billdempsey

I'll open up the Ulticontroller later and look for the pot you're describing. This Ulticontroller worked for a while before. Eventually, it displayed random ASCII gibberish. So, I'm crossing my fingers on that.

I reinstalled the Ulticontroller today, since I have working main board now, and this is what the display looks like: There are two areas of the display where the blue background turns to yellow. Is this the way it's supposed to be? BTW, 500k total limit on drive space for attachments?!? Seriously?!? Are you really that short on drive space? Drives cost $100 for 2 TB these days. If we're forced to use postage stamp sized images, nobody will be able to see the details of our photos to help us fix problems. If we use massive compression, the artifacts from compression will wipe out the detail. We lose either way.

@PrintedSolid I'd be interested in having an extra set of parts for the entire hot end assembly. That includes nozzle, aluminum block, brass tube, Peek, and a couple extra of the white nylon pieces. An extra knurled shaft is probably a good idea, too. Those are the parts I see people replacing the most. I'm wondering how you'll be able to make this work, though. Are you going to find cheaper suppliers for those parts? Perhaps have them made locally? Or are you ordering from Ultimaker? If you're ordering from Ultimaker, you'll still have to pay crazy shipping fees for what you order, so how will you make money if you don't pass those shipping fees on to those of us buying from you? Are you hoping UM will cut you a deal on buying the parts in bulk? If they do, you could even open a storefront on eBay and make a lot more money from other UM owners in the U.S. Unfortunately, I think they're having trouble making enough parts to keep up with their own sales, so getting bulk parts might be a problem.

Let me know if you become a parts depot Joergen! I would like to buy some spare parts, too.

Just a quick add. Ultimaker could make this drive system a lot more fool-proof during assembly by just knurling the entire shaft properly instead of a tiny band at one end of it. It should be science to assemble this thing, not a black art. While I'm making suggestions (that nobody at the company will read, :wink: ) I'd also like to suggest that the electronics be enclosed in a shielded enclosure so that interference from other stuff in the same room doesn't ruin prints. The printer has no robustness. It is a delicate flower thrown completely off by even the slightest changes in heat, humidity, or EMF fields.

@ Alexander No, I fixed my problems the way I described in my earlier reply. The original poster in this thread is still having troubles, though. Fixing mine was trial and error with the washers to finally get the knurled bolt lined up perfectly with the filament. I noticed my washers were all slightly different thicknesses, so I combined two thinner washers on one side of the big gear and two thicker on the other side of the gear. That ended up putting the filament on the best part of my knurled shaft. In my case, I also had the spring too tight, at first. That's why I loosened that screw completely until it barely caught in the nut threads. Then, I slowly increased the spring pressure until the filament started moving. I gave it only a tiny extra quarter turn beyond the spot where it just started moving. So, it's not gripping the filament tight enough to crush it. The only "trick" is to eyeball the shaft through the gap and line up the best part of the shaft exactly where the filament is going to go through. Then use the washers to fix it in that spot without moving it.

As Sander said, it's important to make the nozzle good and tight BEFORE you screw the brass tube into the aluminum block. That helps with leakage. Also, when only a tiny bit oozes out it eventually turns black and this black stuff actually serves to seal the ooze. Most people just leave the black stuff around the joint, even though it's ugly. If you ever cancel a print in Cura, it doesn't turn off the heated nozzle (for some strange reason,) and if you let it sit for a short while, the hot end will plug. So, always avoid doing that. I often turn off the printer and unplug it for a minute after a canceled print, just so the hot end cools down. I also turn on a table fan I have sitting next to it, to blow through the printer and cool it faster. As far as prevention goes, in my case I was having a LOT of plugs while printing, because I print at 225C and generally my prints are 5 hrs plus. That's the temperature my filament likes. On long prints at higher temps, the heat from the brass creeps upward into the nylon area and makes the incoming filament gooey and sticky. So, it eventually plugs up there at the top end of the hot end assembly. The aluminum plate, which the long bolts screw into, is a heat sink which is supposed to prevent the heat from going up that far, but it doesn't work very well if you're doing a long print at higher temperatures. What I did was design a fan shroud which directs the air between that aluminum plate and the bottom wooden plate. Even on long prints, the aluminum plate stays cool to the touch and the heat stays down at the end, where it belongs. Before doing this, I was getting plugs almost daily. After doing it, I've had 1 plug in a month and that one was because I canceled a print and forgot to shut the heat off to the nozzle. So, the fan wasn't running and the hot end was still hot. That's a guaranteed plug. Hope this helps.

