gr5

light and dark blue lines are TRAVEL MOVES. As opposed to EXTRUDING MOVES. You need to understand what those two terms mean. Extruding moves means plastic comes out. Travel moves are mandatory. You can't get the print head from place A to place B without moving the print head. Travel moves should not create strings but sometimes they do. red, yellow, green, teal lines on the screen represent PLASTIC. blue lines represent movements (no plastic). Are you following me? In general DARK BLUE = BAD (in that some plastic will leak out. LIGHT BLUE = GOOD (no plastic comes out - hopefully) If you understand nothing else, know that dark blue moves *might* create strings. Light blue moves should not. Sometimes they do anyway but that is a hardware issue, not a cura issue.

Ultimaker appears to have learned some things about auto leveling "recently" and so the diagnosing of autoleveling issues is improved. So reaching out to (netherlands based) support again may be worth while now that they know more. I would avoid tech support from a local reseller regarding autoleveling and network based issues which are both quite tricky to diagnose. It turns out many many times, autoleveling fails due to the front center fan in the door of the print head. The one that folds down when you open the print head door. The fan can be bad from day 1 or it can become bad after many months/years. It's not clear if the fan is creating radio noise or if the fan acts as an RF antennae but the problem has to do with radio frequency electromagnetic noise. When you test the leveling sensor it gives you a "secret" number with no context (well depending on the version of firmware). The lower that number, the better. I think above 8 is the threshold considered a failure (my memory sucks - I can look it up if you want). That is the noise level. If it is failing or almost failing you can try lots of things including changing the fan or just unplugging the fan. If it is reporting a "2" then your issue is elsewhere. In addition it was discovered that even when the fan is off it was still getting some weak pulses many times per second. This is fixed in a recent firmware release. And is probably not the problem but who knows. Anyway replacing that front fan often fixes leveling issues. But there are other causes so who knows in your specific case. Also there is a way to disable autoleveling and rely on manual leveling. I did this for a month but turned it back on. Manual leveling is usually fine for small parts but not for parts that take up much of the bed. Also I got tired of releveling each time I changed a core (why isn't the old leveling value remembered? Because it assumes you turned a knob under the bed). Anyway if you want to disable autoleveling (I don't recommend it but there are other nice features) go here: https://community.ultimaker.com/topic/39188-ultituner-a-tool-to-tweak-your-printer

Never printed successfully! Okay that's good to know. Cold pull results looks excellent. Wait so #3 doesn't work either? Okay then definitely don't bother printing until #3 works. You can test the feeder easily. Pull the lever up on the feeder so you can slide the filament in and out. Slide it out so it is well above the print head so you can see the end of the filament in the clear bowden tube. Put the feeder lever back down. Now do #3 but no need to wait for it to warm up. Use the down arrow to move the filament down. Fight this. So use one hand to pull down on the feeder and the other hand to push the down arrow occasionally and see how much force it takes to fight the feeder. The feeder can typically pull with about 15 pounds (about 7 kilos) of force. 10 pounds of force I consider a pass. 5 pounds will work but poorly. Chances are you are not strong enough to get the filament to slip backwards. that's fine. That means the feeder is fine and the problem is somewhere else.

1) It looks like I can see on the build plate that you have successfully done a print at least one time before, right? If so this eliminates many possibilities. 2) Do you have the material station underneath your S5? Or S5 alone? 3) Instead of printing, go to the middle menu tab on the left, click on the material in the upper left, then click on the "..." in the upper right and choose "move material". Wait for it to reach at least 160C and then start slowly spinning the dial. Does it extrude? Extrude lots of material. What happens? How long does it take material to get form the nozzle to the bed? 4) If you have any trouble with #3 do some cold pulls. Google it or watch youtube videos or if you want to be lazy and not understand them, just follow the prompts in the menu on the front of the machine under "maintenance". Show a picture of the result. The shape of the cold pull tells us a TON about what is inside the nozzle. 5) Make sure the lever is down on your feeder - did you lift the lever up and forget to put it down? 6) Try a different core. Report back on all 6 above. As a minimum say "I didn't try this yet". I can give you another 6 things to try.

I'm learning that dev mode went away but only briefly when S3 was initially launched but that was years ago and S3 has dev mode now.

