gr5

Yes. This is true. My printer has trained me to always grab that blob and pull it off to the side as it does the skirt. This is the same issue with the UM Original in my experience.

This hasn't happened to me. There is a screw in the top of the feeder. Turn it so that the little white square is near the top (almost as loose as possible). When the white square is down lower the other gear seems to get jammed and it doesn't feed as well.

Yes! Fix this now! You probably don't need any tools. It should turn on immediately when you power your machine - even before the lights come on! Roll back/slide up the black plastic mesh above the print head. This will expose some wires and connectors. The 3 red/black cables go to the fans. The pink/blue one goes to the rear fan. It's either unplugged (likely!) or one of the black/red/blue or pink wires might be loose (give them a gentle tug?). Let me know if you need to know where the other end of the pink/blue cable goes. I have a picture somewhere.

I think it does. Cura detects bridging and usually seems to do the shortest span - I'm not sure if that's always true but it was for my part. The part above was printed with excel, not Cura. Re-read that post. I was thinking the same thing. This might help the shape a bit also. Kind of like pre-stressed beams.

Lots of stringing so... I'd be tempted to print it at 190C and 20mm/sec but... that would probably take a month to print, lol. So I don't really know what I'd do with this one. I think I would start by putting in a larger nozzle! Then print 190C and 40mm/sec. I'm going to try this print on my UM Original with a larger nozzle. I think I will do some stringing tests with the larger nozzle before I print this.

yes. But you can replace just one part and it will be fine with 24V. This was discussed just today in google groups. There are some very smart ultimaker owners over there: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/ultimaker

So the UM prints long lines faster than short because it takes a while to get up to speed (there are acceleration settings). So it seems like if you printed something shaped like a popsicle stick it would print much slower vertically. I don't know if this affects very many parts though. Also when you print something like a scan of something in real life - there tends to be lots of very short line segments with very sharp corners from one line segment to the next. If 0 degrees is no change in direction then angles of 30 degrees are not uncommon so the printer has to slow way way down due to the "jerk" setting (which has a special definition in Marlin by the way). So smoothing these objects can drastically speed up the printing. The printer tends to vibrate and shake like crazy if they aren't smoothed - it comes out fine but it's noisy. A simple way to smooth is to just reduce the qty of polygons: http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/226-polygon-count-reduction-with-meshlab.html But a better algorithm would actually do some smoothing of the noise. meshlab probably can do that also but I haven't played with it much.

They are on ebay here in USA but I would try UM first and if they don't help you, contact "Illuminarti" - send him a personal message. Post #5 above.

Is this visualization going to show a 3d picture of a part and then show a graph that shows "time to print" versus angle? Or do I completely not understand?

Never. The first bridge line was *always* perfect. But then the second line sometimes destroys the first line. I would look at your nozzle tip under a powerful magnifier (or just reading glasses). You may have somewhat damaged your tip. edit: they cost < 5 euros including shipping so don't get too upset if you did.

To clean the filament as it feeds, take tissue paper. Wrap/wind the wrinkled/crumpled tissue paper around the filament near the base of the feeder. Use some blue tape to tape around the tissue to hold it tight. Now run another piece of blue tape from your "cleaner" to part of your ultimaker to keep the cleaner from getting eaten by the feeder. After a week inspect it to see how much it filtered out.

I don't think it's the Z screw - the spacing is about 40/5 or 8mm. This is quite a puzzle! I'm thinking something is happening on the filament maybe at regular intervals. This is a long shot but easy to test: Please print one of those bricks one more time but after it finishes the base pause the printer (with ulticontroller you can pause and then continue - if you don't have ulticontroller just act quickly). Measure out an exact amount of filament (1 meter is good) from where it enters the feeder. Mark the filament with a pen. Then let the printer print 8mm and then stop the printer (just turn it off). Measure how far the filament moved. Then figure out how much filament you used to print 8mm of your "brick". Is it exactly one turn on the spool? Let's assume you used 30cm of filament. Measure the width of the filament with calipers in 10 or 20 different places along 30cm of filament.

Oh! Smart. That could be it also - the symptom is slightly different but almost impossible to see the difference (in both cases it only goes one way). But if you command one move at a time front,back,front,back and the DIR pin is backwards then it will move 4 times in same direction. But if limit switch stuck it will alternate moving and not moving. But only in one direction. Anyway - check the wiring where it may be touching your pulley in the back and front corners of the machine. The pulley may have worn through the wiring and occasionally shorting out the limit switch. As far as the arduinio is concerned it is socketed. No soldering necessary. Just pry it out very carefully and slowly alternating one side, then the other. Use a metal screwdriver or other metal blade that fits when rotated flat but doesn't fit when rotated the other way. Be very careful not to bend any pins and if you *do* straighten them immediately (before you forget) with needle nose pliers. This is very easy to do -- just take your time and be calm. Will only take a minute once you have the right tool(s). The arduino can run powered ONLY with the USB if you desire to connect it up. You can install the firmware without installing it into your UM which might be wise. It might be best to power up your UM with an arduino aware that it is in a UM so that it doesn't set any voltages to anything. So that it doesn't pulse digital signals that shouldn't be pulsed.

Putting that little hole - at that spot - centered on the filament - and so close - makes it very unlikely that the filament will go off the edge. Love that. Clever.

