billdempsey

Yeah, I disconnected it and tossed it in a drawer. I'm not spending a couple hundred dollars to buy and ship a new one. Besides, the only function I can't do in Cura is adjusting the fan speed during printing.

I'm having an issue with the wooden gear popping the black clip off on the motor side and then drifting until it isn't making contact with the smaller gear. Ruined a couple of 5 hour prints this way. Does anyone know of a drop-in herringbone replacement gear set for the filament feeder? I'd much prefer something that doesn't require recalibration of the filament feed speed, since I don't know how to do that.

OK - I'm a dork. I had tried that over and over under 12.11 and it didn't change anything. I just tried adjusting the speed and temperature from the print dialog under 12.12 and it works! So, cancel 1 & 2 on my list. I was basing it on my 12.11 experience before I upgraded to 12.12 yesterday.

Already basic functions of the ulticontroller I don't use the Ulticontroller, because well, I can't. It's pretty much useless to me. If this is doable with Cura via USB, then I'm missing it somehow. When I try to adjust the temperature in the print dialog while printing, it always reverts back to the temp shown in settings. I don't see the function for adjusting print speed while printing. If I change it in the settings tabs, it doesn't seem to affect the currently printing object. I just alters the next object I prepare. 6. Also, I'd love to have the option to only run the fan during bridge printing.

Make sure you are using Cura version 12.12. On the expert menu, select "Run bed leveling wizard..." It guides you through the adjustments. Basically, you turn each of the 4 screws at the corners of the bed in order to adjust the height of the four corners. When the corners are even, the middle will be even. That bed leveling wizard makes it easy to tell when they're even.

When you start using higher temperatures, you need a fan blowing between the aluminum plate and the bottom wood plate to prevent plugging on longer prints. I believe Snowygrouch has one on his personal web page you can download and print. See the link in his signature above.

Example of what it does.

Can't wait for that legendary slicer! Cura is my favorite due to ease of tweaking settings for each print. It's going to be great having a faster/better slicer attached to it.

Hey Daid, I'm liking Cura 12.12. I particularly love the bed leveling wizard. I stopped using a doubled-over card as a spacer. Your wizard sets it just right. Many thanks! My future feature wishlist is: EDIT: Removed 1 & 2 as they are in the current version. 3. Move the expert settings to another tab next to printer settings and advanced settings. 4. Allow us to adjust the Quick Print mode settings and save them. 5. Save all window positions between runs. EDIT: 6. Also, I'd love to have the option to only run the fan during bridge printing. 7. Adjust the fan speed from Cura while printing. 8. Support for adjusting two fans on the print head. Perhaps this is a change to the main board, not Cura. Thanks again for a great app!

I keep getting a "xxx.stl is chain exporting" error. This happens no matter what STL file I try. I've checked task manager, viewing all tasks, and there is nothing from any of my CAD programs running. Currently, I cannot print anything because this error always happens on every file I try. Any ideas? EDIT: I rebooted my computer and opened only Cura. Loaded an STL. Pressed "Prepare Print." Almost immediately, I get "Something went wrong during slicing." When I press "Show Log," it says, "File xx.stl is being chain exported. Carve procedure took 0 seconds." What's strange is it's been working for a couple months and now suddenly gives this error on every attempt to prepare any STL file for printing. What's up with that? EDIT2: Just realized that I was running Cura 12.11, so I uninstalled it, downloaded the latest, installed it, and now I'm running through the wizard. I'll let you know if I still get the error. EDIT3: It works now! Just uninstalled and installed latest. Boom. Back to working.

Agree with Robert. Save your money and don't bother with NetFabb. The company behind it doesn't care about Ultimaker users and updates are few and far between. Like others I use Cura, too. It's mostly dead simple to use. I do wish the expert settings were on another tab, rather than in the menus. Doesn't make sense to me to have two pages of settings on tabs and a third page in the menus. I also wish it saved it's window locations between runs. It always opens on my middle monitor, so I have to drag and resize it to my right hand monitor. Then, when I print, it pops THAT window up on my middle monitor, so I have to move it, too. Lastly, I wish it let you adjust the print speed and temperature on the fly. Maybe Daid can add these to a wish list for future versions of Cura.

