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Does the nozzle heat up okay during this? Double check that please - if nozzle also has trouble then the problem is likely K1. Give it a hard tap. Otherwise it could be a bad connection anywhere in the cable where it isn't quite connected somewhere but connected just enough to supply a tiny bit of current. You should jiggle the wiring all along the path. It could be at the PCB itself. If jiggling the wire doesn't fix it you could tell UM you need a new PCB. Personally though I would diagnose further. Look at the pins on the mosfet. Make sure the signal from the arduino is turning the mosfet on and look at the signal across the mosfet pins when the heater is connected and not connected. Also there could be a bad solder joint so I would just heat up the 4 or so solder joints related to this.

What temperature is the bowden? Are you in a very hot environment? In the hot sun maybe? Please - this is very interesting. PLA gets soft around 50C which I think is too hot for humans to breath. Maybe your printer is completely enclosed? (heated chamber)?

Often when I change filament it won't extrude at all - nothing happens. So I retract about 3mm and then insert again (using move material) and then all is fine! Clearly it is getting caught on something deep inside the head where I can't see. Could this be what happened to you? Some people have this worse than me. They solved it by always filing/cutting the tip of the filament on 4 sides so that it is pointy and won't get stuck on the way to the nozzle tip. I'm too lazy to try that.

I don't understand how melted filament gets into the bowden. Could you explain further? This sounds interesting. Maybe a picture next time it happens?

What do you mean by "engine speed". In Cura the word "Engine" describes the C program that does the slicing. You can see how fast it is by watching the progress bar. By engine do you mean "extruder stepper motor"? With cura ulticode mode, the extrusion speed is set on the ultimaker in the "filament settings" or "tune" menus. With cura reprap mode, the extrusion speed is set by the expert settings.

Smart! I didn't think of that. Insert needle into nozzle hole until it stops due to getting too wide. Use tape or permanent marker to mark how far in the needle went. Then remove the needle and measure with caliper.

I don't think nico needs to repeat his measurement. Extrusion slipped and pressure when to almost zero so since he measured at the skinniest spot this should be good enough.

In the move material menu, spinning the knob moves the filament one direction and spinning the knob the other direction moves the material the other direction. It works for me even when the nozzle is cold last I tested. Although I guess I haven't played with this since I upgraded the firmware to 14.02. Also I believe if you print with ulticode, I think the last thing the um2 does at the end of the print is retract. At least it seems like it.

I thought 60mm/sec sounded very very fast. Unfortunately I am now travelling to NYC (amazing that I can do web stuff on a train) and won't be home until Sunday night. I think you mean .39 to .42, not 3.9 to 4.2, right? Please edit your post and I will remove this line.

In cura do "file" "import profile from gcode". Something like that. Pretty much all settings that can be found in an ini file ("file" "save profile") can be placed in the start.gcode section. So you could save all the settings you care about at the top of the file. That's actually a really cool idea. I don't recommend putting all 100 or so settings there - but the ones you have ever changed would be good.

Remove filament. If in a rush just snap it off. The feeder pops off and you can place inside but I'm not sure it's any better (that's how UM ships prebuilt ones but there's lots of tape and cardboard holding everything in place).

I don't know but you can figure it out in seconds: 1) load a tiny STL file. 2) select "fast low quality print" 3) Save the gcode (or save the settings profile) 4) Switch non quickprint mode You would think at this point it would show the previous settings but it doesn't. 5) in file menu, load the profile you saved or do "load profile from gcode". now all the settings visible are from the quickprint fast low quality mode Another setting you should change for most (all?) prints is to enable retraction.

Please post a screenshot of layer view. I have never seen this.

Before you print it - look at it in layer view with and without spiralize turned on.

Please post a photo!

Yes, definitely. If you set it at .4 I think Cura will treat it like anything between .3mm and .6mm as needed. Oh - now I get it. It's probably a bad slicer. I'm not familiar with simplify3D. Does it have a slice view where it shows how many passes it is making? If not you can install repetierHost (it's free) and drag and drop the gcode on and you can explore each layer and it color codes the extrusion amount and shows all kinds of problems like this that you describe. I think this is the wrong forum to ask about simplify3D - you should see if they already have forum - they will probably know the issue in an instant. Cura shouldn't have the problem you describe as long as you set shell to .4, .8, or 1.2 and if shell is < .8 then also turn on infill to at least 50% but I recommend put shell at 1.2 and it should fill that all in I think - you can check in layer view in Cura what it decided to do. Since Cura takes about 1/100 of a second to slice a cylinder you can try 5 settings changes in 5 seconds. The main settings changes to play with are nozzle size, shell thickness and infill percentage. Yes you can mess with nozzle size a little and it will print fine - I wouldn't go below .35 or above .45 though.

