gr5

Some/many UM2's are built in USA and shipped from USA but I don't think the HBK is.

Experiments are good!

Adding supports definitely works. You only have to support the corners. So if it's an upside down pyramid you can have 4 diagonal walls supporting the corners only and it works great. It only has to touch occasionally - say once per mm. The problem is the "rubber band effect" where the liquid filament is cooling and shrinking and it sticks to itself so that you are laying down a liquid string that is under tension and telling it to go around a corner so I don't think: jerk,acceleartion will help I'm not sure that anyone experimented with layer height - that's one of the simplest things to try. Maybe someone did. Duplicate outlines also has some merit - although I suspect it would give it 2 times to make things worse (the problem tends to get worse each time, not better). Reversing the fan seems to me the equivalent of turning off the fan. One property of fans (and blowing versus sucking) is that when you blow there is momentum to the air and it goes relatively straight. When you suck there is no momentum and the air comes from *all* directions. This means the airflow is not where you want it. I've always been amazed at how poorly "sucking" works with fans whether they be window fans or other. This video and diagram demonstrates that nicely - look at the blue arrows in the diagram or watch the 38 second video: http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/exp/jet-powered-rotor/

I recommend you create the gcode with Cura and then use pronterface/printrun. I have no idea what that log might be saying but the UMO and UM2 don't do to well with USB printing. In fact it's not officially supported on UM2. And I assume RigidBot has Marlin and uses arduino. So I recommend trying a different program to send the data (gcode). Also consider trying a different USB cable and a different computer. Or add a USB buffer of some sort to boost the signal. Or run the USB cable in a different path (away from EM interference - away from electronics and fluorescent lights). printrun/pronterface/prontrface download: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~kliment/printrun/

Ah - I get it now. e3d nozzles. Well pm-dude is in canada - not so far. I can probably ship to him. And melkolo is in USA. So I'm willing to pay for 10 if you promise not to sell any in North America until I unload those 10. I'll pay for them up front through paypal when you are ready to ship. After the first 10 if things work out well maybe I can expand my shipping department. Or maybe I'll decide it's not something I want to do. One of my worries is that it will leak around the nozzle threads. Regarding what UM is doing - I've seen their new nozzle designs and they are going in so many different directions there's no way to tell where they will end up. They are doing so many experiments with completely different designs. Anything you can imagine they are trying it out and running into problems with every way they go. I don't think they will have anything for at least 6 months. But I don't know. I'm pretty sure that even none of the UM employess know if the next nozzle will be quick change or not. Will be all metal or not. Will be able to handle 300C or not. Will be flexidrive driven, or not. Will support PVA or not. Will support other nozzle sizes or not. Will need an entirely new head. Or not. Will be custom nozzle depending on material or not (the melt zone moves depending on the glass point of the material so with ABS you can have longer bronze section near the tip but that's bad for PLA - or maye I have that backwards). It's just all up in the air.

Obviously there is a HUGE difference between the photo in post #4 and #9. It looks to me like a huge improvement. You gto rid of the pillowing completely. There are hundreds of printing issues. Please don't confuse the 2 issues above with each other. I'm pretty sure any problems in post #9 is completely different than issues in post #4. I doubt there will be any difference between printing at 210C versus 203C. Also printing 40% infill should be unnecessary. I usually print 20% infill and never get pillowing. The 30mm/sec and the .1mm layer is what I believe fixed the pillowing. Now what is the problem with your latest print in the latest photo above? Is it the central area that is a problem? Or the border? I have to say that I have no idea what is going on at the border. That looks like infill for walls that haven't been printed yet. Is that correct? I'm going to guess that's not the problem, right? So the problem is in the center area? Can you explain the problem better please because it looks like a huge improvement over photo in post #4.

What kind of printer do you have? (it doesn't have to be an ultimaker - it's okay). I'm thinking something might be wrong with your feeder where it is turning the wrong way? Or more likely there is a bug with the skipinfill plugin. It probably isn't properly keeping track of extrusion amounts. But I've never looked at it. Are you able to print just fine with retractions when you don't use the plugin?

Oh! Of course that won't change until the slicing is done *and* the gcode file is read back in by the gui. So explain again what you want? You want to be able to slice once and then look at the sliced view and then... change some parameters without losing the view of the old sliced layers? Because you like to change maybe one parameter without restarting the slice right away? Please explain to me the work flow that means you want to change parameters and still see the earlier layer view at the same time.

