gr5

You can leave bottom layer at .3mm I would also increase the flow a bit next - maybe 30 or 50%.

I've never noticed this - I'm kind of surprised. How much bouncing are we talking about? What infill percentage are you using? I'm using 20-24% usually - at 25% the algorithm changes drastically. Obviously one fix is to use 0% infill. I have found that works much better than one would think. Instead of clipping you can raise the nozzle to 240C and lower the speed to 10mm/sec and it will melt those "peaks" down just fine. You could do that from the tune menu ever 10 layers or so or create a plugin that does this automatically. But I've never seen these peaks as an issue. A MUCH bigger issue is when you have overhangs you get raised edges - sometimes as much as a whole millimeter. The head can hit these raised edges and knock the part off the bed.

Please also indicate that you have a UM2 and what country you live in on your profile. This information affects the advice you will get on this forum as support options vary from country to country and the names of products and where to get them (like rubbing alcohol) vary also.

This has many names - such as "feeder skips". It's by design. The current sent to the feeder is purposely reduced such that it will skip back before hopefully before grinding the filament. On the UMO it tends to grind the filament. As a result you get gaps for several seconds where it's not printing much. The normal fix, for a working printer, is to print a bit slower or a bit thinner layers or a bit hotter. Although it's possible your printer is defective. In general this issue is called underextrusion. Anyway if you have the nozzle hotter, the plastic is less viscous and you can pass more volume of plastic through the tiny nozzle. At lower temperatures you can pass less. It's not recommended to go over 240C for PLA. Here are top recommended speeds for .2mm layers (twice as fast for .1mm layers): 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.

If the holes *aren't* visible in slice view I have totally different advice by the way so please answer that question.

Are the holes visible in cura slice view? If not ignore this whole post. If so don't even try to print it until they are mostly filled in visually in cura. To do this you might want to print with a wider font (bold letters?) or you can reduce the nozzle size by a bit. For example I often lie and say the nozzle is .35mm and set shell to a multiple of that (ALWAYS DO THAT) such as .7mm shell. Then check it again in slice view to see if it looks better. As you change the nozzle width in cura from .4mm to .3mm the quality gets a little worse but it is probably worth it for you needs here. Also consider increasing the flow a bit - maybe 150% - especially on the top layers.

I'm not sure exactly what your problem is. There could be a nozzle clog, a bowden tube clog, or the filament may be ground down in the feeder. Be aware that you can always just cut power and start over. I don't remember what the very first power sequence on a new printer looks like anymore - I think it wants you to level the bed maybe? Or load filament? It's only been a few weeks since I did this but I forget already. lukem you can call customer support - they are very good at this kind of thing. Anyway if power is off and head is still hot (over 180C) then you should be able to cut power and just pull the filament out the bottom of the feeder. If it breaks you can remove the bowden tube from one or both ends. The bowden is the clear plastic tube. To remove at the feeder end is much easier. To remove at either end remove the small colored horse shoe clip. Then push down hard on the part that was being held up by the clip and pull up on the bowden at the same time. If you don't push down hard enough there are tiny metal blades in the clip that will scrape your bowden. If/When putting it back together at the print head you want it pretty tight so loosen the 4 screws 2 full turns, then insert the bowden, then lift on the part that holds the bowden in place while tightening the 4 screws again so the bowden is secure - when inserting the bowden also look inside the head from the front and make sure it is seated nicely inside the white teflon part. Most parts are strong and you can push or pull on the filament with up to about 10 pounds or 5kg of force safely - enough to lift the printer off a table.

Is the 3rd head fan working on your printer? The one in the back? If not you will get these exact symptoms. Another possibility is that the filament is expanding into some part of the head path - perhaps your isolator (the white teflon part you can see with the spring pushing down on it) as deformed (shrunk) enough for filament to get in there and melt/expand and get stuck when it is solid. Replacing the isolator might fix your problem. Have you printed several hundred hours yet? Do you tend to print hotter than 240C? The teflon part can warp/burn slowly and it happens especially fast at 250C and hotter.

@streuner - did you get this figured out yet? Did you try: 1) Squish bottom layer more 2) ABS juice 3) turn off fans 4) 100C or even 110C 5) cover top 6) cover front 7) at least 260C (at least for first layer) 8 ) Brim feature in Cura ?? Once you get good at a new material (ABS) you will eventually find it incredibly easy to get good results.

With default settings your "walls" need to be .8mm wide as minimum. A quick workaround in your case is to set your nozzle width to .35 and your shell width to 0.7 (for two passes on the normal parts). Even though you have a .4mm nozzle it will work "okay" at .35 extrusion (12% underextruded - 12% less than normal plastic coming out and also lines are 12% closer together - all lines - infill - everything). Always check in layer view to see how it will come out. If you can get those thin walls with .38mm then all the better. But always always make shell width an integer multiple of nozzle wicth.

@coen - don't assume you have to get everything at HK. Their prices are amazing until you go to the shipping page where if you are ordering from a HK in a different country the shipping can add 50% to the price! When you include shipping, other sellers are often cheaper than HK. You don't need a power controller board but your flight controller needs 5V so I ended up buying a little module that solders into the power line and in addition to creating the 5V it also supplies my APM with current draw information which isn't critical but nice. Did you check that the ublox is compatible with your flight controller?

The UM2 shouldn't need belt tighteners - there are belt tighteners *inside* the blocks. But they only tighten one side. To get the tension to travel to the other side you have to loosen the pulleys and let the tension distribute and then retighten. The belt tighteners inside the um2 blocks are basically the same springs one finds on a clothes pin. I thought the umo and um2 had the same belts but I'm not sure.