I don't understand why the Google groups would be favored over their own forums. I used Google+ for a short while and then gave up on it. I generally prefer official forums for products. Curiouser and curiouser.

Hey, does anyone have any updated information on the best way to add a heated bed to an Ultimaker. I have no plans to do PVC, but I want a heated bed so really large flat PLA prints don't curl up at the edges. Since I'm thinking about a different leveling method for the print bed, I figured now would be a good time to swap in a heated bed, too. Basically, I'm looking for a parts & supplier list, plus basic instructions. EDIT: In the U.S., please. Somewhere, I also read that you need a bigger power supply (like 400+ watts) for the Ultimaker if you want to connect the heated bed to the outputs of the main board. Anyone know where to order a replacement brick that outputs 450 watts or so?

I had that same problem at one point. What I did was change the number of washers between the big wooden gear and the extruder. It seemed like the wooden gear was slightly toward one side of the plastic gear, which caused it to slowly push the small gear further onto the shaft. I changed the spacer washers so that the wooden gear and small gear lined up perfectly and haven't had trouble since. When I did this, I had to unscrew the knurled shaft very slightly and tighten the lock nut more to hold the big gear in the right position. This made the black clip on the opposite end slightly more difficult to snap in place, but I finally got it to stay put. As I said, I've had no problem with that small gear moving on the shaft since then.

I would much prefer to get a ton of good or even bad suggestions than no suggestions at all. These forums are the only reason I kept my Ultimaker. You guys all rock.

They could probably use Amazon fulfillment for PLA sales now. But, I'm guessing in order to use Amazon fulfillment for printers, they'd have to reach a much higher level of production volume. As it is, they're still having trouble keeping up with their own online orders. In reality, opening a second manufacturing/sales center on this side of the world makes more sense, because production volume is their bottleneck right now. I think once they lose all the plywood parts, and retool the printer for precision mass production, the sky is the limit on what they could sell, especially through Amazon fulfillment. MakerBot has the right idea with their move to a steel chassis on their Replicator 2. Another really good looking unit is the aluminum chassis Sumpod. I like the look of the Sumpod better than any other personal 3-D printer. Heck, even Leapfrog in the Netherlands has a better looking unit. Having spent $3000+ on this printer, I really wish it looked like it was worth that much money. As it is, my wife took one look and said, "THAT'S what you got for all that money?" I would have spent a couple hundred more to have it look as good as a Sumpod.

Old info. We ship daily, and we have about 15ish employees, most of them part-time. (Especially those in packaging&shipping) Thanks for the clarification.

No changes have been made to the firmware. Can I run Pronterface at the same time as Cura? I like the three click simplicity of Cura, but changing speed on the fly from my desk would be a huge plus.

Thanks Daid. I'll take a look at the connections to see if any of the solder looks suspicious.

The SD slot is the least useful feature for me. Huh? The SD card isn't easier than just clicking "Print." The SD card adds extra steps since I have to take the card out of the printer, find the tiny slot on my computer to insert it, copy the files over, take the card out, put it back in the printer, then find the file on the tiny menu screen of the Ulticontroller, and finally print. All of my computers are on 24/7 anyway, so the cost/extra power usage isn't an issue for me. I bought the controller specifically for two features - the real-time display of printer status and the ability to tweak settings mid-print. I never intended to use the SD card slot for anything. If there had been a cheaper model without the SD card slot, I would have bought it. If it comes down to choosing between USB or SD, I'll likely just unplug the Ulticontroller and print without it. I don't know how others feel, but when I'm in The Zone, I hate disruptions. Getting up to walk an SD card back and forth between my computer and printer is disruptive to my workflow. Clicking "Print" in Cura, which is always running on my third screen, isn't disruptive at all. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the suggestions, but it seems like everyone wants me to change the way I work, rather than helping me fix the crashing controller. This is looking like one more regret in a long string of regrets buying this printer. I've already spent as much on this printer as a low end SLA printer costs and now, I have an expensive controller that is turning into a paperweight. It's a shame because I'm really hooked on 3-D printing now. When it works, this is a great printer.

