alaris2

you have entirely too much PLA at your disposal Daid.

at that speed you could use it as a CNC lathe

thanks Daid, the error temperature one I find odd. I have never once experienced any fault with the thermocouple connection using the PC as host. the second print (and third) failed with this error as soon as I connected the ulticontroller. nothing more elaborate than a power reset and it printed fine the next time.

+1 for making me lol I am tempted to not bother with the GUI, which would benefit Cura - but I suspect there are some stumbling blocks. PVA might be interesting yes,

so it looks like the time has finally come when the slicers available just can't go where I want to go next and I'll have to sit down and write my own. it will concentrate on multi-extrusion - support + structure, multi-colors, multi-material and fix that annoying and persistent bug of lousy quality top surfaces. before I set about doing this, I thought I might as well ask if anyone else wants to be involved, or has feature requests, or whether everyone's totally happy with what they've got, in which case I'll just get on and do it. if there's a high demand, I suppose the question has to be what I do with the software - make it payware like netfabb, free and paid editions like k'slicer, donateware, or completely and utterly free (as in crippled, not beer). all comments welcome at this time to help me make a decision. cheers, nik

thanks Sander - altho it only has one button, there are lots of questions about it. I've found some answers by trial and error and thanks to MSUrunner. some of the questions I don't think I've yet to find an answer for (if anyone feels like chiming in) 1) so if you set the speed to 150%, presumably that sends some g-code? I didn't realise there was one that affected speed, i thought we decided that at slice-time. so if it's running 150% does that also affect the minimum layer time? (ie. 10 second min layer is now 6.6 second?) or is it only affecting perimeters, or only fill, or some combination? what exactly is 'speed' is the question I guess.. 2) on several occasions it heats up the nozzle, goes down to the bed. sits there burning a hole in my tape because the screen says 'sleep'. it appears to have died. if I reboot, sometimes it decides to work again, so I guess the file isn't corrupt. 3) no long filenames? bummer, I can't work out which file I'm printing.. what about file extensions? does it care what extension is used? (I use .gcode at present) 4) I found a way to stop the print. except it does exactly that. nozzle stays where it is, at full temperature spewing out plastic. can a print be resumed? if not, isn't 'stop' a bit like saying "and switch the hotend off please!" maybe even "move it out the way at the same time" 5) all that stuff in the prepare and menu - I can see extrude might be useful as a tool, and flow rate and temp are useful tools too - the other things look more like settings that belong in the slicer? so I guess I don't touch them or something bad happens

I'm sure I remember seeing a manual for ulticontroller somewhere. a pdf showing where everything was in the menus. perhaps it even went as far as to tell me whether i need to fiddle with any of the numbers in the myriad of submenus or not. but now i can't find it, and a search of the forum didn't find it :( is the '100%' at the bottom left the speed? or the flow? I can't find anything in the wiki either :( this isn't a good first user experience! :(

correct. if E is too high it also affects retraction and makes things worse. you need E to be about right (or retraction to be off). an active cold end is the correct solution as SG, myself and others have also found - any long prints or idle periods will otherwise allow heat to creep up the barrel and form a plug.

yeah, I can only assume it's something to do with the larger head. essentially what this means is that anyone with a V1 can get the latest and greatest merely by adding one teflon insert and one blue clip. you can even skip the teflon insert (I had mine floating in air instead) as long as you can align the end of the tube with the start of the barrel.

likewise. I have a V1 nozzle hybrid here after my V2 nozzle broke. it actually works better than the V2.

well if you're wanting to impress people, I found the skull gear from thingiverse to be a good talking point. it's quite easy to print, but people can interact with it, which they like. http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:27388 there are plenty of similar items - actually thingiverse is getting quite full of things worthy of printing these days (also some rubbish of course)

(for reference, it's a slice about half way up the model. green = top surface, blue= interior fill)

OK, good news is my previous post is basically correct, so no need to write tons here your 3ds model consists of an object called 'null' - probably a ground plain or background? I don't this is causing problems, but it's superfluous anyway. it also has a group, consisting of 5 objects. the individual blocks. so I loaded it in the *free* hexagon from daz studios. I was trying to find a package you could also use. if you export as stl, then slice, even in the best slicer in the world you'll find problems as seen below - notice how k'slicer tries to preserve the perimeters of all the blocks. it's not what you see on the outside that counts, but the internal geometry. it creates -ve space around the perimeters since it can't decide how to represent these areas. it's not quite as bad as SF (Cura) but still wouldn't print how you wanted it, and the model will be structurally weak. the solution, is to ungroup and then boolean union all the parts together to make a single part. now i can't answer how to do that in your original package, but it isn't difficult from hexagon - select object, hit boolean, select next object, click 'union'. repeat until only one object. the result of slicing this model is seen below - now that's what you probably intended..

