gr5

@bkirchman - manual leveling 1mm above the glass won't help much if it does an autolevel right after. Did you disable autolevel in addition to doing the manual leveling?

Did you try a factory reset? Often these "distance error issues" after an update are fixed with a factory reset. At least with a UM2 this is true but I don't know about the UM3. I don't even know if UM3 has factory reset.

@yellowshark - Cura doesn't care if the nozzle is round, square, star shaped nor what it's cross section is when calculating the amount of filament needed to extrude a line of filament. If the nozzle diameter is 0.8 but the line width is 0.4 it will extrude the right amount to fill the volume of that printed "line" of filament. Back to your concrete analogy - if you are pouring concrete into a sonotube, it doesn't matter how big the chute is - it matters how much volume the sonutube takes up. The nozzle in this analogy is the chute only. In real life of course it matters a little but Cura doesn't worry about nozzle shape. Also note that the spacing of the "lines" is equal to the line width. So with 100% fill it should work very well.

Well if you ask @korneel he'd say get an S5. He has 8 of them and prints stuff like crazy on them. Pretty much 24/7. For money. And he used have many UM3s (I think 8 as well). If you ask me I'd say buy a bunch of um2go's. I have 7 Ultimakers (UMO, UM2, UM2go x3, um3, S5) and if you really need dual and wanted to stick with Ultimaker, consider the UM3. The quality goes down slightly with size so that's why I love my um2go's the most. I'd rather have 5 little printers than one big printer. However the um2go will absolutely not be a "cut the zip ties and go" kind of printer. I upgraded to heated beds and more powerful feeders and olsson blocks on all 3 of them. But I love my babies. The UM3 and S5 di indeed have lifting nozzles. The right nozzle goes up and down such that it is always either higher then the left or lower than the left. If you want to print with CF or glowfill and you don't want to modify even a tiny little thing then you will have to go with S5 as that's the only UM printer out of the box that deals with CF. Modifying a UM3 for CF is pretty easy. The UM printers are relatively well built and dependable. But I have no idea if you will love them or hate them.

Where you guys on 4.X before this? Or where you on 5.1 before this? The upgrade from 4.X to 5.X is a two step process where you have to update to a "stepping stone" version and then immediately update to 5.X. You probably would have remembered that as you have to immediately do a second upgrade. Some or all of the 5.X versions have a serious bug with the G92 command which, if you use G92, could cause what you explain. But Cura does not normally use the G92 command for the Z axis so it shouldn't matter. But many plugins use G92. Such as pause at Z possibly and there is some kind of Z offset plugin that definitely uses it.

When you did the manual leveling, did you also disable the autoleveling? Or is it doing the autolevel before every print?

I totally agree with your power assessment. If the temperature is within 5C of the goal temp then you don't need a more powerful heater. I think you just have typical UM2. At 0.2 layer you shouldn't be going over 30mm/sec and 60mm/sec is the absolute fastest speed at 210C for a typicall, well running UM2 with the old feeder. Faster than 60mm/sec and it will start clicking. I do recommend you upgrade the feeders but it's not mandatory. You have several options: 1) Get the $400 kit 2) Get a knock off copy kit from china at under $100. on aliexpress. 3) You can do a meduza upgrade for $19 (and around an hours work typically for each printer) I sell the Meduza kit in my store thegr5store.com It involves printing some parts. It's definitely more work than doing the "plus" kit. All the instructions are on my website at gr5.org/med/ Here is my table of how fast a UM2 can print: Here are top recommended speeds for .2mm layers (twice as fast for .1mm layers) and .4mm nozzle: 20mm/sec at 200C 30mm/sec at 210C 40mm/sec at 225C 50mm/sec at 240C The printer can do double these speeds but with huge difficulty and usually with a loss in part quality due to underextrusion. You also might want to keep the petg on one arbitrary printer and the pla on the other. The nylon degrades faster at 230C versus 210C and petg (and abs) can put up with the degradation better (I have no idea why).

As @johnse says retraction is a few mm. Typically 4 to 7mm. It should be *only* enough to relieve the pressure, not actuall retract and let air into the nozzle which would be bad. But say as you calculated in your scenario you are printing and it's about 1 step per mm which is what you were talking about I think with the 0.25mm nozzle and the 0.06 layer height. If you printed two half mm long lines it would step once and print the first half, then relieve the pressure, move to the new line and unextrude. This unextrude puts the pressure back in the nozzle cavity and it starts extruding again. feeder resolution isn't as big a problem as controlling pressure in the nozzle. The bowden acts as a big spring. Pressure in the nozzle versus resistance creates extrusion velocity. Typically once you fill the area below the nozzle, the friction goes up so nozzles tend to extrude the right amount automatically.

He was of by 16X because he didn't know about microstepping so it's closer to 1mm/step.