Amen brothers! Between the exchange rate and the shipping, my Ultimaker purchase has cost me over $3000, so far. I really want a backup set of hot end and feed parts, but there's no way I'm paying hundreds more to get them. I'm going to buy a second printer and it will NOT be an Ultimaker because of the additional shipping and exchange rate costs of owning and maintaining this printer. I won't buy anymore supplies from them, either. I can't afford to waste $75 for a tiny spool of filament. I just ordered 40 pounds of filament from Ultimachine for the cost of 5 kg from Ultimaker. I just won't buy from the Netherlands again. It's a money pit. If they had a second manufacturing and distribution center here in the U.S., I'd reconsider my position on never buying from them again. As it is now, I'm looking elsewhere.

Their processes and customer support are definitely not even close to polished yet. I had very similar experiences to yours. Every time I ordered parts, they would take my money and after a few days, I would have to remind them that I ordered the parts and magically, I'd get a ship notification the very next day. It's like nobody keeps track of anything other than printer orders. I shouldn't have to remind them to ship the parts I already paid for. When contacting support, I would explain in great detail exactly what was happening, and what I had tried in order to correct the problem. The first reply I always received was, "you must have assembled it wrong." I'd point out that it wasn't assembled wrong and the next reply I got was telling me to try the things I had already told them I tried in my first email. So, I'd email back and tell them AGAIN that I had tried those things. Next, I'd get an email asking me to double check the assembly wiki because I must have assembled it wrong. I double checked it and found that the wiki hadn't been updated for the parts they shipped me. I was so desperate that I started hacking up the hardware to try to fix the problem. After I had done a bunch of hacks trying to fix my problems, they asked me for pictures. I sent pictures, and explained that I had already made a lot of changes trying to fix the problem. As a reply, they pointed at the changes in the pictures and told me that those new changes must have caused the original problem. (Say what?!?!? Apparently, I can time travel.) In a nutshell, they don't actually read long emails where you go into great detail about what you already tried in order to fix the problem and they always make multiple attempts to blame you for your problems. Email exchanges with Ultimaker were so frustrating that I was literally at the point of selling the printer for parts or burning it just for the satisfaction. Thankfully, the other users on the forums helped me where Ultimaker failed. Thanks entirely to them, I figured out that the wiki instructions I followed did not match the parts I received in the box. When in doubt about which part to use, I followed the wiki. The wiki was wrong. That caused a month of problems and cost me $600 in purchases of replacement parts and shipping. I was finally able to get the printer working after a month of messing with it all day every day. In the process of solving all the issues I've had, I know this printer inside out. It is definitely not mass market ready. I'd call it more of a prototype device for hobbyists who want to spend countless hours tweaking it, fixing it, and babysitting it. I've already replaced some of the parts with more dependable upgrades I found online. I changed the micro fan header out for a standard PC fan header so that I could connect a fan with higher output and less noise. I dumped the origami fan shroud and printed one from Thingiverse to use while I work on my own design. I ditched their filament spool holder and designed my own double-width ball bearing based roller cradle for filament. Nuts kept vibrating loose all over the machine, so I have started replacing all of the regular nuts with nylock nuts. (They should ship it with 100% nylock nuts from the start.) My next upgrade will be a redesign of the bed leveling system. As it is now, I have to recalibrate the print bed on every other print and every time I change filament. Has this been a completely pleasant experience dealing with obvious professionals? Hell no. If not for their forums, I might have set lawyers on them due to the incredible frustration, long delays, and vast expense of dealing with them. Worst of all, I really hated having them treat me like I was a moron, when their out-of-date wiki instructions caused all of my issues. Their default view that it's always the customer's fault just reeks of amateur hour management. Their documentation is just a mess, requiring tons of searching, because it's organized in an irrational manner. It's nearly always out of date with what they're actually shipping. Just try finding the calibration instructions in the online manual. Or try finding the instructions for assembling the filament spool. Their user community is the only thing saving this company right now. Have I come to like the printer after all that trouble? Even though I'm now having trouble with the Ulticontroller crashing, I must admit, I have grown fond of using my printer. Perhaps I'm just in love with 3-D printing in general. I'm printing nearly 24/7. My ideas and designs come too fast for the printer to keep up, so I'm now researching another printer to buy. It probably won't be an Ultimaker. It's just too much work to keep it printing accurately. It's also too damn expensive to buy from the Netherlands when you live in the U.S. I've spent over $3000 on this printer thanks to the poor exchange rate and horrible DHL shipping charges. I could have purchased a more reliable MakerBot Replicator 2 for that and still had money left over. I could have purchased TWO Type A Machines printers for that money. Both come pre-assembled and this one didn't. Hindsight is 20/20. So, to answer your question: Whether you made a huge mistake depends on what you thought you were buying. If you thought you were buying a reliable printer from a professional company with a reputation of excellent, timely, customer support and prompt order processing, then you were definitely wrong based on my own experience. If you thought you were buying a fast printer with the capability of really high quality with constant tweaking, purchased from a poorly-organized start up company that relies on the user community to support their products, you chose correctly. In other words, it's a trade off. You potentially get high quality prints at high print speeds with the cost being frustrating company interactions and constant tweaking to keep the printer working properly. EDIT: I just read elsewhere on the forums that Ultimaker only ships items out on Wednesday and Friday. So, parts I ordered on a Saturday were always delayed until the following Wednesday. Tuesday is when I would finally remind them about the parts because I hadn't received a shipping notice, yet. With 20ish employees, you'd think they would have hired a cheap shipping clerk to send stuff out every day. They take our money every day but don't ship every day. Nice priorities.