So does your S3 have a "developer mode"? If so you can ssh into the printer and use connman (a utility to work with wifi, ethernet and more) and there's TONS of help on the internet on using connman as it's not just used in Ultimaker printers but zillions of computers out there. The S5 has developer mode. I believe the S3 had developer mode the first year or so and then it was taken away although I belive if you enable it, it stays enabled even if you do firmware updates. My memory is crappy regarding this. I have an S5 and not an S3. Also I just use the flash drive to print everything and don't use any network features at all anymore. But connman was pretty cool. It has pretty much every obscure networking feature you can imagine. If no developer mode, then yes, log files are critical.

I'm not certain but I think this is supported with the material station and the S5 combination. But the S3 is smaller and I don't think it fits on the material station.

Not... really... One failure mode is if the temp sensor is reading low such that the printer thinks the nozzle is colder than desired and it starts feeding full power into the heater "forever". Well there is a software check - if the heater is on full blast for N seconds (I think it's 30 seconds) and the temperature doesn't go up by M degrees (I think it's 2 degrees) then it knows something is seriously wrong and shuts down the heaters immediately, and aborts the print. Also if the temp sensor measures very high temperatures it also cuts off power to head and bed. Also Ultimaker tried just feeding 24V into the heater "forever" to see what would happen. I'm pretty sure what happens is: not much. I think the teflon inside the head melts out a little bit and needs replacing afterwards. I don't know if anything catches on fire but I wouldn't want anything above the printer within a few inches. Other than the print head, I believe the rest of the printer is unaffected. If you feed 24V into the bed "forever" it only reaches about 110C. Not hot enough for anything to burn. Even if you raise the ambient temp in your cupboard to 50C the bed will only reach about 135C. Still not hot enough for anything to burn. If your printer has the CE certification sticker on the back (I think the UM3 does?) then it's *somewhat* safe but there is no guarantee. The servo drivers also get quite hot and have built in thermo cutoffs - built into the servo driver chip. It only cuts off for a portion of a second and then starts right back up (but your printer loses steps so your print is ruined) but this prevents these chips from getting so hot they would start a fire. The power brick should also be CE certified and seems to have a computer in it. It has safety features and almost certainly a thermal cutoff. When it cuts off (it's happened to me many times - not sure if it's thermal or current or voltage dip) it stays off until you power cycle it. I don't represent Ultimaker. I don't work for them. This is all 3rd hand information. I believe it's not 100% safe but it's reasonably safe. But safer if like on a table away from all combustibles, lol.

Oh - so another fix would be to just remove all the partitions or make one big partition or change the partition sizes. That's much easier than formatting as the format utility needs to be downloaded over the internet (couldn't figure out how to call f2fs in the ultimaker repair firmware and it's not in the olimex jessie image either).

Thanks for the info. What about my questions 1 and 2 above.

It might be normal, yes. So before it prints it has to do active leveling and for that it can't have solid filament on the nozzle so it heats the bed and the nozzle to prevent any filament from throwing off the leveling adjustment - even 0.1mm of error would be bad. So look in cura at the bed temp as the bed takes the longest to heat up. If you are printing say ABS then you probably want around 110C bed temp and that can indeed take 15 minutes when you include heating up the nozzles also. But if you are printing PLA than it should only take, I'd guess, 5 minutes before it starts leveling. As far as 15 minutes to abort, that can be avoided. For safety reasons (which I disagree with), it waits for the bed to get below the safety temp before allowing you to print again. I hate this feature. You can disable it with this tool (ultituner): https://community.ultimaker.com/topic/39188-ultituner-a-tool-to-tweak-your-printer/ I remember putting a towel on the bed after an abort so I could keep the bed hot to quickly restart the print. Well this slowed down things even more! I was quite mad. It was not obvious that it was trying to cool down. Also you can go into the second menu on the left and click on bed and in top right click "..." and then something like "set bed temp" and then you can see the current temp of the heated bed and if it is going up or down (which provides hints). Similary you can check the temps of the nozzles. After a print there is also a short delay (maybe 20 seconds) to do a semi-cold pull to avoid tiny strings in the bowden jamming the filament which is a very good feature. But waiting for the bed to cool? No way. Absolutely hate that feature with a passion.

Well the plugin is from an Ultimaker employee. One who is a software engineer who works on Cura. Most people agree it's the best reference for what all the settings do.

Feature already exists. Click on this star (circled). Then click on the italicized profile. Then all the differences are shown. You have to click on the "extruder 1" tab to see some of them. It seems kind of buggy. I"m sure there is a reason it doesn't always show you the "before" value but it certainly shows you which settings were changed and what their current value is (and sometimes what it was).

