futurejames
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Posts posted by futurejames
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Hi concreteturtle, how would you compare the ulticontroller with cura for ease of use and quality? I'm finally starting to get some decent prints with cura and so quite hesitant to shake things up. Thanks in advance for any tips you may have.
I can't speak for the OP but I have used Cura awhile and just got an Ulticontroller. To be honest there's not much of a shakeup -- a 2 year old could put it together, and I'm still using gcode from Cura in it.
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Ian that's a great looking Ultimaker you have there! Seeing those pictures always makes me wish I painted my Ultimaker prior to assembly.
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One of the things I really like about this release so far: more control in the Printing window. The starting gcode is a lot cleaner IMO. Testing it right now on a Win7 platform, I'll try it on one of my Linux machines later.
Thanks for all the hard work Daid.
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I got my replacement bowden tube from Ultimaker. The new tube measures 3.2mm ID. It does seem to pass the 3.0mm PLA just fine, at least when I'm just passing it through by hand. I'll try a few more prints with the 4mmID then try the new one.
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But if you remove the horseshoe clamp.. nothing is holding the bowden tube in! No that method only works if the clip is still attached!
I didn't mean to confuse you with my picture but I am using a printed bowden clamp on top of the head which is not in the frame! I merely left the white plastic clip in to help guide the tube a bit through the too-big holes in the wood.
You didn't confuse me at all. I have a printed bowden clamp as well. Using the new tightening circle, its clamped really, really really tight. I have it marked so I can see the moment it starts popping out.
My tubing is PTFE so it's a lot more slippery than PFA and it is also slightly bigger on the inside (1/8" = 3.175 mm). So if my filament is too big for the narrow tubing it only has to go through a bit of it, and even it will still slide even if the filament doesn't nominally fit because of how slippery the tubing is.I'm starting to think that threading the end of the bowden tube is really the best way... Lots of reprap people (not to mention ultimakers) have had success with the threading method. see (
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5355
) and tantillus.
I was thinking the same thing, threading it would probably be the best way. I wonder if there's a way to take your method, having a short piece of PTFE, threaded into the PEEK, also threaded into a connector joining it to another tube. The connector could sit right where the white plastic + blue horseshoe sit right now.
I did a one hour print at 0.16mm layer height yesterday and that worked perfectly. So I think this setup has some promise, but I was also thinking of printing out the hot end mount from tantillus to use on my ultimaker since that can fit a J-head which is a much better nozzle than the UM standard. Not to mention, that hot end mount has a built-in captive nut bowden clamp which might work better than our pressure fitting (tube constricting) setup.I might try that out. And if the J head doesn't work out, it gives me an excuse to build a Tantillus.
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I had some findings as well.
One thing I noticed off the bat, plugs still happen. However when you have such little friction (I also have a bearing in my filament feeder), you can put things pretty tight. It was fooling me into thinking there was no plug, because it was able to still print with a plug. But I did notice my quality in prints suffered slightly.
Yesterday I took the hot end apart and cleaned it all out. When I put it back together, I used the method you've mentioned before (instead of 8mm protruding, put a lot more). Then I tightened the screws again after a couple of prints. Right now there is about 2-3mm gap between the wood and the aluminium frame. Once everything was nice and tight, I removed the horseshoe clamp to see if this would relieve pressure inside.
I'm reading your solution and wondering, is the only way to prevent this to have a very narrow end? One of the reasons I was trying this out with a larger inner diameter, was so that I could use filament with a slightly larger diameter (actual 3mm instead of 2.9mm).
I was told minutes ago that my new bowden tube is here from Ultimaker (yay!) so at least I have a proper tube to compare things with.
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Since then, everything is going fine for me (but i will still switch to a 4mm ID teflon tube, is i saw somewhere that it will improve retraction efficacity, thanks to less filament friction inside the tube).
Add this to your combination
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:21674
and you'll see almost no filament friction.
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I first tried to get it at McMasters but they won't ship outside the US.
I found another place, flurotherm.com that carried some, and were willing to ship outside US.
In the thread where we were discussing it, I recall that gael had published a link to a place in France that was selling it.
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So you guys had no problems with plugs forming in the interface between 4mm ID bowden tube and 3mm ID heater barrel? Or did you use a short piece of 3mm ID bowden tube material in that interface? I was thinking about doing the latter...
I'm pretty sure I did run into that problem at first -- I had my tube popping out of my bowden clamp and there would be a plug of material in the PEEK. That's when I put the new tightening cone in. And of course, shortly thereafter it started popping out the filament clamp end, and I put a second new tightening cone there. Haven't had a problem since.
I think using a short piece of ID PFA would be a classier solution than my current kludge
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So... what was the ID of your bowden tube that was not good?
It was pretty close to 3mm (not the 3.1mm it should be). It was just enough to make it through, but it would still jam 30 mins-1hr into any new print.