Yes. So if your print has lots of corners and short line segments then obviously it is printing much slower than the requested speed. In every case I could print quite a long distance before pressure got high enough for it to "click" (loose steps). When it *does* lose steps it loses a lot! Also this was in open air. When you press the nozzle close to the print and are trying to extrude into a small area the pressures might be even higher and you might have to print even slower. But I think this is probably not as serious a factor. So you can probably print fully up to the speeds I published.

Okay. So if the code works, then: 1250ma is default stepper current - in another post, Daid said that higher currents than 1250ma didn't pull any harder on the filament. 2/3 of this is applied for when feeding filament (833ma) 2000ma is the max current M907 S255 Sets XY,Z,E currents all to 2000ma M907 E255 Should set just E axis M907 B255 set's some "other" stepper current to 2 amps? WTF? B=Bed? B=Burner? Oh! Maybe this is extruder B? edit: confirmed that "B" is the second extruder when UM gets around to selling this. There is also M908 (not sure why) where you can do more complete control: M908 P1 S255 which sets something to full value but I don't know the "P" (pin) values as Robert didn't include that part. M908 seems dangerous so I wouldn't mess with it. edit: with more info from Robert I see that M908 P0 S255 M908 P1 S200 is the same as M907 X255 Y200

Ah! Of course I should have done that! I will do that when I get a chance. Maybe tonight. Probably not (I play volleyball thursday nights).

That above quote was from clinton over on google groups.

yes! Also: yes - brim is good for this kind of thing.

Yikes. Why bother? Sometimes support snaps off in less than a second as a single piece. Sometimes I have to get the dremel out and spend 20 minutes cleaning even a tiny part. More useful would be to look at the gcode, know the acceleration and jerk settings and calculate the REAL time to print. Right now Cura just assumes every print line segment is printed at the full speed but in reality it accelerates and decelerates at every vertex. Plus retraction takes time - maybe 1 second for each retraction and prime motion. Is this for a college research paper?

There are several things you can do to reduce stringing. Lower temps help: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/1872-some-calibration-photographs/ Slow speeds helps. Change retraction back to 4.5mm and 40mm/sec. 70mm/sec actually moves slower because of a Marlin bug. 6mm is too much and lets in air into the nozzle. Also add this to your extruder to keep the tube from moving up and down at the extruder: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:46157 Try 20mm/sec at 190C? I know that's extremely slow but you are likely to see zero retraction with that setting. You should be able to go much faster depending on the type of filament, layer height, and more. But at 190C you can't squeeze as much filament out so if you want to print faster you might have to increase the temp a bit.

I think it is still printable. Print 3 at once and set "gantry height" in the machine settings to 0 so it prints them at the same time. It will alternate between the 3 prints and the other two will have time to cool. It's the trick I used to print these little people: Also set temp to 190C and print at 20mm/sec and I hope your retraction is dialed in nicely or you might get lots of stringing among the 3 parts.

Both. Daid already had 2 (two!) issues with reading the SD card. The second one hasn't been fixed. Mix in some new brands and ... well... yikes - who knows. You don't want to risk it for any print slower than an hour.

I see that now. I thought maybe you printed closer together in another experiment (.4mm apart) to be more realistic with what Cura does. Didn't realize they would cling together like that even though so far apart.

I did another test tonight. I wanted to determine max extrusion rates. I don't know how to adjust the "trimpot current". See daid's new M907 and M908 codes here: https://github.com/Ultimaker/SecretMarlin I don't know how they work and I don't know if I can increase the stepper current for the extruder. But for now, with Marlin 13.10-5, these appear to be the maximum extrusion rates for the UM2: Here they are in table form: temp max volume max speed with .2mm layers 180C 1.59 mm³/sec 20mm/sec 190C 2.97 mm³/sec 37mm/sec 200C 4.24 mm³/sec 53mm/sec 210C 5.59 mm³/sec* 70mm/sec 220C 7.00 mm³/sec 87mm/sec 230C 8.25 mm³/sec* 103mm/sec 240C 9.54 mm³/sec 120mm/sec * means it was derived but you can see from the graph that it is VERY linear. I got these values by sending extrude commands to the printer. Typically I extruded 5mm to 10mm of filament at different temps and speeds until I found the max speed with no "clicking". For example: G1 F67 E7 Was the max speed I could go with no skipping at 220C. F67 is 67mm per minute or 7mm³/sec. DO NOT TRY TO PRINT OVER THESE VALUES! At least I strongly discourage it. So if you are printing .1mm layer height (and um2 has .4mm nozzle) and you want to print at 220C your max print speed is 7/.1/.4=175mm/sec. But if you are printing .2mm layers your max speed 87mm/sec. If you go over these values you will get lots of under extrusion. This was for the blue ultimaker PLA that came with my UM2. I know I can print a bit faster than this with my UM original so people who are trying to print just as fast a throughput of PLA may have underextrusion issues. Note that at 240C, .1mm layer height you can print up to 240mm/sec without any underextrusion. Other brands and colors of PLA will vary. Plus I think there is a way to mess with the current to the E-stepper (increase it) but I don't know anything about this yet. Daid? The formula to derive these values for any nozzle temperature is: mm³/sec = (temp - 168)*.133 mm/sec = Volume (mm³/sec) / layer height / .4mm (nozzle width)