gr5

No, the slice button is gray. He changes a setting and back again and then he can slice. The 15 second video makes it clear. So the workaround is trivial. Just change *anything* and change it back again. I've also seen this issue. It's so minor I don't even think about it. I barely notice it anymore. I spend more brain cycles trying to find my mouse pointer. But it is a bug.

Here's a guide I made to help choose filaments. You can zoom in with the mouse. There are 2 charts. The first one has to do with the 2 paramaters that usually describe strength. The second chart has to do with temperature and ease of printing. http://gr5.org/mat/ There are gains to using CF or GF. But they are small. If your parts are breaking already then maybe you need to redesign the shape, or use metal (e.g. rods or screws) or fiber or come up with a whole new approach. If you are going to print with GF or CF you really should get a bondtech feeder. First you should understand the relationship between strength and flexibility. What some people call "strong" or "tough" is actually weaker but more flexible and so tougher. the more flexible, the more likely the part can survive being driven over by a car. But if you are using the part only under tension (rare but still), flexibility is not important or helpful and strength is more important. Another way to look at it: stiffer parts tend to be more brittle. Like glass. Steel is an exception. So nylon is slightly weaker but much more flexible than PLA or PETG. So Nylon tends to be extremely durable and tough but it's not good for making gears (too flexible!). Add some glass fibers and you can get the best of both worlds but the GF and CF fill are very small pieces so the added strength and stiffness is not nearly as good as long fibers. You might only get 20% improvement.

Alternatively you can just choose the material in cura. For people with multiple printers this process gets more complicated (I believe). I think the same is true for print cores. I think you can set them to "automatic" (that's what it used to say I think 4 years ago) and that information will then be also loaded through DF.

So I haven't done this in maybe 4 years, but in Cura you can tell it about your printer. Make sure that you are connected to your printer either directly or through digital factory. I don't know exactly how that is done but that is the interface that communicates back to Cura what material to slice for. It used to be, and probably is still true, that when you go to choose your material in the PREPARE screen you can choose something called "automatic". That's what it used to be called. It would automatically load the current material. The printer needs to be turned on I believe and also connected to digital factory I believe. Are you using Digital Factory? Does Cura show that your printer is connected to DF? Or are you using a direct connection?

Yes! You should use the G92 command very heavily. G92 resets any axis (in this case extruder or E) to any value where you say, "I know you think you have extruded 1.5mm of filament so far this print and you think you are at E position 1.5 but you are wrong - you are actually at this new position. Right now.". So once you calculate the needed filament for one line, use G92 for two purposes - at the start of each line do G92 E0 and then you can put the extrusion amount in the line so all the extruding gcodes will have the same E value. Simple. Also after you finish the grid - set the E value to where the printer expected in the original gcode. So if the deleted code ended at position E73.1247 then you can do an G92 E73.1247 at the end of your grid code so the printer extrudes the correct amount going forwards.

It sounds like you don't have a material station as you marked in your profile that you have the S3. So I'm confused as to why color has any meaning. If you had the material station then you want to make sure it selects the correct color. I've never specified a color in Cura so I'm not sure what you are trying to do. I know that you can specify a particular color filament but I never understood the use case for that. So please be more clear. Are you specifying these colors on the printer? In cura? Both? Are you connected to the printer through network directly? Or through digital factory? Where exactly are you seeing the wrong color? And why does it matter (I'm not criticizing - just trying to understand)?

I'm sure on shape is okay. Just Google manifold on shape and learn how to be sure your models are manifold.

Well you will destroy your feeder so: 1) fix it before you destroy it 2) fix it after you destroy it 3) don't print cf (this is my recommendation) If you install the tinkerMarlin firmware then you can adjust steps/mm for the bondtech feeder. In other words, that version of firmware, designed for UM2 will let you change the steps/mm right on the display. All you need is usb cable to update the firmware on UM2. Installing firmware is pretty darn easy. Google about tinkermarlin as I'm going away for a day or two.

By the way, cf filaments will grind down the tip of your nozzle slowly and it will get a HUGE "shoulder" within a few hours of printing and also you will ruin the feeder unless you print pretty slow. The CF will grind down the teeth in the feeder so that it will no longer be sharp. You can get 3rd party upgrades (e.g. bondtech feeder and 3dsolex sapphire nozzles).

Ultimaker 2 wants you to configure the materials on the printer and not in the slicer. go to the UM2 menu and go into the materials screen and save all your profiles to the uSD card. Then load that card on your main computer and edit it - add your own materials with temperatures and fan speeds. Then load the uSD back on the UM2 and load that. Going forward you select the material on the printer, not in cura. That way you slice for all materials once and then you can choose which material to print later, on the printer.