There should be no difference unless there is a bug in Cura. You have to make sure these settings are the same in both modes: bed temp nozzle temp print speed retraction speed retraction distance fan=100% in ultimode on UM (Marlin multiplies to the fan rates together - the rate in the gcode/cura against the fan rate for the selected filament which should probably always be 100% for PLA).

Did you enable brim? It helps quite a bit - it's in the "adhesion" drop down on the first basic settings page. The shrinking is happening because each upper layer shrinks and pulls hard against the lower layers. While still above the glass temp (around 100C) you don't care about the shrinkage because it is laid down as a liquid and will only contract in the shortest dimension (get thinner/skinnier). But once it gets below 100C or so, it pulls in all directions until it cools to air temperature. Because of this: 1) Nozzle temp does not matter (for lifting/curling) - as we only care about temps below 110C. 2) Keeping air temp warm helps quite a bit. The shrinkage from 100C to 20C is double the shrinkage from 100C to 60C. 3) Keeping the lower 5mm above glass temp sometimes helps as it will deform slightly instead of lifting but on the other hand it might not look so good (kind of half melted). 4) Turning off the fan can be very helpful. Some people who print ABS never use the fan. You don't get very good overhangs but also it is less likely to lift. 5) Print speed does not matter. ABS juice is a great thing to try - stick a bunch of leftover ABS filament into a glass jar, fill the rest up with acetone, let it soak for hours and shake it up. Paint this on with a junky paintbrush. Let it dry before printing. Having square corners on your part is a problem - all the force is at one tiny .4mm corner. Brim converts this into a rounded corner and helps hugely. You need perfect brim though - it needs to be squished down onto the glass flat. No gaps in the brim and especialy no gap between the brim and the part. Rounding the corners in CAD might help but brim is even better. Having no bottom surface helps. or running large holes from top to bottom of your part - especially the bottom 10mm helps a lot. This is because there is less shrinking force. Temperature is ciritcal - try 5 and 10C lower and higher than what you've tried before. Personally I would do an experiment where you print the bottom 1mm of the UM robot with different surfaces and different temp. Abort the print after 1mm and try to pry it off.

You turned on spiralize! Turn that off. I've never used that. That is for only very very specific prints and only works for very very limited shapes and it turns off infill (overrides lots of settings). It will also make your nozzle over extrude by 2X if you ask for .8mm wall because it only does one pass. It's only to be used for cups and vases and only certain shaped ones - For example it will not work for a coffee mug due to the handle. Spiralize is of extremely limited use.

It's the red/yellow/black twisted wire that's the problem. That is your temperature sensor. It's not going through the "F" shaped black strain relief. By now it is too late and there is an open (likely) in one of those 3 wires near the connector (or inside the connector). The simplest thing you can do is swap it with the other unused cable hanging there and this time put it through the F connector. Of course you need to find the other end of these 2 wires underneath your UM and swap them there also. Cura generates a file with the extension ".gcode". Find the file. Open it and look at it. Go here and read about the 5 or so codes found in that file. Read the comments (e.g. layer 1, skirt, etc). Pay particular attention (or search for) the letter Z meaning height. E is extruder. Here are explanations for all the gcodes although only 5 or 10 are actually used to make a print: gcodes for Marlin (and a few other firmwares) great reference: http://reprap.org/wiki/G-code scroll way down to the gcodes on this page: https://github.com/ErikZalm/Marlin/ I plan to one day write up a detailed explanation for how to continue a print. Unfortunately my instructions above are all I can offer now. I need to spend a few hours making screen shots and explaining every little detail even though most of it is very simple to do. The instructions need to work for UM1 and UM2 and for people with or without an ulticontroller and so on. They need to work even if the part is in the way of being able to home (there are more tricks if you don't have room to home without hitting the part). But not today. Sorry.

I also have UM Orange so that's a good choice.

Are you asking what temperature most people print at? Or are you asking about the part itself? It's a PT100 RTD. That means it is 100 ohms at 0C. Here is a table: http://www.intech.co.nz/products/temperature/typert.html

well - or the way the filament is mounted and fed to the extruder maybe? Is that really the extruder that is the issue or the way the filament reaches the extruder? Although your design with the open extruder bottom seems to blame the problem and fix on the extruder. I love that idea by the way. It's just semantics I suppose.

If you do the above test nico I will repeat it on my machine. Publish the temp and speed used in pronterface and please use the UM light blue filament as we both seem to have that. Do you have micrometer accurate to .01mm? I think I have one somewhere that screws.

The photos are very useful but ONLY if you add temperature. Could you please add the temperature you were printing at? If you changed temp throughout the print you could maybe post the final temp where it failed or show with arrow which layer it was at which temp. Your post showing temperature and max print speed is very useful, thanks! I will be referring to it quite a bit! 10mm^3/sec is what I consider very fast. This test is designed to fail. The person who created this test probably didn't expect the printer to reach above 5mm^3/sec. I don't think the UM Original can do much better - many people can't print 10mm^3/sec on the UM Original.