I got the "x1" for $40 as recommended by many expert quad pilots because it is tough as hell and flies well both indoors and outdoors. When you get your toy, after you feel really good at it, try having it pointing towards you until you can (without thinking) always move away from obstructions in a panic instead of towards them, lol. Also practice sideways where it is facing 90 degrees to the direction you are facing. In fact you should probably do that first from my experience. Get really good at "sideways" orientation (landing taking off, repeatedly, on small targets, thnigs like that). Later fly it mostly above you. When flying outdoors I have the most trouble with things like when it is right overhead and I need to rotate myself as it is drifting in a direction I can't see anymore. Or forgeting which way is the front of the copter. Or when it gets in the sun - I had a crash due to the sun recently. Fortunatly it was my X1 and it survived fine after a 15 minute search for the battery.

Waderoid - clearly the blue cube has no underextrusion. Yet the orange part earlier did. So you likely printed them at different layer height, temp, or speed. Are you trying to make a point about the horizontal lines on the cube? Those are unrelated to the underextrusion on the orange part. Not sure if you want to "fix" this - if you do then maybe start a new topic.

I think you should have voted 2 posts above as the best answer.

I'm not sure that there is a problem. The bed holds it's position for months of printing without needing re-leveling even though sometimes I have to wack the parts off the bed using my palm as a hammer and a putty knife to apply the pressure with enough force to slide the printer a foot across the table.

That last poster - gr5 - ignore him! He didn't watch the movie. But *I* just watched the movie and it's something else. Not sure what. It seems to happen once per rotation of either the motor or the pulley on the other end of that short belt. When power is off push it back and forth and try to figure it out. That's a new one on me.

It's probably not serious but you should fix it at some point. There are 4 rods in the outer edges around the top of the machine. I think one of them is sliding back and forth a few mm. The next time it is printing put your fingers on the ends of each of the 4 rods and see if they move a little bit. Once you identify the loose one memorize which of the 4 rods. Later when nothing is happening you need a 2mm hex wrench (don't use inch measurements or you could strip it) preferably a 2mm hex wrench with a screwdriver handle but the L shaped wrenches are fine. Also the ones with the ball end are even better. Push the rod both ways and decide which way is better. On the side that is now loose you want to loosen the pulley that the long belt goes over - then slide that outward against the side of the printer and retighten - tighten the hell out of that one - it was obviously not tight enough the first time. The wrench should twist a bit with the force.

Looking at that photo of the orange part - it tells me many things. You x,y,z looks perfect. Don't bother with the Y belt - it's fine. However you have underextrusion (pretty severe - maybe 50% of the filament requested) in the lower third. There's lots of things that can cause underextrusion. Your nozzle may need many atomic pulls after printing woodfill. Or other possibilities. Here are top recommended speeds for .2mm layers (twice as fast for .1mm layers): 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. If you are printing at these speeds/temps/layer height and seeing this kind of major underextrusion then something is wrong and we can move on to possible solutions and tests (other than cleaning nozzle which is only one of about 20 things that can cause underextrusion - the next most likely would be your ptfe isolator).

I've never tried to autotune the bed. In bang-bang mode (P=infinite I=0 D=0) it keeps a very steady temperature. But some people reported problems with bang-bang mode where their nozzle (go figure?) changed temp too much. So I recommend you stick with PID mode for the bed and not alter the existing PID values. They work fine. My bed can get up to 100C in a 20C room but has trouble getting to 110C. Sometimes it never quite reaches 110C. If I put a box over the top and cover the front then it can get to 110C no problem (and the ambient air inside is around 50-60C). There two different gcodes to change the bed temp - one is "do it and return now" and the other is "do it and don't accept more gcodes until you reach the temp". Possibly pronterface used the wrong gcode? It seems unlikely and I *thought* I've messed with bed temp and nozzle temp at the same time with pronterface but I'm not sure.

Also sometimes people pull out the SD card before the gcode is completely copied onto it and so it prints only part way through.

If you are printing multiple objects "one at a time mode" then when it finishes a tall piece it then goes back down to print the next peice but your parts is tall enough that when the bed is all the way up it will hit the gantry. So Cura automaticaly (and correctly) switches you to "all at once mode". This has nothing to do with printing only half way up and stopping. This is totally unrelated. On the top right corner there is an icon - click that and switch to layer view - see if it only plans to print "half way up". If so then there is something wrong with your model. Maybe it is too thin or maybe it has holes or extra internal walls that confuse Cura. Also switch to XRAY view - anything that is red is a problem - red means a line passing from your eye through the part passes through an odd number of walls/faces. That means something is wrong - you have non-solids in your model.

I have assembled 2 so far. I was asked to just print the parts this time which was welcome request for me because the printing is easier than the assembling. They will be used at an "assembly party" I am told.

robotfuzz is incompatible with the pt100 found in the heated bed. However you can use this marlin builder: https://bultimaker.bulles.eu/ Unfortunately it has MANY fewer options :( To make a dump of your current firmware you need to know what version it is. I don't remember if you can determine it on the ulticontroller. You basically have to know where the hex file is that created it. You can get tons of old firmware versions from all the old curas here: http://software.ultimaker.com/old/

It's almost always the pulley on one of the motors - I can't see it very well in the photo but I think it moved in the Y direction, correct? Towards the front of the machine? So it's the motor on the back left corner. Remove the metal cover that hides the Y motor (only one screw holding it on) and push the head around until you can access that set screw. Then tighten the screw on the other end of that belt while you have the tool in hand. The pulleys on the long belts rarely are the problem but occasionally are the problem.