Oh - I can also change other parameters during all this time. There's zero delay. Not even 1/4 second (less than that I probably can't get my mouse to the next parameter to change).

I loaded the skull - very big model. I couldn't scale to 1.6 (too big for my platform) so I scaled to 1.4X. That thing takes a long time to slice - more than a minute. Anyway it took maybe 3 seconds (slow!) to scale it but then everything was fine. I can change the layer thickness and the progress bar restarts but you hardly notice. I can rotate and look around the model during this time. There's no delay. Visualization never stops. I can rotate, pan, zoom, all before the progress bar has moved one pixel. And while the progress bar is moving some more I can still rotate around the model in "normal view". I think you found a bug, bot. And the cool thing is this wouldn't have been discovered if Cura didn't have the "auto slice" feature. I know you experienced great pain but your pain will help many other people who experience the same bug once it is fixed. Do you use linux, windows, or mac? What version OS? Do you have a virus scanner? Something is probably slowing down the launch of the executable (CuraEngine.exe on windows) which is done I believe in the same thread as the GUI unfortunately.

@anders - this is very cool. To do it right you should sell a .25 or .3mm nozzle as well and a .6 to .8mm nozzle also. Selling 3 nozzles would be amazing. Also the "shoulder" - the flat part around the hole needs to be about 3X the diameter of the hole. So a .4mm nozzle should have about a 1.2mm diameter flat. A .25mm nozzle should have about a .75mm flat. And a .7mm nozzle would have a 2.1mm flat. If you can get me 3 sizes of nozzles and the basic heater part for 100 Euro, then I'm in. This advantage of quick change is great. In fact I'll be your USA distributor if you want. P.S. I noticed that the length of the .4mm hole is shorter in your design - this is a fantastic feature. The pressure drop (friction) increases linearly by length - if you can make the length half as long then that will make the feeder motor not have to work so hard and you will get less chances of slipping, underextrusion.

The "shell move" points where it moves to the outer shell and then back in for each "island" on a layer can be made invisible if you print real slow like 20mm/sec and keep your non-extruding moves fast - like 200mm/sec. If you don't have patience for a beautiful print, there's no way right now to keep them in one spot but earlier versions of Cura I believe keep them all in the back left area and you can rotate your part so that area is on an unimportant section of your part. Starting cura 13.05 has the new slicer (much faster). The moving "retraction points" is quite recent. Try version 13.12 it's well after the UM2 came out so it will have ultigcode but I think it's older than the "moving retraction points". All of these versions work quite well and bugs tend to be pretty minor - I mean tens of thousands of beautiful, successful prints were made with all of these "old" versions (but don't update your firmware!): http://software.ultimaker.com/old/

I don't know what bot is talking about. I can have a part that takes a few minutes to slice but that doesn't matter as I can change a parameter and it seamlessly, invisibly starts slicing again. Sure the little progress bar is annoying but I don't think that's bot's problem. @bot, @peggyB - what the hell are you talking about??!!?? I think your words are complaining about a feature but you are actually experiencing a bug. I don't know what that bug is but it sounds like you are experiencing a bug that most people don't experience. Or at least that I don't experience. When the autoslice feature first came out there were TONS of complaints and quickly it turned out that all of them were BUGS and not the autoslice feature. There was a bug related to firewalls blocking the slice process that slowed down the gui. There was a bug related to... maybe SD cards? Or network drives? There was a MAC bug or two. I suspect there is still a bug that a few people are experiencing (bot, peggyB). Or maybe it's this bounding box problem but I haven't experienced it even with models that take well over a minute to slice. So lets concentrate on the BUG and not the FEATURE. Also bot don't get so riled up by Daid. He's just playing with you. He really *is* a nice person despite what he says and he *is* making improvements (pink unicorn) on this very issue (just not the way you think is the best way). Unfortunately it may be months before pink unicorn is out.