I think this is a problem for all windows software. I think (I really don't know) that all new installers are met with high suspicion by microsoft but if there are no viruses found after a certain amount of time or a certain amount of downloads then the warning goes away. I trust UltiMaker enough to just ignore the warning.

I have a PLA knob on a plexiglass door in my yard. I'm not sure if it gets direct sun but probably at least an hour a day for many months of the year. it is about 10 years old now and it looks like new. No fading. It is gray but it's a vibrant gray (lol). Not a "faded" gray. But if you are selling these, definitely don't use PLA as it can melt during shipping or if left in a car on a very hot day.

I hope you mean "30 degrees from vertical". It's not the sphere that is the problem. The most common test print is called "benchy". It's a cute toy like tugboat. It has a chimney on top. The chimney is difficult because of cooling. Benchy is a "benchmark" print. Anyway, most test prints go beyond what a printer is expected to be capable of - so you know the point where it fails. If part of the print doesn't "fail" or look bad then your test print sucks, lol. Better to just print something you really do need to print and if there is a section that is trouble - make a smaller test print out of that section. I find it takes about 100 prints in PLA before you are pretty good at PLA and know what the printer can and can't do and what settings you may want to tweak. Then it takes *another* 100 prints to get good at Nylon. Sigh. But the UM S5 combined with Cura makes this whole process much easier. But there are always issues. For example with Nylon you have to keep it insanely dry.

Consider leaving holes to insert carbon fiber rods. You can leave these holes in the print, have the print pause at some layer (there is a pause at height plugin - probably the most popular plugin) and then manually insert the rods and have the print continue. Or metal rods. Or other shapes. If you can spread the load to many layers then layer adhesion is less critical. So even adding a long screw with a nut that you can add after the print is done - that doesn't connect anything to anything but just holds the layers together until the part gets wider again - that can add a huge amount of strength. Why go ASA and ABS in the first place? Can't you stick with PLA and PETG which have really good layer adhesion? (because they melt at lower temperatures). And so are therefor MUCH stronger. Typically. People seem to think ABS is stronger but it's about the same as PLA if you print it right and with 90% of printers, PLA is much weaker because of layer adhesion. Are these for high temp prints? How hot will they get? There is HPLA (high temp PLA) that can be annealed in an oven and then can withstand 100C no problem. The problem is they shrink and twist a bit. So you need lots of support structures for when it's in the oven to hold it in place and compensation for shrinkage. 90F is 32C. I'd try to reach 40C. But not much higher if you have stepper motors in that air space. They are rated I think for 80C (actual temp I think? - not air temp). And 40C is reasonably safe but I wouldn't go higher.

The quality of the tilted surface looks typical. Or better than typical. The solution of course is to use PVA dissolvable support and PVA, although normally very difficult to print, is handled well by the S5 if you keep it very dry. If you want quality better than the tilted surface you may be very disappointed with 3d printing in general. At least FFF printing. Mostly I design parts to not have overhangs tilted more horizontal than 45 degrees. The top of the ball looks like it had insufficient cooling. This is VERY common with small objects that stick above the rest of the print. The solution is cooling but if the printer sits there doing nothing off to the side, then you get different issues so you need the printer to keep printing so on those rare parts that have a very small area for the top few layers, I print a second part next to the first that is the same height. It sounds wasteful but if you need many of the same part anyway then you can just print two of the same part. Sometimes I even print 5 of the same part when they are very small - just to get better cooling at the top. 90% of my prints don't have a small area in the last few layers so 90% of my prints I don't have to worry about this.

It looks like line width and layer height didn't make much difference as long as the layer height stayed below .3mm or so. So instead you need to crank up the air temp. Maybe add an air heater as a separate component indepenedent from printer control? Like a heat lamp maybe? If you don't need any fan for overhangs then that is a good indication that the air is too cold. As the parts start to need fan for better overhang quality then you know you got the air hot enough. That's my guess anyway. I've gotten ABS to print quite strong but only in a fully enclosed printer where the air temp was 35-40C. And the ABS needed fan for a nice quality looking print. But just a tiny bit of fan. Something like 1/10th as loud as normal. Maybe raise the nozzle temp by 5C as well?

