gr5

volumetric setting is not in the cura profile settings. It's in the machine settings. You have to do "manage printers".

Well I don't know about anet but Ultimaker has huge friendly group of people who will do things like build a custom marlin for you (for an ultimaker - not for an anet whatever that is). Perhaps there are similar people for the anet. Maybe you should go find some anet forum and find someone who can build you a custom Marlin firmware for your printer.

Looks like it's the X axis that is losing steps. Had you noticed the Y axis is fine. So 3% of the time this is caused because you never oiled the gantry. Put no more than one drop of oil on the 6 rods in the gantry (count them to be sure you got all 6). Push the head around before and after to see if there is a huge difference. But 95% of the time this is caused by a pulley where the set screw isn't tight enough. There are 5 or 6 set screws and pulleys for the X axis. Push the head left and right and see which ones move. It's almost always the one on the motor - the hardest to get. I think UM2 printers were mostly shipped with a black and green hex driver - this is a critical tool to have as you can tighten the motor pulley set screw without taking a single thing apart. If you don't have a long hex driver you'll have to remove that corner cover - it's held on by only 2 screws. Remember you can push the head around until the set screw is in the best possible position. Tighten all 5/6 set screws but the one or two on the short belt are usually the ones that slip. If you don't believe me you can mark the shaft and the pulley with a sharpie and you'll see that it slipped part way through a print.

If cura doesn't recognize the larger bed then it won't print larger prints at all. I fhte print is larger than 220mm wide then it will go gray in the view and it won't slice. I assume this is not what you are complaining about. Therefore I suspect Cura is working just fine. Most printers have only one endstop on each of XYZ axes and then they have a *software* endstop for the other extreme. Usually you can only fix this by building a new copy of Marlin. Did you do this? You would have to modify the bed dimensions in Configuration.h. Although usually Marlin says something like "printing out of bounds". And you didn't mention that either. So I guess I don't understand your issue - how big is the part you are trying to print?

I also like PETG. It's in between nylon and pla. Almost as easy as PLA. More flexible (tougher) than PLA. Note that if you are building a bridge across a gap with more flexible plastics, the bridge can hold more weight before breaking. Like snapping a pencil in half. But if you make a carabiner and the force is mostly tension (pulling), then you won't get much extra strength from a flexible material (typically it will be weaker, not stronger). I believe Ultimaker calls PETG "CPE" and I believe colorfabb sells it as "nGen". The 3 materials may have differences but I think the differences are minor (different additives?). The other problem with Nylon is it absorbs water like crazy. It's a pain in the neck to keep dry. Don't leave it out for more than a few hours. You have to store it with LARGE packs of rechargable dessicant and occasionally I have to dry my filament on a heated bed overnight. PETG also seems to absorb water. I printed some a few days ago that was sizzling and popping a bit but the quality was good enough. PLA does not have a problem with moisture. You don't need to keep it dry.

Nylon definitely is more flexible. Which makes it tough. Very tough. You can drive a truck over most nylon prints without damaging them. They just bend/flex. And there are a variety of different amounts of elasticity. Materials towards the left are more flexible: http://gr5.org/mat/ It's also harder to print. The higher the softening temp of a material - the more it shrinks after it becomes solid. A heated bed helps a lot. 80C is hot enough for nylon. 100C even better. The other problem with higher temp materials is that new layers don't bond as well to the layer below so the part seems fine until you stress it a bit and it splits along layer lines. This is solved by lowering the fan speed to almost zero and enclosing the printer to heat up the air. Basically, the higher the softening temperature, the harder a material is to print for these 2 reasons above. They won't stick as well, they will be more likely to have the corners warp up off the bed and layer adhesion issues might mean the part is very weak if you aren't careful.

Something is wrong with your model. Cura only knows how to print solids but some CAD software creates all kinds of non-solids which can't be printed. For example a cube with only 5 sides. Also the STL file is a collection of triangles and each triangle says which side faces air and which side faces plastic. Some CAD software gets this backwards. Most CAD software will not let you do this. Sketchup is a very popular CAD program that has this problem - it lets you create just flat "walls" that are infinitely thin or that are backwards. I'm going to guess you are using sketchup (although I know of 2 others) because it's popular for architecture. Here are some tips for sketchup (I have other tips for other cad packages): https://i.materialise.com/blog/3d-printing-with-sketchup/ In sketchup it's important to make sure surfaces are white, not gray. Right click on gray surfaces (in sketchup) and select "reverse faces". 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...

What moves? the extruder? Z? I don't understand. If you can take a picture with your phone, you can join this forum using your phone - that's one option.

So you got it on layers but then you can edit which colors and there are checkboxes - support is grouped into the "helper" group. Make sure "helper" is checked.

The problem with PETG is that it can stick too well and remove shards of glass from your bed. That is why people recommend not squishing the bottom layer much with PETG. Another solution is to use a liberally thick layer of PVA glue stick (just standard office supply or kid's crafts). If it is thick enough then it won't stick so badly that it spalls the glass.

no one has any ideas?

I was just told that there are several versions of Firmware that support this exact feature already! Including the latest Marlin (which Ultimaker has drifted from), and Duet might support it. Also Octoprint might support that. But then you need some slicer to support this also. Not sure which slicers support it.

fan. It matters where the fan is. It matters where the fan is blowing when the nozzle is printing the rest of benchy other than the bow. If the fan is on the left side of the head only, or right side, etc it all matters and that is what causes one orientation to be good and another to be bad. Also the position of the part on the bed - if the part is near an edge of the print bed and if it is a heated bed then that can make a difference. I guess I could say "air temperature and air speed" is what the issue is. Or how well the previous layer cooled down before printing the next layer. But usually it's just "fan" asymmetries.