Also it's neither stronger nor stiffer than regular PLA. But it is a fantastic color: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/7575-strength-of-different-filaments/

@u2fletch - it's great that you narrowed down your issue and have a work around but I've done a 30 hour print with 109k retractions (that's half a kilometer!) no problem. So eventually you might want to figure out what's going on - I suspect the extruder motor is hotter than mine. @mariem Chrisp's comment implied that "this is not your problem" but it could still be contributing. I still recommend you try taking apart the head as he suggests. Also: 1) Do you have lots of retractions? As u2fletch says it increases the risk of grinding/flattening even though my printer is fine. 2) I still recommend removing the back left cover (only 2 screws) and blowing a window fan on the feeder from the front of the machine - it makes a huge difference for some and narrows down the problem so we don't have wildly varying theories. 3) You possibly do have some kind of partial clog or restriction in the nozzle or head so taking it apart would be wise as you might learn something. Particularly consider burning out the nozzle with gas flame so it's once again nice and clean and consider sliding a piece of filament through the white section (the isolator) to see if there is any resistance there. If so you can order a new one or simply drill out the existing. The isolator tends to get deformed after many months of use.

It would certainly be nice if Cura displayed the volume of filament your print will be printing for the given speed and also highlight in red if it is over maybe 7mm^3/sec and flash red if over 10mm^3/sec and be yellow if over 5mm^3/sec and green if under 5mm^3/sec. Then also you should be able to click on it and it should jump to 5mm^3/sec and lower your speed accordingly (or leave speed alone if already < 5mm^3/sec).

Don't use kapton tape! Glass is a huge improvement over kapton tape. Add a very thin layer of PVA glue and dilute with water. I use wood glue but glue stick works great if you wet a tissue and spread the glue out very thin until it's invisible. Hairspray also has PVA in it. And heat the bed to 50C for PLA. 110C for ABS.

I don't think that's it. Pink Unicorn has some major changes and is not even in alpha test let alone beta test. There *is* a place to download the compiled versions somewhere but I forget where. Here's the source code: https://github.com/daid/Cura2

There are no Z seam lines created by Cura because the Z movement happens on an inner layer. Howerver there *are* lines where the movement goes from the inner shell to the outer shell. You can make this almost invisible if you print very slow such as 20mm/sec and it's pretty hard to see even at 35mm/sec. But the only way to eliminate it 100% is with spiralize which ONLY works for cup shaped objects - objects that have a very thin wall and no top yet *do* have a bottom. This is an extremely limited number of objects but includes cups, vases, pencil holders. It does *not* include things like coffee mugs which have handles. Or pretty much anything not cup shaped.

Usually I only get the nozzle hitting the layer below when there are overhangs and only in those regions. There is a lot of discussion. There are a few possible fixes - the most common and most successful is more fan. But I suggest you read over some of this: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/4094-raised-edges/ Look at the first picture in the first post to see if this is the same problem you have. Then skip right to "page 2" and look at foehnstrum's video and read all the posts after that possibly. It's not until around post #39 and later that we really begin to understand what causes the issue. That video was important and looking with "reading" glasses.

It used to work (even though not officially supported). I wouldn't be surprised if the feature was removed recently. There's just too many problems associated with USB printing. Anyway you could try an older version of Cura but I recommend printrun/pronterface (it's free). Or octoprint on a rasberry pi and you now have a network printer.

There's 2 possibilities: 1) Your model is bad. 2) You have some of the "fix horrible" checkboxes checked. So first check that you don't have any of the "fix horrible" checkboxes checked. I think "type A" is checked by default. It's in the expert settings. If this doesn't help you can play with the other checkboxes in fix horrible. To see the mistakes in your model do "xray view" instead of layer view or normal view. Anything in red is an area that has an extra wall or a missing wall (a hole). Consider using cad software (like design spark mechanical, orscad, solidworks or hundreds of others) that *only* allows you to create manifold 3d parts (unlike sketchup where it starts out with a 2D person which is nothing like reality or real parts).

I assume he will have 2 printers so there's no need to rush. I still have the stock feeder (1 year now) and it works great.

Oops. We've met. Now I remember. Sorry I didn't recognize your icon! I mean I recognized it but I forgot what it means - once I remembered the strap-around-finger iphone product it all came back to me! By the way - UM2s are pretty easy to sell on ebay.

1) Some people have grinding issues due to the feeder servo getting too hot and softening the PLA. Especially in warm climates except that you are currently in a cold climate, right? Anyway some brands of PLA are much softer. Did you change filament recently? 2) Another possibility is that you are getting near the end of your spool and the curvature of the filament makes it difficult to get through both the bowden and the isolator inside the head. 3) With the recent firmware change in Marlin (have you changed firmware before the grinding started?) there is a change in the temperature stability of the nozzle. When the nozzle gets too cold you can get grinding. I have a few other theories but these 3 seem most likely.