that's good old fashioned post-processing for you. I'm not sure scaling isn't part of the reason you're having problems - you may create additional overhangs etc. but what are you going to do with a yoda bust anyway? there's lots more awesome things to print

that's interesting - I took mine apart last night to find almost exactly the same thing. a couple of experiments later and I was able to reproduce the plug at several different key points along the hotend - just by changing the ambient temperature and applying (or removing) a fan. it can be exacerbated by increasing the extrusion amount too - if you are over extruding you can create the problem in 30 seconds from a clear nozzle. your temperatures are fine so next question - what's your E-value? (you probably set this in your slicer whichever you're using)

perhaps I didn't use enough words in that last post, hence my meaning was unclear - if you post a file, we can work out what is 'wrong' about it, hence can feed that back to you to change your design flow. for example, I know of several ways to create inside-out geometry (what you refer to as -ve space) but I can't be sure which one you're currently falling into the trap of (or perhaps you've found yet another) as a starter for 10, it looks like your model here consists of 5 cuboids and the places where they intersect are causing you problems. an easy way to create -ve space is to merely group them all in your 3d package. when you export as .stl, the faces inside of others will create the very problem you see here. the order you create the cuboids can occasionally influence which become -ve. the correct way for most packages is to boolean (union) all of the objects in the scene before export. if you have more than one object in your scene before export, it nearly always causes problems such as -ve space and also if 2 objects sit one on top the other, a slight gap will occur in the stl, leading to weak construction. actually this last point is interesting in itself. take 2 cuboids and place them one on top the other. export and print. the finished model looks OK at first sight, but often the walls don't quite line up correctly (looks like a model MCUrunner posted recently) and if you hit it against a surface, the model will fracture at the join. now boolean union and print again. the model becomes a continuous and much stronger model without the strange joints on printing. you can use this to your advantage when you want to print 'break away' pieces, but that's another topic..

why not just post the file somewhere and we'll fix it for you. it would save a whole load of pain..

I usually heat up the hotend and pull out the PLA and let the excess dribble out the nozzle. this gets rid of most of it. 4 or 5 isn't many retractions, i was thinking lots of retractions in a short period of time, but at low speed and with high temperature, the hot zone may extend further up the nozzle giving a similar effect. have you checked the ID of the bowden tube? that's a good start. Or if, when the nozzle is clear, you can easily push filament through, but when blocked like this it is difficult, that would eliminate the bowden tube as being the problem. I also note the problem sometimes fixes itself a few layers up, after rapid retractions stop and the material is pushed out the nozzle it seems to 'clear' itself.

I've observed exactly the same. all versions of hotend and extruder are affected I agree. the problem is due to a gradual build-up of material which, as you observed, then leads to it being very difficult to remove the PLA from the hot end afterwards. you can't manually push it through without excessive force either. a temporary fix is to remove and clean out the hotend (if you just re-insert the PLA it will do the same thing). I believe it's caused by excessive retractions - if I run with no retractions there are no problems. do you find the same thing?

Unfortunately, having tested slic 3r, Cura and k'slice at regular intervals, and having just done the same tests on the new Cura and new k'slice... k'slicer is still the winner. the GUI sucks really badly, as does the name, but the capability still kicks the rocks off all the other slicers. sad to say, the new UI re-arrangement is actually less usable than the previous version, but the g-code produced seems to be identical from tests so far, so whilst I haven't seen the changelog, I'm assuming it's UI changes only. for new users, the weapon of choice should be Cura still. it's slow and surface quality isn't as good, but the UI and ease of use make up for this. keep up the good work Daid.

set the extrusion width to the nozzle size? it's listed under 'style' for some unknown reason.

let's review the evidence. it's black. it comes assembled. it works out the box. they have awesome marketing skills (as already noted). UM should be worried. it's not enough to say the quality is not as good, think betamax and vhs.

you could write some g-code to move the head with a laser strapped to it and feed that to david?

it's PLA right? 230 is pretty hot, tho it shouldn't be doing that. and 70 is pretty slow, so it explains the melted tip at least. is this a model you can share or on thingiverse? maybe the clue is in the model - those deep bands approx. every 10mm would be the ones to be most worried about. the other irregularities are just due to Cura I'm afraid - you can fix those just by upgrading to k'slicer.

I've never seen a print with poor surface quality like that from k'slicer, especially not when you print at 50 microns resolution. I'm assuming your model has smooth exterior walls? and that your z threaded rod isn't wobbling around madly because it's become unscrewed or something? oh, and that you've told us what slicer and what settings you used of course