gr5

Well I suggest you use cura 3.X for slicing and then save as gcode and then use printrun/pronterface to do the actual printing step. Get pronterface here. It's free: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~kliment/printrun/ It's much nicer than cura anyway for the printing part. Maybe some cura developer here can help you on Monday.

Well don't be afraid of factory reset - it takes all of one minute. After you do it you have to level the bed again which takes me very little time. I pretty much skip over that whole 1mm part.

Well it's probably grinding at the feeder. There are many possibilities but I'll give you 4 to think about: 1) CF (carbon fill. Also glow fill and glass fill) filament can wear out the points on the pyramids in the feeder wheel that grips the filament. 2) Don't mess with the tension - it should be at half way point on the feeder 3) Tons of retractions will do this. I printed a big ben tower that consistently failed several hours in because it was doing about 20 retractions on the same spot of filament - after going through the feeder 20 times it was ground down such that it couldn't grip it well and soon after it took a "bite" out of the filament and stopped printing like what you see. You examine retractions in line view in cura - dark blue is non-retracting moves - light blue is retracting moves. There are cura settings to limit the qty of retractions on the same spot of filament. Try setting max retraction count to 10 and extrusion distance window to 4.5mm. 4) printing too cold or too fast. Try lowering speed to 50% in the tune menu when you leave the office. It will print 2X slower but this is a good experiment to see if the pressure is just too high in the print head. 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. Different colors print best at quite different temperatures and due to imperfect temp sensors, some printers print 10C cool so use these values as an initial starting guideline and if you are still underextruding try raising the temp. But don't go over 240C with PLA.

@ReggieCarey Cura shouldn't be slow - it has worked very well for the last year or so. The main thing that causes it to be slow is that it's looking on your computer for removable drives. If you go to finder and try to disable/unmount all removable drives (for example don't connect your mac to your phone or to a USB stick, network drives,etc) it would be informative if that helps. Also some people have had trouble with antivirus software. Also try disconnecting from the network. If any of these things suddenly makes it work fine then that's a clue where the problem is. I'm not saying you will have to disconnect from the network forever - just that this may help isolate your issue.

If you have windows, unplug the mouse and listen to the sound it makes. Learn that "song". Then plug it in again and listen to *that* song. Now plug in your printer and listen for the same song. Before plugging it in go to device manager and you should here the "song" and also see a COM port show up in device manager. If only the USB port shows up then you might not have the arduino COM port driver installed. If you don't even get the USB port then probably you have a bad USB cable or a problem with the connectors or the printer or your computer or you might want to add a USB slitter box. If you *do* get the COM port, then what is it? Cura might have a bug. Basically I'm asking you to break out the problem into parts and figure out which parts are working and which aren't.

We'll I'm the gr5 he referred to but I don't know what guide was meant. I have a guide for underextrusion but this is something else. So I strongly recommend you switch to tinkerMarlin 16.01 and also do a factory reset and set the E axis steps again. 16.01 is much less likely to hang with this "error stopped". I've never seen it personally and I have all sorts of tinkerMarlin versions and UM2 printers but the people who get crashes with tinkerMarlin usually get it with versions after 16.01. 16.01 allows you to change the steps/mm and has 90% of the same features as 17.10.

The failures are underextrusion. Unfortunately there are dozens of possible causes. I would squeeze the feeder lever, remove the filament half way and try adding a drop of oil to the filament, then inserting the filament back in. This can help a lot and won't affect the quality of the prints (really!). Also try printing a bit slower even though 30mm/sec is on the slow end, try 20mm/sec. Or when it starts failing go into the TUNE menu and play with feedrate % (66% will convert 30mm/sec to 20mm/sec). And play with temperature. Did you do a cold pull after you did the failing print and before the good one? If so maybe it was a partial clog. If not then probably not a clogged nozzle ? When it fails look at the filament in the bowden and near the feeder and see if there is something obvious (maybe the filament is curling up instead of moving along the bowden or getting tangled in the feeder).

Push the head as far back as it goes and note the spot. Then push it to the front and measure the difference. I doubt it reaches 270mm. Anyway to answer your original question: set "travel avoid distance" to zero. disable brim and skirt both! details here: https://ultimaker.com/en/resources/44677-maximum-build-volume-ultimaker-2-plus-ultimaker-3

You shouldn't have to ever dry out ABS or PLA. Only nylon and pva. I have 6 year ABS that still works great. Not kept sealed up. Enclosing the printer is good for ABS. That was a good idea. Your retraction distance is huge (6.5mm) and that could be the problem right there. How far between your extruder and your hot end? Isn't the extruder mounted on the print head? I'm going to guess around 30mm. You typically want about 5mm retraction per meter of distance between these 2 devices so you probably don't want to go over 1mm retraction. UM printers have about a 1 meter tube between the feeder and the extruder so UM printers need typically 4.5mm retraction. Not sure about your A8. Make all the print speeds the same. Don't have one at 15 and the other at 10. Look at all the printing speeds and try setting them all to 20 if you want it to print slow and high quality. And your travel speed you want to crank it up. If it travels too slow you get more stringing, more pits and blobs. 150mm/sec is usually fine but 300mm/sec is reasonable as well. I suspect the A8 can do 300mm/sec just fine.