Update: I received the replacement board, cleaned the entire print head (just in case,) and was able to get through first run wizard and print a couple things. My printer is working again! I'll test the Ulticontroller tomorrow. Thanks Sander! As for calling Erik a liar, I apparently got the worst support person they had at the time. Sander is great at customer support, so I take back my previous anger rant and apologize. I sincerely hope this new positive experience is the norm, not the exception.

This new forum tells me my photo capacity has been reached and I haven't posted a single picture on here. I think there is something wrong with photo attachments in the new forum.

At this point, I would re-run the first run wizard and install the Marlin firmware again. It could be a messed up instruction in the firmware which is off by one bit.

For some strange reason, they don't show all of the parts on the web site. Having had to purchase a lot of parts myself, I discovered you have to contact support through email and ask for each specific part. They send you a link to hidden pages in the store which let you purchase the parts.

I'm in the U.S., too. I've had to buy a lot of parts. It would be great to have a less expensive alternative to buying parts from the Netherlands!

The specs on their web site say it's 100 micron. But reps quote 125. Either way, few printers actually stop at the rated minimum. I know a MendelMAX owner printing at 40 microns. Ultimaker says it's 100 micron, too, and we know that's not true. Also, those three modes are the "quick print modes." They also say you can directly tweak settings in an expert mode. Granted, the print quality may still be lower than Ultimaker, but at this point, I'm after dependability more than anything. The activate process supposedly gives you access to special owner-only functions of their web site and registers your printer. I've tried a dozen different distros of Linux and always go back to Windows. I own a Mac, but I only use it for music creation, because I like the UI on Windows 7 much better. Everyone has their preference. As far as the patents Daid mentioned, considering they invented 3-D printing, if anyone deserves to patent some aspects of 3-D printing, it's them. In most other industries, patent troll companies who don't even produce products own all the patents. For some patent trolls, entire company is made up of patent lawyers. The CubeX did win Best of CES for 2013 and everything they were showing at the booth were real prints off the real printers, because they had a bunch running at their booth. I haven't seen any stereo lithography prints alongside their printers. The only ones I've seen were produced on the printer. They all show the characteristic banding of filament prints. Thanks to Sander, it's looking like my Ultimaker experience may finally have a happy ending, which would be great because I wanted to have two printers, anyway. Thanks for the good wishes.

I just realized that this forum is supposed to be about alternative FIRMWARE, not printers. I saw another post about an alternative printer and thought I'd post. Feel free to delete this thread. Sorry about that.

I solved this problem by tightening the pulleys on the motor drive shafts really tight. The pulleys couldn't be moved by hand, but tightening them further cured the problem, so they must have been slipping a little.

It could be that your fan shroud is allowing the fan to blow directly onto your hot end, rather than downward onto the hot plastic. The fan isn't on at the start (default settings), so the temp probably drops when the fan kicks on. You might consider printing out a replacement fan mount, like the one Daid designed on Thingiverse. It works much better than the origami thing they ship.

I was having similar problems early on. I had to change the washers on the knurled filament drive shaft around from the way the instructions said to do it. I had to put more washers on one side of the large gear than on the other side. On mine, the shaft had to be contacting the filament at a specific point which was closer to one end of the shaft. This made the black clip difficult to attach, but I finally got it to stay on long enough to make my own thinner replacement clip which fit perfectly. After I got the shaft positioned perfectly to the filament, I completely loosened the spring screw and started up a print. I turned the screw slightly (1/4 turn) and then checked to see if the filament was moving. I repeated this until the filament started moving. Then, I gave it one more quarter turn and stopped messing with it. Another contributing factor was that my original nozzle had a metal bur just inside the tiny hole. I didn't see this until later and only under a magnifying glass. I had already replaced the nozzle, so it didn't matter by that time. So, you might check for that also.

One of the drawbacks of printing in plastic is that plastic shrinks as it cools. It is normal for holes to be slightly smaller than the dimensions in your CAD program. You just learn to adjust dimensions in the CAD program so that you get the desired size in the final print. For example, if I need a precise 3mm hole, I make it 3.2mm in the CAD program. As you use your printer more, you get used to putting in adjusted values for things you use a lot.