I've had that problem twice. In the first case, the pulley mounted on the motor shaft was the one that was loose. It was a pain to get to the screw, but it fixed the problem. In the second case, my controller had glitched. In that case, turn off the printer. Unplug it from USB and power. Wait 10 seconds. Then plug in power and turn it on. Plug in the USB last. This fixed it for me. Sadly, my controller has proceeded beyond glitching occasionally to display crashes and print stops. Once, it reset to home about 20 layers into a print and tried to start printing again with the item still on the platform. That was a mess of broken and melted PLA which had to be cleared once I heard the motors grinding. I wish I had saved the money I spent on that controller. I'm about ready to disconnect it and burn it in a bizarre cleansing ritual.

Because Cura's settings can't be changed according to layer number, I use the Ulticontroller to manually keep the speed low for the first 5 or 6 layers, then I crank it up. When it's near the end, I slow it down again. This gives me nicer surfaces on top and bottom. I'll be sorely depressed if I can't use this expensive controller to adjust for limitations of the software. I'm getting really nice parts using that method. The thing is, it worked perfect for what I've been doing for weeks. Then, the display started crashing the last week or so. Today, I came in and it was crashed without anything having been printed. Just sitting there doing nothing, it crashed. There is something very wrong with it.

My Ulticontroller keeps "crashing" where I have to shut down and unplug the machine to get the display to come back. Part of the time, the display fills with flickering random ASCII characters. Other times, it just goes completely blank. This happens during the early stages of most USB prints from Cura. Often the print continues to the end, despite the Ulticontroller displaying gibberish or a blank screen. Unfortunately, while it's like that, I can't adjust print speed, hot end temperature, or fan speed. That's all I do with the Ulticontroller, anyway. When it crashes, I'm pretty much stuck with whatever Cura set up at the start of the print. Is my controller faulty? If so, is there a simpler controller out there where I could just adjust those three things? I don't really print from SD card. I just need the temp/speed display and the previously mentioned three adjustments. I plan to check the connection to the main board after this print stops running. Any other suggestions I might try while my printer is down?