You can change the gears in the 2.85mm QR to 1.75. Contact bondtech for 1.75 gears and instructions. I don't know what the procedure is but it can't be trivial because a customer of mine who did it broke something in their feeder. But I imagine with the right tool it's not bad. Wait you have a UM3 - you should have ordered the DDG feeder. Much cheaper! And simpler. Also the feeders that come with the UM3 can print 1.75 or 3mm filament just fine with no modifications.

yes. That's all correct. You enable dev mode in the menu system somewhere. But I don't think you can change it while it's printing. Once you do that the ip address should be displayed (if it wasn't already) and you can ssh in. I recommend you mess with internet using conman as that is the preferred utility for this distribution of linux. Google about conman if you aren't familiar. You can disable wifi that way.

Did you kill that background cura before deleting stuff and installing stuff?

Ah. I get it now. Yes you still want flow. You can create a separate profile for each filament type (as Ultimaker has done as well). Because different types of filament need different temperatures, fan speeds, and flow. Ultimaker has over 100 profiles e.g. fast-ABS-0.2 fine-ABS-0.1 fine-PLA-0.1 etc. There are a lot of combinations. If there were only 10 material types and 3 profiles for each type that would be only 30 profiles but some (like PLA) have more.

The best way to see exactly how high you can print is by connecting a USB cable to your printer and using pronterface. then you can home the Z axis, go to Z=0 and make sure it's touching the glass then go to Z200, etc. Get pronterface here. It's free: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~kliment/printrun/

Make sure raft is off. Go into "prepare" mode at top center of screen. Click on your machine type - towards upper left corner for you, where it says "Ultimaker manual". Click "manage printers", then on the next popup click "machine settings" button (I think this only works for the currently selected machine by the way). Look at Z height in the left column. Increase that as necessary. Note that it would really suck to do a 5 day print only to discover when it does the last 1mm it hits the bottom z limit switch! So maybe do some tests like: G0 Z190 G0 Z195 G0 Z200 G0 Z201 And make sure the printer actually moves to all those positions without hitting the limit switch.

I don't know about that but you have 2 other options to add a second STL file to the same print: 1) You can drag and drop the stl file onto cura 2) You can do "file" "open" and open the stl file In both cases it should add the stl file to any existing stl files already loaded into cura.

Those versions you linked to on dropbox were created by smartavionics, right burtoogle?

90% of the time if your bottom layer has gaps but the rest of the part doesn't then your "leveling" is off. I don't care if you have autolevel or if you are a leveling expert - your height is probably off. It should be that when z=0 the nozzle just touches the glass or actually when Z=0.1 it should touch the glass and Z=0 it should try to go through the glass a bit (but something springy instead just moves a tiny bit). To answer your question about saving and reloading the gcode, I'm not sure. It is trying to guess the width of the lines based on the gcodes and this is hard to do. It is possible you have something out of whack in your settings. next to the profile where it shows layer height, click on the * there and it pops up a dialog, click the "extruder 1" tab and it should show all the settings that you modified with both default and modified values. See if you changed anything. For example, "initial layer flow", "initial layer width". It's also possible that you are just printing too fast on the bottom layer. For example if you are printing 0.1mm for most layers but 0.3 for the bottom layer and you are printing 40mm/sec on the bottom layer and 60mm/sec on the higher levels, you are still printing 2X the total extrusion rate on the bottom layer and your printer might not be able to print that fast. Total extrusion rate is line width X layer height X print speed. Most printers can do 5mm^3/sec. Some can do up to about 20mm^3/sec with a 0.4 nozzle. You can print twice as much volume with a 0.6 nozzle and 4X as much volume with a 0.8 compared to a 0.4mm nozzle.

It's called "flow". If you set flow to 200% then that is the exact same thing as "material multiplier=2". It will increase the extrusion values by whatever you set the flow to. It will *not* create a "flow" gcode. It will just increase all the extrusion values by the flow value in cura.

None of those red faces need support. They appear to be 45 degrees which should print extremely well - almost as good as vertical faces. The exception is the bottom edge. But again, I don't really understand the red areas either. I think red means "potential" place that *might* need support? I'm not sure.

That model has very little support so I'm not sure what the problem is. I rarely use support generated by cura. Instead I just model the support I need directly in cad.

This is a common problem when the head is too far from the print surface. You need to find a way to make the print head closer to the print bed. Is there a leveling procedure for the ender3? Are you sure you are doing it right? Try creating a program that just does G0 Z0 (nozzle to touching glass) and see if it touches the glass or if instead there is a small gap.

You just need the nozzle closer to the print bed when printing the first layer. To prove this you could simply push up on the bed or down on the print head while it prints the first layer and you will see it's fine. You only need to move them about 0.1 or 0.2mm closer.

Most likely your object - your STL file isn't sitting flat. But if you could upload a photo or even better also upload the 3mf file of your project someone could then help you.

I'm not an expert on thin walls but maybe try setting Minimum Wall Flow to 50. And if that doesn't help @smartavionics understands this much better than me.