Although by eye the ID of my bowden tube looks more like 3mm than 4mm, I'd say 4mm would be too big. So the 4mm tubes would have to be replaced. However I do see my filament moving about inside the bowden tube. So when the feeder pulls back 1mm of filament, there is no movement further down the bowden tube....Ultimaker didn't send out tubes that were too big inside, they send out ones that were too small inside. This post is about switching it out with a 4mm ID. I can tell you from experience that a 4mm ID works great, its less fussy about PLA/ABS that is 3mm/3.1mm in diameter, and my friction problems went away completely.
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I'm running the 4mm ID / 6mm OD bowden tube setup from here
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:21674
. And I stole destroyer2012's idea about duct tape but I used a twist tie.
I started playing a bit with retraction. I set it to 2mm and it made some difference. I'm currently running at 3.5mm right now and its making things much better, there's almost no hairs. I'm pretty certain with this setup I can risk putting that value even higher because of how little friction there is.
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Ok I see, so the trick is how to vent it without just taking all the heat out.
I don't know if I had good or bad ABS. I do know that I really dislike the smell, and it could be a possible migraine trigger for me (had them after both times). Venting would be much better. I guess a second alternative would be printing in the garage -- no winter printing ABS though.
I'm not sure if the steppers getting really hot is hazardous or not. But maybe there would be a setup where you could have them cooled and/or isolated from the rest of the chamber?
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I kept having problems with my bowden tube. I contacted Ultimaker Support about it and nothing is going on.
What do you mean "nothing going on"? The day before you wrote that I got the email below:
Well unless you are one of the voices in my head or my personal assistant, that's your email not mine
. Mine took several days to come back. Considering how long it takes to sort everything out and ship parcels (while in the meantime I'm doing zero printing), I figure I'd get off my duff and do something about it.Now in fact I don't think our original problem was caused by this bad bowden tube, or at least there is a combination of bowden tube and something else: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=987&p=5933#p5933Ultimaker did end up getting in touch with me and sorting everything out. One of the things I was asked to do was measure the ID of my bowden tube with a calliper. So I know for a fact in my case the problem was the tube (which is why they are replacing it).
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Very nice!
I thought about doing something similar, but I wanted to put some sort of blower on top to take fumes out and toss them out the window. I have an old kitchen range hood as well as a bathroom ventilator I was going to use for this.
If you print out the Bowden clamps in ABS will this resolve your issue with the claps being made out of PLA?
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Thanks for the feedback everyone!
Kym: I'd be up for a group buy. I really need to order next week though -- I am needing this particular laptop more and more away from my Ultimaker.
destroyer2012: It definitely looks more fun! It would just be a bit cheaper for me though (have to order panelmax and all the other bits) and unless its coming from Canada I always get screwed by shipping (my new PFA tube cost $5 but $30 to ship from the US).
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I was wondering if anyone who's had an Ulticontroller could post their experiences, etc.? I'm teetering on the edge of buying one (the shipping cost is a turn off).
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You inspired me to add my own lights.
I found these super bright diodes at Clas Ohlson. 5000 mcd, 3.2V 20mA
4 of them and a small resistor only draws 20mA from the 19V and I have 20000 mcd of light :-)
And of course I needed to add a light-switch 8-)
That's a pretty nice setup you have going there!
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Looking forward to seeing updates!
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Just thought I would give a head's up after using Voxel Factory PLA.
First, a caveat. Their filaments are 3mm with the usual .1 variance. Make sure your Ultimaker can handle this! I have a bigger bowden tube now (4mmID 6mm OD) so it is no problem for me.
Now, the great news:
- Their prices are extremely competitive. There was no one who came close to what they were selling PLA for.
- If you are in the same country (Canada) its a lot cheaper than ordering from the down south. My shipping for 3 1kg spools was $15.
- The site owner is very friendly and listens to customer feedback. When I asked about a pick-up location he began offering one, for example. When we were unsure if his PLA would work, he offered to reimburse both my money and the shipping fees if it didn't work out -- now that's some great service!
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EDIT: still having problems with with replicatorg, but CURA is working fine ...
I applied the same fix (started using Cura).
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I kept having problems with my bowden tube. I contacted Ultimaker Support about it and nothing is going on. So I decided to be proactive.
Here is the setup plans for installing a new PFA tube, with a 4mm ID and a 6mm OD:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:24771
Really I did very little -- I modified a tightening cone and put it up there, the rest of the work is thanks to Owen and pit3k. But I thought others might like some easy instructions on how to resolve this very annoying problem.
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Thanks Joergen!
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Off the top of my head, Blender works fine. So does OpenSCAD.
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So after playing with my settings in Cura, I went to set some back to default, and realized I didn't know one of the default values.
So my questions:
A) What's the default setting for Infill overlap %?
B) Is there a page/topic/document somewhere with the defaults listed?
Ulticontroller Documentation
in Coffee corner
Posted
Also would like to add that I would have appreciated some documentation for the same reason, just to explain some values so there is no ambiguity or nasty surprises.