gr5

That's pretty quiet. I was expecting something different that I've heard before. Whatever issue you have it's not the one I'm familiar with. I would ignore it. You can try moving things when it's not printing. With no power to the steppers (90% of the time if it isn't moving at that moment - if it's not in the middle of a print job) you can push the head around. Maybe you can hear the click better that way (fans will be off) and learn more. I have to tell you I've heard all kinds of nasty noises that can be ignored for years. Usually related to bearings (in the wall) or belts (dying or slipping up on edge of pulley). 3 years from now your printer will probably still be printing like new but making all kinds of noises and you will miss the days it only made this quiet click. 🙂

It's better to post a project file than an stl or a profile. The project file has everything you chose including your printer, your model, how you positioned your model and much more. To save a project file do menu "file" "save project".

commenting on wjbdesign post above: People think cranking up the resolution in CAD will make a print better but if there are too many triangles in the STL that means there are even more moves in the gcode and the firmware in printers can only look forward about 16 moves and has to be ready to stop and can get overwhelmed if there are too many moves in the next 8mm of printing at any given moment and this can cause the printer to stutter (slowing down and speeding up too much) and this can cause ugly prints. Only one possible cause among many. So yes don't have too many triangles in your STL. I've seen prints with 10 triangles in 1mm of travel on corners. That's too much.

Once you've made this connection and startup cura (with the printer on) will it automatically send over all the profiles? Or do you have to do something in Cura first? Maybe click some button to send the profiles - or print the project that contains the material profile?

I don't use profiles - I use a different process. What you describe sounds so damn complicated and makes me glad (again) that I don't use profiles. Instead I always save the gcode file and also the *project file* (not profile) in the same folder. The project file stores everything a profile stores and much more. Then when I want to slice something I locate the closest related project file. I load that and all my settings are ready to go. I add in the new STL and slice. So for example if I have been printing Nylon brackets and lots of other PLA items and then one day I have to slice a new type of Nylon bracket or a new version of the old nylon bracket, I load that old project, delete the old bracket and load in the new bracket and I know I have all the same settings from that last successful bracket. I'm sorry this doesn't answer your question. I hope someone else can answer your question. But maybe you'll try out using projects instead.

Maybe @Dim3nsioneer has some experience with this particular issue.

Formatting to FAT32 does nothing as applePiBaker will remove all that and format it some linux format - I think maybe F2FS format (flash to file system). Or maybe ext4. I'm really not sure but that FAT32 gets erased right away. The uSD gets partitioned into two partitions - a boot partition and then everything else on the second partition including a copy of debian jessie and all the files to copy onto the olimex internal drive. What was the size of the uSD? I believe it must be 4GB to 32GB. < around 3GB and it might not store everything. > 32GB and I think the olimex can't read it. I have unbricked several especially troublesome S5 printers that had damage to the flash. We were able to skip over the damaged area on the flash (the internal "hard drive" of the olimex). I have tons of information on this web page and I keep adding to it. By the way - where did you get the image for the UM3? I strongly advise you get the olimex serial cable F. You can get them on Amazon in USA (or digikey) and you can get them directly from olimex.com if you are in Europe. More info on all this here: http://gr5.org/unbricking/ I keep updating information on the above page as I learn more.

Looks like typical quality to me. You can always increase quality by dropping the speed in half. Again. Slowing it down fixes all manner of quality issues. That's all I got as that quality doesn't look too bad for FFF printing.

I just have a plain S5 without the material station and have never seen this so you *could* try just not using that to help isolate the problem.

You can't disable active leveling in the S5 so I can't tell you that you are doing the leveling wrong 🙂 I just don't have this problem. Keep the nozzles clean. Make sure the silicone doesn't hit the bed when it's leveling. Watch the beginning of the procedure - that's when it compares left and right nozzle - the first two touches. Clean the tips of both nozzles while hot - although that shouldn't be much of an issue normally as it heats the nozzles before leveling. But still try cleaning them. Also clean that little spot on the bed where both nozzles touch down. I use a putty knife. It just works for me. It's one of the few things that is really consistent and works well. Oh and check the seating of both cores. Sometimes the core is too far forward when it goes down and doesn't slide completely into the metal "fork" that positions both cores. Sometimes a core slides down a little farther after printing. You can make the right core go up with the lifting switch manually and then down and then push the nozzle towards the back of the machine (not much force - no more than 1/kg or 1lb - 4 sticks of butter kind of force). If the core goes down some more then that would explain your issue and you can fix that with a tiny bit of high temp grease. I doubt that's the issue. I don't know what the issue is. Maybe replace the silicone dam? If you don't have a spare, try printing without the silicone dam one time to see what happens. It's important to have though for a few reasons. One is if the print fails and it's not there it's possible to have a head flood. The other is airflow control to keep the part cool and the nozzle hot. But that's not as critical as you might think.