On further thought - why are your parts coming loose? I don't get parts come loose like you describe. Maybe you should concentrate on that issue. 🙂 Here's a long but information packed video talking about how to keep parts from EVER EVER COMING LOOSE.

very cool idea. Even if it's just numbered parts. The display can show the number of part currently printing so you know which one needs to be 'spliced out'. Although it's a little more complicated as you have to adjust extrusion amounts also: say you are extruding 3mm of filament per part, after you skip one part you will see a sudden jump of the E value (extruder) by 3mm but you have to subtract off that 3mm from all future E values. and then on the next layer when you skip it again you have to subtrace 6mm from future E values and so on. Not that hard to do but it's another detail.

Cool stuff! I don't think about wear much. Not consciously I suppose. It makes a lot of sense that you don't want to use PLA in high wear situations because it softens at such a low temperature. when I insert screws using an electric driver into a PLA part I have to be careful not to overheat. The screws melt the pla and self tap nicely but if they get too hot (insert and remove the screw too quickly) then the pla sticks to the screw and it makes a mess. Not a problem for me with higher temp materials. This property (wear resistance) will be in the back of my mind now going forward.

Normally the extruder WILL NOT MOVE if the temperature is below around 170C on the heater. There is a gcode to override this. google something like "gcode extrude override" or look for gcode at reprap website and search for override. Or just heat up the nozzle. If it still doesn't rotate then it could be the driver is damaged. You can just buy another driver. is this UMO green board? Or UMO+ with white board? If green board you can just remove the driver and put another one in there. They cost around 20 euros/dollars. if white board, then yes you can reprogram firmware to use the other driver. Look for my posts about building the firmware and the only thing you have to change is pins.h.

"use adaptive layers" isn't just a checkbox. There are 4 critical settings. At the top of all your screen shots there is a search box - put "layer" into that. Check "use adaptive layers". now 3 new settings should pop up. Hover over the text of each of them as they are described. The most important is your base layer height (0.2 shown above) and "maximum variation". If they are 0.2 and 0.1 respectively then it will stay in the range of 0.1 to 0.3mm (0.2 plus or minus 0.1). I recommend getting down to 0.05mm layer height. So maybe do 0.15mm layer height +/- 0.1mm. Check that it's working in PREVIEW mode (at the top of the screen). Then change your "color scheme" to "layer thickness". Look at the size of the "circles" you were talking about.

If you change the layer height from 0.2 to 0.1 there will be twice as many circles and so harder to see. Each step will be half as thick so *also* harder to see. Unfortunately it will also take twice as long to print. Also you can look into "adaptive layer height" which is a feature in Cura where you can set the minimum and maximum layer height and it will switch to thinner layers at the top of your rounded-top part.

Are you loading a gcode file into Cura? If so - that's for viewing only. You can't slice that and then output a new improved gcode.

If you have fusion 360 then you should be able to do a "binary or" or "union" in fusion. It's much more sophisticated (1000X more sophisticated) than Cura and can do this kind of thing easily. There may be a bug in the Cura feature but I can't say for sure as I would have to check the normals as well. I've never had to use the "overlapping volumes" on my own models as, well, my CAD software just won't allow that so I don't know how to export such a thing as an STL. But I've used the feature on downloaded models and it helped me in the past.

Yes but I think you have "normals" errors. It looks to me in the first screenshot that you are using sketchup. In sketchup if you see any gray surfaces you need to right click on these surfaces and choose "reverse faces". This should fix your part in the eyes of Cura. You may also have to do "union overlapping volumes" in cura but if you get the normals right then maybe not. However I think you changed your materials in sketchup so I guess you can't use that trick. More information about normals and sketchup here: https://i.materialise.com/blog/3d-printing-with-sketchup/

I moved your post into a new topic. In the search box above - in your screen shot where it says "Search..." enter "temp". It should show you heated bed temp at that point. If not then... If this is for an Ultimaker 2 you set heated bed temperature on the printer - not in the slicer. For other printers with heated beds you need to tell cura that your printer has one. 1) In top center of cura make sure you are in "PREPARE" mode (not preview mode). 2) In line just below that on the left edge click on your printer. 3) Then click button "manage printers" 4) Make sure your printer is selected in this popup and click "Machine settings" Now you can see options (make sure to check both/all tabs) for your printer

If you want a good raft you might have to use an older slicer. Cura was started well after the time when PLA was discovered and raft no longer needed (heated beds were well known but not that common yet). I believe the author at the time didn't really appreciate good raft design. Other slicers that had been around back before PLA (ABS only) and before heated beds (not many) understand raft better. Like Slic3r - I think slic3r was created back in the cold-bed-ABS days and raft was the only way back then.

For me the raft means I would have to spend a long time cleaning the bottom. I print petg with no raft and no brim. I use all the remaining tricks in my video above. I use PVA glue, rounded corners, squish, and heat. For PETG (printed 4 large petg parts yesterday) I used 82C on the bed. I put some filament on the bed at various temps and it got soft right at 82C so that was the temp I chose to avoid corners "warping" off the bed. Parts came out great. Bottom smooth.