I'm not sure what you are asking as this is a 3 year old topic and unfortunately some of the old links here don't work anymore. If you can say which link exactly. If you want some explanations of how to use cura you could start here maybe: https://support.makerbot.com/s/topic/0TO5b000000Q4utGAC/ultimaker-cura https://support.makerbot.com/s/topic/0TO5b000000Q4w3GAC/cura-print-settings Which has lots of support articles about cura. But instead I recommend you watch some youtube videos about cura. Maybe search on youtube for "intro to cura" or something similar. This will give you quite a few videos to choose from - I'm sure they are all pretty decent. There is also a plugin for cura (get it in the market place - it's free - in the top right corner of cura) that has very very good detailed explanations for each of the 500 or so settings. Most explanations have pictures to help explain.

Also if you buy a print core from 3dsolex.com then it's easy to change nozzles - they are designed to be changed from one print to the next.

Those ones that you linked to should work. They're from a 3rd party seller in china I think. These are not UM approved nozzles and may not be quite as good - for example it actually matters how smooth the bore of the nozzle is - how rough the tool marks are. Here's an old video I made on how to take apart your UM core:

@CarloK - two people with UM3 printers (SCA_B above was one of them) got their printers working again by installing the 4.3.3 version of firmware (using uSD firmware recovery) and then the 5.3.0 version (versions from memory but I think it's correct - you can find the thread by clicking on SCA_B's profile and looking at his recent posts). This helped both of them! The other one showed me his log and he had block errors on mmcblk1p2. It wouldn't mount so the copy step failed. Trying 5.3.0 alone (many times) didn't help - it kept failing when mounting. 1) At least for S5, I thought you told me that 5.3.0 recovery procedure repartitions and reformats? Or at least reformats the partitions? 2) Why did installing 4.3.3 fix it? I thought 4.3.3 didn't do partition or reformatting? My guess: 4.X and 5.X both repartition but only if the partitions are the wrong size (not if there is an error with the mounting command). If I remember right 5.X has a larger partition for p1 (and therefore smaller for p2). There are boot log outputs (from serial cable) over on that other thread.

Thanks for the correction. I was told by a reseller that the Olimex isn't used anymore in the S5 and it's "some other computer". I haven't seen any posts with photos showing the non-olimex S5s. The reseller could be wrong. I assumed the latest UM3s also would have the newer (non-existant?) computer. Or maybe the reseller was talking about the S3? My memory can be a bit sloppy. I try to take notes about these kinds of details all into a single file (easy to find stuff with search) but sometimes I make mistakes. If the user on the forum sticks with it long enough we always get to the truth.

Greg described backwards normals which is different from missing faces. Most CAD software takes care of this automatically but blender is for photos and movies, not for making real life parts so it lets you do things that are impossible to print. Anyway here is a nice blender article about what the issues are and how to fix them in blender. https://www.sculpteo.com/en/tutorial/prepare-your-model-3d-printing-blender/ Read the sections 3.1 - 3.6 and search for "recalculate" to fix inverted faces (aka backwards normals).

Scaling is super simple. So 12 inches is one foot. Average person is 6 feet. So you want probably a 1:6 scaling. If most of the people are actually 5 feet then you probably want a 1:5 scaling. Scaling is the easiest operation. There are so many other pitfalls! In cura just set the scale to 16% (1/6th) or 20% (1/5th). that's it. So you click on the object, select the scale tool, and enter 16% in any of the 3 scaling locations and they are all locked together by default (x,y,z).

That's fantastic. I suspect this *older* version of the firmware recovery procedure formats the partitions! I will add this to my web page on unbricking for UM3 users!

ooh! I just found this: https://www.ultimakernasupport.com/hc/en-us/articles/6426059583899-Clearing-the-Mergers

So Dustin how does one fix it if there is broken filament in the bowden tubes of the MS? Is there a document guiding someone on how to correctly take it apart?

"local echo" is just echoing what you type. If the olimex was working correctly it would print out a prompt each time you hit the enter key and if you type "help" followed by enter key it would spew out lots of information. For some reason the olimex is ignoring the "tty" aka "teletype" aka "serial connection".

I still think you should also mark your servo shafts and your couplers with a tiny mark using a sharpie to be *absolutely sure* nothing is slipping! This is a very very common problem that people deny exists until they are shown proof.