It's because the glass isn't flat. We are talking about an error less than 0.1mm in the glass. This glass is tempered glass and the way it's made it tends to be higher down the center. Like a mountain ridge running from the rear to the front of the bed. But the shape could be different than that. The leveling is only done on 3 points where the 3 screws are so you end up with nicely leveled in the front corners and rear center but the rear 2 corners tend to be low. It helps to print parts in the very center or in the front half. Usually. But again, the glass isn't flat. It's usually thicker in the middle. The S3,S5,S7 printers do multi-point leveling (not just 3 points) so it compensates for this. But you have a UM3 it sounds like. What's the problem anyway? After printing many layers, does anyone care? Or do you need the center of the bottom of your part to be flat with the corners of the bottom of your print within better than 0.1mm? I don't think you are going to get 0.1mm accuracies on the whole bottom of your part but, or are you just concerned that the first layer looks bad before it is covered up? Once it is covered by the second layer, it looks fine, right? Or are you printing 1 layer parts? I've printed some of those. Basically airplane toys.

I checked out the other time the last time you mentioned it but you only speak about layer adhesion here and I'm not keen on your other ideas. Is the print volume enclosed? Or just the hot end? So some people say you should print thick layers so that molten plastic has more thermal mass and can full melt the layer below. Other people say print extra thin layers so the nozzle heat can reach the layer below. I don't know who is right. so I would try both and do the split test. Print a vertical "pencil shape". Say 1cm by 1cm by 8cm tall. Snap it in half. Score the layer adhesion by how well the break follows layer lines (breaking along layers is bad). I'd love to hear what you learn if you do such an experiment. With different temps for the air, different line widths and different layer heights.

It could well be that one of the chips on the board (or somewhere else) is shorting. Or it could be the power brick. I happen to have an IR camera that can spot hot chips but you could try your fingers. That supply can in theory put out over 100 watts which would make smoke. In practice it probably would detect the short. But still - something might be getting hot enough to feel it. I'm an electrical engineer so I would do two tests: 1) Put a load on the supply. When you first turn things on - when you don't enable heaters or steppers - it should not draw much. Maybe a half amp. So that would be about 50 ohms. That 50 ohm resistor will receive 11 watts so unless it is a high wattage resistor, only power up for less than a second but check the voltage during that half second. Also check to see how hot that resistor gets in one second (hot!). 2) Test the board without the supply: Use an alternate 24V supply that can supply at least 10 watts (not enough for servos and heaters but enough to boot up the rest) 3) Alternatively measure the current. If you have a current meter that can handle 20 amps or so (who does?) then break out the circuit and pass one leg through the ammeter. Expect only about .1 to .5 amps. 20 amps means there is a short on the board. 0 amps means your ammeter just blew it's fuse (happens to me all the time) or the brick is bad.

I'd experiment with lowering the fan. A lot.

What cad software did you use to create this STL file? Usually when cura fills in a void it is because the normals are backwards which is impossible in most CAD software but very easy to do in blender or sketchup. Did you use blender or sketchup? If so google about your cad software and the word "normals" to understand them better. I'm going to be now, otherwise I'd look over your STL. Hopefully someone else will look over your STL later. Oh - there are many other solutions as well - there is a plugin in cura that fixes meshes - you click on the marketplace button I think and it's one of the choices, restart cura and load your stl, right click and you can analyze it and also sometimes it will fix the normals to your liking. Plus other free model repair services out there.

If your print has any anisotropy then something is wrong. This is extremely rare in PLA but common in higher temperature materials due to bad layer adhesion. In fact, at Ultimaker, when they test filaments and profiles, they have a part they print at different temperatures. It looks like a stick with deep notches. You break the stick at each temperature notch and if the break occurs along layer lines - well that's bad. they have a score - how many layer lines the break crosses. If it crosses 0 lines it gets a 0 (bad). 10 lines it gets a 10 (good). Something like that anyway. They use this score along with the temperature, speed, layer height, nozzle width, print speed, fan speed, air temp - to pick the proper settings to avoid "grain" issues. So... what are you printing? You probably have the fan speed too high if you are getting layer line issues. On my printers - if I set the fan speed to 20% or 100% I get the same fan speed. I suspect every printer is different so you have to play with the speeds which you can do live from the touch panel.

The symptoms, when K1 is failing: Can't heat nozzles. Can't heat bed. Can't move any servos. Everything else is "fine". Unless it involves moving a servo or heating something up. For example it can tell you if you changed the print core and what temperature the printcore is at. But of course now you can't get past the welcome screen.

Ah! Okay so you have a problem with the servo's moving. I would guess it's the 24V relay. K1. Well is it still under warranty? Regardless you should talk to your reseller or if you are in USA I'd email support@fbrc8.com with the serial number of the printer in the email. Tell them that the servos stopped moving. Tell them everything. Tell them gr5 says it's probably the servo control board. If it's out of warranty I can tell you the relay to bypass if you are good with soldering. I've fixed K1 before myself with just a jumper wire. If you are good with electronics I can show you how to test if it's K1 or something else and how to repair it. But if it's in warranty then try to get them to send you a new servo controller board (or whatever they call it).