Hi Sander, I replied to your message with my information. Thanks for offering a free replacement. You're helping a LOT more than Anita did. I wish you were helping me from the start. Thanks!

If your Peek melted, you were actually WAY above 240C, regardless of what the software was saying. I know this because I melted my Peek the first week and the actual temperature was over 460c. In my case, the temperature sensor wires had been pulled out by the bowden tube, which had popped out while I was out of the room for 15 minutes. When I quickly got the wires plugged back in correctly a few minutes later, it showed 460C on my Ulticontroller display and it had already been cooling down a little. Before plugging the wires back in, it showed a much lower temperature that was changing rapidly in random directions. If the wires are connected perfectly, t sounds to me like the board Joergen described is either poorly soldered, or dead.

Resin printers don't display the "banding" that fused filament printers always have. Having held really good resin prints in my hands next to really good filament prints, I can tell you there is still a noticeable difference no matter how low you set your layer height on a filament printer. The bands get tinier, but they're still visible.

Just a note about a new printer that seems likely to raise the bar for consumer 3D printing. The CubeX printer looks to be a great tool for people like myself who don't have time to tinker with their printer constantly. 3DSystems literally invented 3D printing 30 years ago, so they know a thing or two about it. The CubeX is designed to be trouble free and "just work." It's a tank of a printer at a whopping 84 pounds. The build volume is vast, with the ability to print out a regulation sized basketball (which wouldn't bounce, of course.) The printer even maintains it's current position in the print process so that if the power goes out, it will resume printing right where it left off when the power returns. It's also pretty pricey, if you get the three extruder model. I know, because I ordered one. They call it a "prosumer" printer, because of the options and pricing. They target the newly upgraded Cube as their consumer printer. The humidity-controlled smart cartridges are also more expensive than standard rolls of filament, but they tell the printer what settings to use for the material inside (ABS or PLA), so you don't have to remember to change the settings. The cartridges also tell the printer exactly how much material remains, so you can't start a print if you won't have enough filament to complete it. No more aborted prints because the filament ran out. Overall, I'm really looking forward to receiving my CubeX Trio next month. If anyone has any questions about it after it arrives, just PM me. I'm happy to help everyone who has helped me so much on these forums.

Thanks Sander, Daid, Kreativ, and C ernst. At least I know now that both Arduino's are fine. The one in there now is a replacement I bought at Radio Shack in order to make sure it wasn't faulty. So, now that we're sure it's the mainboard, what's my next step?

Took out the Arduino and connected it directly to my computer using the same cable, which I had already verified works fine. I was easily able to connect to the Arduino using the Cura 12.12a first run wizard and had it update the firmware. Then, I plugged the Arduino back into the mainboard. Unfortunately, it didn't help. When the Arduino is installed in the printer, it won't talk to Cura. It talks to it fine when disconnected from the printer. So, I guess that means it's the mainboard. I'm suspecting now that the mainboard was the reason my Ulticontroller stopped working, too. Others suggested it might be. Now that the firmware is updated on the Arduino, I've noticed that Windows keeps randomly playing the disconnect, reconnect sound now. Is that the mainboard resetting the Arduino repeatedly?

Nearly all of the problems I was having during the first few months were eventually resolved thanks to other customers helping me. When the Ulticontroller failed a few weeks ago, I just threw it in the drawer with all of the other discarded Ultimaker parts I've had to replace. The new (and hopefully only) issue I'm having at this time is not being able to communicate with the printer. I was using Cura 12.12a to do a 26 hour print when the printer stopped communicating after 23 hours. I only installed Cura 13.1 when I couldn't get anything else to work. I'll try your suggestions. Would Cura 12.12a work for installing the firmware on the disconnected Arduino? Or do I really need to go back a couple versions to 12.11? I'm wondering because I still have 12.12a. Sorry for my bitter attitude, but keep in mind I've been dealing with issue after issue for nearly 4 months, now. That's the entire time I've owned this printer. I only got usable prints out of it for a few weeks of that time. Plus, you're the first support person at Ultimaker to finally step in and actually try to help make me happier about my purchase. I've had to rely solely on other customers for help until now. Having two other guys here in the U.S. tell me their similar poor experiences, just poured gasoline on my fire. However, I'll try to reign my attitude in, since you're trying to help me. Thanks, btw.