@undertone_dj - email support@fbrc8.com. Send them the serial number of your printer in the email (sometimes they won't answer questions without it so this can save some time). Tell them you changed the print head so that your printer may have changed versions or something. Show a photo of the old and new silicone part. background: fbrc8.com assembles all Ultimaker printers sold in USA so they probably built your printer. I think Ultimaker may have modified the part to work better but it's possible you got the wrong one, I think if you google on their site you can find photos of how to change the rubber part. But this part exists for UM3 and S3 and S5 and the S5 one definitely is incompatible with UM3. Not sure about S3 but suspect it is the same as S5.

Blender! @Bigred try this - the first thing fixes normals, not manifoldness. Normals tell cura which side of every triangle faces air versus plastic. More about creating printable files with blender: https://www.sculpteo.com/en/tutorial/prepare-your-model-3d-printing-blender/

I don't have a material station so I'm not sure but I think I heard that you can copy the UFP file that cura creates (after slicing save the result on your hard drive) to a USB flash drive. Then when you insert that into the printer and choose to print that part, it should send the material profile to the material station at that moment. I think. I think I read this in recent release notes for either cura or firmware?

Your model is probably not manifold. Are you willing to publish the STL file here? if not there are lots of model services on the internet that check your model. Also what CAD are you using? Different types of CAD result in different solutions. Cura has an amazing plugin to test your model to see if something is wrong with it and can repair a very few of the many potential problems: In the upper right corner of Cura click "marketplace" and make sure you are on the "plugins" tab and install "Mesh Tools". Then restart Cura. Now right click on your model, choose "mesh tools" and first choose "check mesh", then "fix model normals" and "fix simple holes" to see if that helps. Cura doesn't fix most issues so... Also it might be that you have walls that are too thin. As a general rule, walls must be 2X your line width. But there are tricks to get around this if this is the issue.

My answer to you depends what country you are in. What country are you in?

This is news to me - cracking PVA. Is this Ultimaker brand? I wonder if they changed their formulation? Or if it's just too dry? Maybe instead of heating you should leave it out in humid air for an hour?

There are many tools out there to repair STL files. Dozens. Maybe 100 tools. Even Cura has a plugin for some limited repairs. I've heard good things about this one: netfabb free repair service is here (you have to create a free account first): https://service.netfabb.com/login.php

The part requires TPU and PVA. Do you have those loaded?

That's 6mb. That should print fine. MUCH larger than 6kb.

Did you print through USB flash drive, digital factory, or direct network? I recommend USB if you are having issues because then you can bring the "gcode" file (I think it's ".ufp") back to a computer and check that the file isn't corrupt (for example if you pulled the flash drive out before it printed or if the file is corrupt on your S5's internal "hard drive"). Then you can post the ufp file here so we can look at it. You can rename a ufp file to ".zip" and then it will open in your operating system (mac,pc,linux) and you can find the actual gcode file inside. If the print job is "empty" then the gcode file sill be very small. < 10k.

Breakaway is fantastic. You can also use PLA as breakaway if you are printing nGen. This is my favorite combination. It works so incredibly well and the quality of the result is fantastic. I haven't had any trouble with PVA being brittle. I was told it can get brittle if it's too dry. I can bend PVA quite a bit and it won't break. I have a few spools and one is from when Ultimaker first sold their first UM3 (3 years ago? 4?) and it's still not brittle so I don't think it's "age" that causes this. Maybe different formulations.

I don't find it to be brittle. Maybe you dried it a little too much. Also I don't have to warm it up before use. But I keep it in a 2 gallon zip lock with a LOT of dessicant. And I recharge the dessicant about once per month. Maybe 1/2 cup of dessicant. I usually get impatient and keep poking at the part - I put it under water in warm water and try to pull some of the PVA off right away then I walk away and come back several times removing more and more PVA. When the final layer is pretty thin - just a few mm thick I usually leave it overnight. I've never had to wait 24 hours but 4 hours is definitely not enough either. I change the water a few times in the first hour. The water tends to be room temp for most of the time. It's only warmer than that when I first fill the bucket and each time I think of it, I change out the water.

When I say "pushing" I mean lifting it upwards by squeezing with one hand (while the other pulls the filament down and out of the back of the feeder). You have to squeeze quite hard. I recommend printing one of these (I have a few): https://www.youmagine.com/designs/wedgebot-for-ultimaker2 The above part works for both UM2+ and also UM3 (but not S3/S5).

It definitely won't hurt to power cycle. I can see in your photo that the core is cold (solid blue light). Did you try simply pushing the lever on the feeder and pulling down on the filament where it enters the feeder? That should get the filament out of the core and into the bowden far enough that the core should now slide out.

I don't know robson - just put spacers of the right size so that the pulleys line up with the rod above/below. If you really really need to know you could email support _at_ fbrc8.com as they build UM2 printers still but please don't trouble them if you can figure this out yourself.