gr5

GBuchwitz - what country/city are you near? I'm in Boston if you want to do a test on my S5.

I'm not sure what you are asking but I have 3 answers for you: 1) If you are doing a showcase printer you could print the same thing over and over and push the part off with the head. I have done this with bracelets where one gcode file has been cut/pasted such that it prints one bracelet every 7 minutes for about 3 hours. Also the file is named auto.g (or something similar - I forget the name you need to do) and if you power cycle the machine it starts printing again without any intervention. This is a feature on the um2 series printers. 2) I think what you want is printrun. With a usb cable you can print from the command line. Also printrun comes with pronterface which is a really great interface. Get pronterface here. It's free: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~kliment/printrun/ 3) For about $25 or 25 euros you can buy a raspberry pi and put octoprint on it. Octoprint will control a UM2 through a USB cable and can connect to your network and it supplies a web page. You can do everything from the octoprint web page so you can print parts from a phone, ipad, pc, mac, whatever. You slice and upload the gcode files to octoprint (there's an upload button) and it will store quite a few gcode files if you want.

cura is great at slicing but for printing I don't think it's so good. I recommend you do the slicing part with cura but do the printing part with pronterface/printrun: Get pronterface here. It's free: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~kliment/printrun/

Well if you don't care about ringing (which is quite visible but not measurable with calipers) then definitely uncheck "acceleration control" and uncheck "jerk control". Unchecking these two things will give you a large increase in part accuracy but the parts won't look quite as nice. The next thing to try is to set all the printing speeds to the same value (e.g. 35mm/sec) and the non extruding speed to at least 150mm/sec or even 300mm/sec. These should increase the precision of the parts. Printing slower and colder should make parts even more accurate and then it's time to try adjusting the x/y/z scaling and playing with things like "horizontal expansion" (can be negative values also).

You can definitely do all of those things. You have tinkerMarlin 16.01? Just spin the knob and click on each of the things you can change. You can do much more in tinkerMarlin than regular Marlin.

google seems to think the anycubic kossel uses Marlin for the firmware. Marlin likes G0 and G1 so go ahead and fix those and see what happens.

By the way it is possible to turn off auto leveling but it involves ssh and even so I really don't recommend it.

@Abdu - leveling only affects the bottom layer and in rare cases the bottom 2 layers but that's it. Are you seeing gaps in both filaments on the same layer or only in one of the filaments? If both filaments are having gaps in the exact same layer then that eliminates many possibilities and if only one filament is having a gap - that eliminates the other possibilities. I can't tell by your photograph even when I zoom in.

I'm not sure what you mean but I think this video will help you keep the inside edges from coming up:

@JCD I like how you think. I like how you pay attention. What you call "angle dragging" I call the "liquid elastic effect". I think of PLA as a liquid rubber band. Like snot. Like mucus. Are you sure the bottom layer is the worst? For me it seems like the bottom layer is the best and it gets worse on layers above and then as it gets farther from the heated bed it gets better again. Do you have a printer with a heated glass bed? You should look at "initial layer horizontal expansion" feature. This value can be set to a negative value but that doesn't help you I suppose. I think a bigger problem on my bottom layers is that I like to level such that the nozzle is a little "too close" to the glass which gives the bottom layer a little micro brim and is fixed with the "initial layer horizontal expansion" set to a negative value.

Well the M109 is the part where it heats the heater. So the problem has to be after that line. G00 is not a normal gcode. It is normally "G0". What kind of printer is this? I would try changing all the G00 to G0 and change G01 to G1. But maybe your printer likes this type of gcode.

@swatti - good ideas!

It's called "outer before inner walls".

Did you ever look at the print in layer view to see if there were a lot of retractions on the layer that failed?

So you are saying the bed moved down suddenly for no apparent reason? The Z stepper driver can overheat. This is a known problem on the UM2 which was fixed by lowering the stepper current to I believe 900ma. Some versions of Marlin let you edit this - look in motion controls and see if you can lower the Z stepper current. If your version of Marlin doesn't make this easy to do there are gcodes to do it or you can install tinker Marlin. You can test that this is indeed the problem by putting a 5kg weight on the back of the bed and seeing if it is even worse. Basically the stepper driver turns off for about 1 second. Or you can remove the bottom cover, tilt the printer with a dictionary/book and use a desk fan to give a little air flow over the circuit board.

If you put some filament on the build plate and heat to 70C, pla will be very soft. LIke clay. If it gets soft then it's pla. If you heat to 95C and it's soft then it's PET/CPE most likely. If it gets soft around 100-105C then it's probably ABS. Putting the filament under a face cloth or napkin or similar insulator makes this test easier and more accurate.

