve them Reminds me of a usercase I was introduced to this January, where (young) poor sighted people managed to identify their rooms with customized and therefore recognizable doorknobs. They also had a 3D printed floorplan of the building. Before they could mostly walk around the premises under supervision, but this allowed them to expand how far they could walk around independently.

I think this question originally came from @neotko, while trying to get a better understanding of the new added plugin structure which is a big focus; Are the plugins for Ultimaker Cura 3 mostly limited to pre- and post-processing?

@Nallath, can you explain in a few sentences what 'Anti overhang mesh' is? @Rebekah_Harper might be interested too

Another question I have seen resonating through the community for some time; Some users like to experiment but sometimes it is difficult to see which settings influence what and you are not always sure that the settings you enter in Cura are exactly what will happen on your Ultimaker. Are there any plans to include something like an ‘engineering profile’, where settings don't influence each other that much, and it does not care about 'output' but processing the entered values?

If you actually want to code, you need to understand python. If you only want to change how the UI and UX looks like, you should have a look at the .qml files that are shipped with cura (and the theme.json file). Those describe how the UI looks. But we do need more resources on how to get started with developing for Cura. I'd love to have more people outside of Ultimaker to work with. Diversity will lead to a better overall product (both for Ultimaker and for those with other printers). I can also pitch in on this one, on the content side of Ultimaker we are also working on putting some documentation together that should give more insight in this process. Like what is a plugin, what type of plugins can be made, how do they work in Cura, do you submit a plugin if you made one, etc.

This is also where cookies come in, you can always try to convince a developer to put his two weeks of research project into a certain subject ;)Suggestions are always welcome! @Rebekah_Harper, I think this is your cue

How many easter eggs are there in the Ultimaker (3)? Can you give a slight clue on how/where to find it?

We received another question, following the voice assistant. Audible equipment is usually used to help the disabled, in this case people with bad or no eye sight. 3D printing is no stranger to humanitarian aid, through organisations like e-nable and printing objects with braille. Which disability do you think could profit significantly with the help of 3D printing?