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This is a horrible description. You should draw it out. Is the "board" the heated bed board? Or is it the board under the ultimaker? Negative and ground are usually the same thing. So wtf is going on? + should be connected to adj+. Connecting "negative" whatever that is to "adj+" sounds very very wrong and may be your only issue. Please draw out what you describe above on paper and photograph it. Please clearly distinguish the "board" under the ultimaker from the heated bed itself. Which of these negatives and grounds are on the UM board and which are not?

And if you want to upload an STL (the 3d format most commonly used for 3d printing), the favored place is youmagine.com.

Yes - rim-of-bowl down is probably a great idea.

I have this problem all the time when I print something of this shape. I don't know what to do. It is caused by the plastic on the upper layers shrinking and pulling. It will lift the edges of your bowl and the printer will hit it. Usually the solution for me is to just make sure it sticks very well to the print bed. THAT I am an expert on. So if your problem is that the part came off the bed then I can help you. But if your problem is trying to reduce how much the nozzle hits the part - let me know if you figure it out. You might need a heated bed or even a heated chamber. If the part is simply ugly you could reduce flow to maybe 30% during this part of the bowl and then increase gradually to 100% as the walls get more vertical. Let us know if you figure it out. Other things that help is support structure - sometimes I put support structure into the CAD model - posts to help hold things down. This doesn't work though for a bowl shape. It helped when I printed out some propellers though - I only had to hold down the outer edge with a thin support. Recently it seemed like I had WORSE problems with lower temperatures but this was just a single print - I didn't test it very well. I'm thinking of doing tests to try to reduce this shrinking lifting. Also less infill helps a great deal but with a bowl I assume the part is hollow so you can't print with any less than that.

That would make sense but he has the problem even at 10mm/sec! And it's not any better at 10 then at 20. No -- I think it's temperature related. Please please - use Cura - set the temp to 180C and let it sit for 20 minutes. Come back and look at the graph. This was what I wanted you to do the first time. This is what Robert suggested. This was the VERY FIRST SUGGESTION and it's the only one that makes sense to me at this point. I spent a lot of time thinking about your issue. Did you spend much time reading all the responses and thinking about them?

Correction - Ian is one of the happiest, craziest and creative people on the net.

1) When you ran first run wizard did you choose "ultimaker2" or "ultimaker original"? 2) Did you install a new marlin? It looks to me that your steps/mm is wrong such that it is moving half the distance it should be. Try moving exactly 10mm and see how much it moves. There are software endstops in Marlin meaning it will not go farther than 20.5cm. But if the steps/mm is off by 2x then this explains what you see (only goes to the middle).

Well Sander should be back in the Netherlands today and he probably has too many tickets to get through and other business and meetings and things to do but hopefully this week he will put out a new schedule if it has changed since his last schedule.

If you guys are going to report a bug Daid is more likely to look into it if you provide a screen shot of the layer view that demonstrates the problem along with explaining what you set nozzle size and shell to. If you make a little extra effort, then maybe Daid will also.

It can't be. Look at the first photo again. I already tried to explain that it can't be the filament.

I only have the UM original but I'm pretty sure there is no locator. In fact it is recommended not to file any of the rods flat as supposedly that is worse then standard "perfect" rods. So just loosen that grub screw and slide the pulley so that the belt is straighter. Then of course tighten the heck out of it so it stops moving around.

Find out at what temp your heat block boils water. Set it to 90C, then increase by 5C until it boils. It should boil around 95C to 105C. If outside that range something is wrong with your temperature measurement system. It could be the wiring, it could be the small electronics board on you print head. It's usually not the thermocouple - but sometimes even that can go bad. If the print head is just always 20C hotter than you could live with it and always print at 180C instead of 200C. If you go any lower than 180C you will occasionally go below 170C which halts the movement of the extruder. Note that there is a spare cable for the temperature measurement. You can just switch to the other connector (at both ends - the print head and the board underneath).

I agree. That's why I almost always set the speed in Cura to 100mm/sec. The number on the UM2 (and UM original) shows the "feed rate %" which is a multiplier. Normally it is 100% at the start of every print.

But I really doubt that this is caused because it's too hot. I don't see this on my prints and I tend to oscillate between printing fast at 240C and slow at 190C.

So Jet - what is your favorite 3D modeling software?

I'm going to assume that the *back* of the scull was printed first (on the bottom). YOu have some *serious* unsupported overhang there. That's difficult to print. For a bust or skull you probably want to print the flattest possible surface down. And the bottom of things printed often looks worse so for this skull I would consider printing in the "normal" up/down position. The rest of that skull has tons of bumps on it - it looks like crap. Try cutting the print speed in half to see if those go away: See this photo of this pumpkin with similar (maybe?) bumps: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/1872-some-calibration-photographs/?p=24010 If you are using these for cold casting you can use sandpaper or metal files to remove bumps, and bondo to fill in gaps. You can use a solvent to hide the layers although like Illuminarti says, that's much easier with ABS. Check out this nice finished print: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/467-post-your-latest-print/?p=18661 posting #541 Scroll through all the prints in there - some of them are amazing and you can't tell they were 3d printed It takes a few weeks of printing and experimenting and reading the forum to get your cura settings dialed in for your particular needs. You can certainly do much better than that skull.