So the username and password is root/ultimaker Have you used ssh before? What operating system do you have? ssh is built into mac and linux but for windows I recommend "putty". To ssh to my um3 I had to put it into developer mode. I don't remember doing that for my S5 but I might have (it has been several weeks). The ip address is written right on the control panel for the S5 at the top.

This feature already exists in cura. I'm not sure if it's billed as extra skin layers or fewer infill layers. I think extra skin. I can't find it but I know it's part of cura somewhere.

This is a crazy hard print because it has tight tolerances and lots of overhangs. One way to deal with this is to model and print this vertically as a cylinder and after done printing then pour boiling water over the center and bend it to this shape by hand. That way the tight fit parts will be a food fit.

That's a good point. I'm requesting source. Is there a better contact for officially requesting the source (I have a UM3).

I tested their regular pla. I have tested about 20 different brands of PLA and they all get soft around 52C. Unless it is advertised as "high temp PLA" or HPLA (for example proto pasta has such a thing) I doubt it's different. Anyway it's very easy to test yourself. Set the build plate to 60C and place 5cm of filament on the build plate with a towel over it. After 1 full minute at temperature grab the filament and bend it. At 60C you will see it's soft. Then lower to 45C and then try at half way between 52C and so on until you find the point where it gets soft. As a general rule of thumb you want to print with the build plate 5C to 10C above this temp so that the bottom few layers can flow slightly (like clay) when under strong stress due to warping stresses. This will help keep your print on the glass. This rule doesn't apply to flexibile filaments such as TPU nor to Nylon which doesn't have an obvious softening point but instead just keeps getting more flexible gradually (so 80C should be enough for nylon but it gets suddenly pliable just a little below the melting point).

@tsirianni - right click on the model, select "multiply" and type in how many additional parts to paste in.

I don't know if you can get those tiny spikes any better. Well if you go to a 0.25mm nozzle or smaller and keep lowering the temp - maybe even to 160C (but you have to change the cold extrusion limit if you go that low). That's what I would try. But I recommend you move on to some other test or try an actual print because "tiny spikes on top of a print" is not a typical feature. There are many other things hard to print. I think it's best to concentrate on what you actually need to print first, then move onto test parts to concentrate on a particular feature you care about.

The arms issue is called "overhangs" and you can fix that somewhat with support. Personally I would enable support touching buildplate only for this model. Was this one thorn worse than all the others? If so it's probably related to "z seam". By default it's on "sharpest corner" but that's probably this particular thorn so try "random" or any of the other options. Make sure your fan is at 100% and consider lowering the temperature by 10C and printing slower (try half the speed you did and I think it will help the quality quite a bit).

Well there is a feature called fuzzy skin. You can enable fuzzy skin only on the bottom few layers if you want. fuzzy skin is very cool. If you set the values very small it is a subtle fuzz and yet can still hide layer lines. Other than that I guess you would have to use the raft feature.

Where did you do this search? In cura? On the Ultimaker website? if a website such as ultimaker offers a search feature I strongly advise to use google instead but restrict the results to that website so in google you can do: site:ultimaker.com followed by your search terms (e.g. cura connect) and you will get lots of forum results about cura connect.

That's news to me. I'd really like to look at the marlin code. Sometimes there are bugs and features and I like to do a quick look over the code to understand things. For example I've been curious about what the default acceleration and jerk settings are for the UM3. I think I know the answer (3000/20) but I'd be much more confident if I could look at the arduino firmware. Also I might want to help this sensor project and work on changing the firmware to incorporate tinkergnome's code and integrate that in with the python code on the UM3 somehow. So: can I get a copy please? a zip file? A git repository? anything would be nice.

I've tested eSun pla and it gets soft at the same temp as all the other PLAs - right about 52C. Hence you want the build plate at 60C. Strength and flexibility is decent and typical of all other PLAs for sale these days. I'm sure the 10x claim is versus pure PLA. Even a 30% stronger PLA would be a big deal. 10X? Even CF filaments aren't 10X "stronger". Steel is almost exactly 10X stronger than PLA. http://gr5.org/mat/index.html

You could soak it in MEK but it's dangerous stuff - leaks right through your skin so use gloves. Personally I would burn it all out - put the nozzle in a flame and let it get to 400C (if it starts glowing red hot that's too hot and let it cool immediately as brass gets soft and you could damage the threads with pliers if it's red hot).

Not really. No. There are reasons but they are minor and if a print fits in my UM3 or my S5, my UM3 wins every time.

It's hard to tell looking only at the top of the parts in the first picture - the problem looks like underextrusion but this could possibly be not enough top layers or infill insufficiently dense. But I'm pretty sure it's underextrusion. Looking at the second picture of 3 cubes - that's severe underextrusion. It could be soemthing isn't tight enough in the extruder. Or maybe you are printing too fast or too cold. This is not an Ultimaker but an Ultimaker can push on the filament with about 5kg of force. That's a lot! With an ultimaker here are max printing 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 So my question is: what's your layer height, line width (all of them), print speed (all of them) and nozzle temperature. Does it exceed the volume of filament in the table above? If not is there a way to tighten up your feeder so it squeezes the filament harder?

What printer is this? Um3? S5? It's important that the nozzles on the cores have no plastic on the tip as that gives a leveling error. Personally, on my UM3, I haven't done autoleveling in over a year. I prefer the manual leveling. You don't have a choice however on the S5 (current firmware version anyway).