Send the unopened ones back.

Restart your print. I get that error on my S5 sometimes. While it's heating up both cores, clean the tip of the cores a bit and make sure the glass doesn't have a small post of filament right where it starts the leveling. Also consider opening the front door of the print head and looking at the base of the print head - there are two wires going to the height sensor (which is just a big flat plate in the bottom of the print head). If either wire came loose then that's the problem. More likely it's just electrical noise and you need to retry a few times or you need to clean the nozzles a little. If you cleaned the nozzle tips and it still does this more than 5X in a row I would call your reseller. Also make sure you upgrade the firmware as the newest version seems to get this error less often - somehow they managed to filter out most of the noise maybe.

This is called underextrusion. In the worst areas you have about 50% underextrusion meaning only half as much plastic is coming out as needed to fill the layer. Typically we run our printers somewhat close to the limit of what the feeder can push through a tiny nozzle. You may have gone over that limit. Typically you just need to print thinner layers or print slower or print hotter. Here are some guidelines. What kind of printer do you have? The below guidelines are for a typical printer. Some feeders can print 3X as fast as the below recommended speeds but printing faster than the below speeds can cause other problems (e.g. overextrusion on corners) so until you know your printer well I'd stay below these speeds. 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

Cura should be fast even on a slow computer. It's checking something on your computer repeatedly. Did you look at all the things it thinks are drives on your mac? Could you explain about the port thing?

Most printers have (0,0) on the front left corner. Some printers (mostly just delta printers) have (0,0) in the center. You have to configure this in cura in machine settings. If you have it configured wrong then on a normal printer it will print in the front left corner and on a delta it will print in the far right corner.

Well the USB drive solution sounds like a good one. I picked linksys because the seem to have produced the most routers back in the day. The features you want: dhcp 1 WAN and at least 2 LAN ports DHCP because without modifying the printer through ssh it will only accept ip addresses through DHCP. Wan and Lan ports because if it has both then it's definitely a real router that will have dhcp built in and nat translation (but you don't need that) and can be configured to run with any ip address you give it as the sort of host of the network. I mean the router will run the network.

How is a USB ext hard drive different from a thumb drive? Wouldn't that also violate the same rules? Anyway don't answer that. An old/used network router would be a good solution. Any old linksys - one with a WAN port and 4 LAN ports. Leave the WAN port open. Connect your pc and the printer to the LAN ports. Connect to the admin web page of the router - most of these by default are either 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 or 10.0.0.1 so just enter those ip adresses into your browser and you should be able to connect to the linksys box. Then login (google the default password and how to reset the box physically to default passwords - basically you hold down a reset button or stick a paper clip in the reset hole and power cycle it). Set it up to use an address range *different* from your company so 10.3.2.1 for example (the Internet will never have addresses at 192.168.x.x nor 10.x.x.x but your internal company might so you can pick something in that range that is not conflicting with machines in your company). Then turn on the ultimaker and it will automatically grab an ip address from the router through a process called DHCP (which you can also control on the router). Your computer will grab another ip address. Now you can talk to the printer. The S5 has linux on it. If you know linux you can configure the network in a plethora of configurations including the crossover method. I think you just buy the crossover ethernet cable, then configure the printer to be at a fixed ip address outside the LAN space of your company (again like 10.3.2.1) and configure the port on your pc connected to the ethernet to be another address in the same space (like 10.3.2.2). At that point they should be able to ping each other and you can connect to the S5's web page. The hardest part would be configuring the ip address on the printer - you can't do that from the screen on the printer. You have to first put the printer on your LAN somewhere (e.g. bring it home) and ssh to the printer and set this all up using the linux conman utility, then try the crossover cable. If you aren't very experienced setting up networks and using ssh you would want to find someone who is.

I've never seen this question about the ability to listen on some port. Could you explain more about that? This is a large red flag in my view - it could be the whole problem. Also if you go into finder and look at all storage devices could you list them? Do you have network drives that are down when you disable wifi but are still listed? Hopefully what you provided so far will help someone figure this out. @ctbeke @ahoeben @smartavionics - maybe one of these people have an idea or know who would.

That's close enough to tension at half way that I would leave it alone. I never do "unhide". Instead I type in the name or part of the name in the setting in the search box and it will show the hidden settings related to that word. I already told you the two settings: Try setting max retraction count to 10 and extrusion distance window to 4.5mm. But you could also look at your part in layer view and visually see if there are a lot of retractions roughly where it fails versus the beginning of the print.