frodeheg

I sawed away 1.5 mm on each side of the fan and put silicone there instead and it helped a lot. However I still get a little bit of vibration. Seem to improve quality of the print as well if I just detach the pcb from the bottom panel. I'll try to improve the dampening in the weekend, but If I can't remove the vibration alltogether I think I will make a separate box for the PCB just for the sake of printing quality.

Agreed, I gave up the "official" software after two days and went straight on the Netfabb train and didn't regret it for a second... however I am afraid of trying Cura because then I might regret going to Netfabb ;-) ...I have heard lots of good talks about Cura. (I guess I will try it eventually)

I too think my Ultimaker is extremely noisy. However, it doesn't seem like it is the fan itself that is noisy, because if I detatch it from the machine I can only hear the air flow, not the noise... All the noise seem to be caused by the wooden case acting as an amplifier for the vibration from the fan. I will try to make a better fan attachement and see if I can eliminate the noise completely.

It is not neccessarilly belt tension, I had a similar problem when I was printing near (x,y) = (0,0) but not when printing in the middle of the build area. The reason was that the timing pulley near (x,y) = (0,0) was not tightened to the axis. Even though I had tightened the screw as much as possible, the timing pulley did still move along the axis. I had to clean the timing pulley and apply accessive force to the screw to get it tightened. After that I have not had any more problems.

I found out that the MOSI signal, which was sent correctly from the arduino and through the level shifter, had a bad soldering between the level shifter and the sd card. I soldered it, and now it is working! Yippey :-)

No, I have not solved it yet. I am in England right now, so I had to delay any further debugging. I was in contact with Ultimaker support and they was very nice. However I want to find the exact cause before shipping anything back and forth, so I'll investigate it further next week. And yes, I have also had some troubles with LCD artifacts. I just got the firmware source tested on Tuesday, think I am very close to finding the cause :-)

No, I wasn't thinking of mixing. I was thinking the flow control is so far out on the tip that there is little room for any mixing. ...besides you can make sure all the colour changes happens during infill of an object, then you will get rid of any unintentional mixing. My idea of getting all possible colours was not with mixing, but by changing the plastic you extrude with for every different layer. If the layer is thin enough, you won't notice and can fake all sort of colours...

I really like the idea of printing in multiple colours, and admire your dual setup Daid. Now, could we extend it further? I have strong belief in the following concept: * One nozzle with 4 or more entry points for plastic of different colours extruded in the same tip. * Flow regulators for each colour within the nozzle (using electromagnetism?) or as close as possible. If the flow control is close enough to the tip you could get quite accurate x,y precision for colour changes and if you have thin enough layers you could mix the colours to fake almost any colour. I wonder if such a prototype nozzle could be printed in one of those metal 3d printers?

That is a very good point Daid! I tested my multimeter against my lab power supply and the multimeter shows constantly 7.6% to high numbers :-( Then the problem is not the voltage, phew :-) Next on the plan: * Test the connections on the EXT2 interface on the Ultimaker PCB * Attach a logic analyzer to the ext2 interface while trying the sd card * Make custom firmware to get some debug output on the screen Debugging is going slow because I can't debug while printing, and it is just a few days since I managed to get decent quality out of the prints. What is most fun, printing awsome quality figures or debugging? I fear this is going to take a long time ;-)

Yes, level shifter, sorry :-) The 19 V power supply delivers 22.6V to the Ultimaker PCB The Vin to the Arduino is 13.0V while the voltage I got now is 3.6V (earlier today I got 3.8V, so it's improving.... ) The Arduino mega 2560 spec says: "The board can operate on an external supply of 6 to 20 volts. If supplied with less than 7V, however, the 5V pin may supply less than five volts and the board may be unstable. If using more than 12V, the voltage regulator may overheat and damage the board. The recommended range is 7 to 12 volts. " ( http://arduino.cc/it/Main/ArduinoBoardMega2560 ) So 13 V into the Arduino is a bit on the high side and may damage the voltage regulator.... I wonder if this is what has happened?

Thanks again Daid. I have checked all the connections according to the schematics you linked to and I cannot find any issues with it. It seems like the Ultimaker Controller is perfectly fine... The only thing I am puzzled about is the voltage... According to the SD spec, the card should not be damaged if it is below 4,6 V, but it is not guaranteed to work if it is above 3,6V So right now I am guessing it could be a: the SD card I have does not work at 4.1V (which I wouldn't be surprised of) b: the ultimaker PCB has some issues on EXT2 c: the Shift register on the ultimaker controller has some issues. I will get a logic analyzer tomorrow to rule out if it is c, then check for option b and try to get some other SD cards to check for option a but if that still doesn't help I'll try to make a custom cable where I patch the 3.3V from another power supply...

Small update: The voltages measured above was with only EXT2 connected, EXT1 was not connected. (I thought EXT1 was for the LCD, apparently it was not... seems like the SD GND is grounded to the EXT1 GND but not EXT2 GND, which explains the voltage differences) If I connect EXT1 as well I measure 4.14V between the SD GND and SD Vcc regardless of if the SD card is inserted or not... This on the other hand is outside the SD card operating range (2.0V to 3.6V) so I still have my doubts... Do you think it is an issue between the EXT2 GND and the SD card GND?

Thanks Daid, I have tried to check for short circuits and voltages, however I'm not sure where all the signals should go, is the ultimaker controller using the same layout as the SD controller from Eric on this page? http://reprap.org/wiki/Ultimaker%27s_v1.5.4_PCB One thing that made me puzzle was that the voltage between pin 3 and 4 (on the SD card) which is the SD card power supply measue 2.37V when there's no SD card while it is 1.55V when the SD card is present. This is apparently caused by that GND on the SD card is not the same as GND on the EXT2 interface. If the SD card is out, I meassure 1.78V from EXT2 GND to SD card GND and 2.37V from SD GND to SD Vcc If the SD card is in, I meassure 2.58V from EXT2 GND to SD card GND and 1.55V from SD GND to SD Vcc Can this be right? According to the SD card specification the operating voltage of the SD card should be between 2.0V and 3.6V I don't have this much voltage when the SD card is inserted... only 1.55V as you can see above. The voltage supplied by EXT2 is the same regardless of if the SD is inserted or not, 6.22V

It is a "Kingston" 2 GB SD card (not SDHC), which was the one that came with the Ultimaker controller. and yes I did properly disconnect the SD card. I don't think this is a cable issue because if I swap the two cables I get the same problem and the screen is still working. I think the problem is elsewhere, because as I said I get the "sd init fail" message in ReplicatorG even before I insert the SD card. Initially my cables was swapped, can this have something to do with it? According to the wiki it should not hurt to have had the cables wrong. I don't think this has anything to do with it due to the error message I get, but are there any restrictions on the file names?

I cannot get the SD card working on the ultimaker controller. On the display I get no feedback that anything went wrong, it says "Card removed" or "Card inserted" when supposed to and I can go to the "Card Menu", but then it only shows two items: "Main" and "/.." none of the files on the card are listed, and the card does work on my computer. It was using FAT, so I tried Fat32, but that only made the ulticontroller go haywire, so I went back to FAT again, suppose that was correct. One thing I notice though is that every time I open "ReplicatorG" and connect to the ultimaker I get this message in the list of messages once when I connect and once for every time I insert a SD card: [00] sd init fail [00] SD card failure! I am using Marlin 1.0.0 release candidate 1. any ideas?