How slow? I found no difference between 50mm/sec and 100mm/sec. Did you look at my photo in my post above?

Read about pid controller on wikipedia. It explains how to tune yourself and how it all works. If the temp is unstable you want to decrease P, and/or I or increase D. So increase D or decrease P or decrease I. Usually P is the culprit but it depends how slow these cycles are. For a quick test, cut both P,I in half. Try that. If that isn't much better, try doubling D. These values can be way way off (by a factor of 10) and it might still work pretty well. In fact D isn't really needed as much as the other values and can in theory be 0. The latest version of Marlin and Cura 13.06 or so and newer have these really cool features which graph the contributions from P,I,D so you can see what is going on. But you can't use the Marlin that comes with Cura you need to get it from here: http://marlinbuilder.robotfuzz.com/ And I don't know how to turn show this stuff in Cura. You might have to edit configuration.h and enable something. Not sure.

Why is this pinned? This is pretty old. The UM Original and UM2 have different versions of Marlin now. For UM Original the easiest place to get the bleeding edge Marlin - well it's a month old maybe but it has been tested on UM Original and is much more recent than the version that comes from Ultimaker: http://marlinbuilder.robotfuzz.com/ This replaces Daid's marlin builder but it was written by someone in the community - not a UM employee. The source code for the UM Original and for the above link is from here: https://github.com/ErikZalm/Marlin Although Bernhard K seems to be the main person contributing right now? Anyway ErikZ is basically the primary source from and for the reprap community. The UM2 Marlin source code is in this repository: https://github.com/Ultimaker/SecretMarlin

This is very bizarre. This experiment where you printed slower and faster blows out all my theories (filament gets wider and skinnier, Z screw issues, slicer issues). Maybe you should repeat that experiment in reverse in case the problem had nothing to do with the speed and it was a coincidence. Anyway, assuming it really changes with speed the only thing I can think of is temperature. The time it takes to go from 210 to 190 is much too fast to make any difference in the pattern. The problem is most likely related to flow of plastic. It's extruding less in the skinny sections and more in the fat. Temperature cycles explain this perfectly. Print using the cura window instead of the Ulticontroller and look at the graph of the temp. Time the bumps/waves in the temperature graph and also time how much time it takes to print from one "bulge" on your part to the next. See if they roughly agree. Also to eliminate fan issues you might want to turn it off as an experiment. I would recalibrate the PID values. Actually I would get pronterface and figure out what the current values are. Pronterface is free. When it first connects to your UM it prints out lots of values including the PID values. You can see my values in this screen shot: Oscillation is very common in PID controllers. Larger values of P or I increase oscillations. D decreases. I wouldn't touch D though but it is quite safe to cut P or I (or both) in half. The only downside is it may take a little longer to heat up but probably not. Or you can issue the M303 to recalculate the values: M303 S210 210 is the temp to calcluate the values at. Default is 150C and 210C will give you slightly better results (not much different though).

Or did you mean the Ultimaker2? That's MUCH quieter.

Doesn't sound load to me. Maybe the Z axis - I guess everything about the Z axis is a bit loud. Did you put a drop of green grease on it? Anyway it sounds like mine. I think it is just that your house is much quieter than 3d printing show.

Thinking about this some more - it could be a bad solder joint. I would look at the full schematic and look at the pins with a loupe (or reading glasses). And if any look bad reheat them with a solder iron. Or just do it even if they look good. The full schematic is here: http://reprap.org/wiki/Ultimaker%27s_v1.5.7_PCB There is a zip file at the top. It contains the "brd" file which is the layout. Also the "sch" file which is the schematic. Both files can be opened by eagle software which is free: http://www.cadsoftusa.com/download-eagle/

90% chance it's the arduino then. There's almost zero chance it is the motor itself. I would spend the $20 on ebay and get a new arduino mega2560 (get 2 for $40!). Load it up with Cura before swapping it with the "bad" arduino. But if you are good with electronics you could instead look at this circuit - maybe check the voltage - see if it is a bit low. The signal should be around 0V for one direction, and 5V for the other. If the voltage is more like 3V then it's probably the arduino. A bad stepper driver can damage the arduino. There was a guy posting on this forum in the last few months who went through 3 arduinos until he finally replaced the stepper driver and then the *next* brand new arduino worked. The arduinos were permanently damaged (but only that one pin - X DIR for him). This shows X DIR signal. Your problem is with Y DIR which is similar.

Actually I think it *is* the Y axis. The *leaning* part was removed and replaced onto the bed after printing was over.