gr5

A friend checked and it's 2 wires going to the fan so the ground pin (J1 pin 0) is not used for these fans

circuit diagram for reference. Fan normally sits with 5V on pin 1 and pin 2 is open (I assume pin 0 is not used). So both sides of fan should be at 5V when off. Inside the fan is a fancy circuit (I believe) that detects rpm and pulses the wiring accordingly with circuitry inside a chip inside the fan. I think the sound is coming from that circuitry trying to get the fan to start up but it can't because the voltage is too low. What seems strange is that the fan is getting any power at all as I would think the firmware would keep Q1 turned off (when Q1 is turned on it grounds pin 2). It could be that the firmware is not at fault and some part is broken (Q1 or D1 most likely) but I suspect it is a firmware thing where it is sending a small amount of power to the fan.

Well your part is smaller than average. When I have to print two tiny things on each layer (such as this tower) I usually get even worse quality. So what I do is print two of the parts (so you would have 4 towers) and this makes a massive difference. It gives the part just another second or two to cool. Those profiles are limited and tend to work for average parts. There isn't a profile for "printing a part smaller than a pea in diameter". For such a small part you need to tweak the existing profiles. I wouldn't mess with bed temp but I'd get the fan started a little sooner I think? Maybe. I'd check the settings to see what fan speed it is at for each layer. Typically I think it has changed - it once was 5mm before the fan was at full speed and I think more recently it must be closer to 1 or 2mm? Or 5 layers? I just don't know. The other issue is that the percentage fan speeds don't make sense at least for my UM3 and S5. For those printers the fan is typically at full power when it is around 10 or 20% (depending on the printer - they are different). And there is no increase in speed going up from there. So I consider 3% as a good low speed, 6% medium, and 15% pretty much full out fan. But I don't know if my printers are unusual or not. But knowing this and looking at the profiles out there, something is wrong with the fan speeds of many profiles. At least for my S5 and my UM3.

If both of you go through this link and request a firmware fix (surely the firmware can disable the fan completely (looking at the schematic) then maybe you can get a fix in the nest release of firmware: https://support.ultimaker.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

So is that a retraction test? Is this telling you how much to retract? Does it retract more and more as you go up the towers? If so, what is that perfect retraction distance? If not, if this is a print with normal settings, then I'd say it's too hot near the bottom (where you are closer to the heated bed and also where the fan might not be up to full speed - typically 5 layers to get to full fan speed).

PTFE is teflon and teflon doesn't do well above about 200C. The teflon in the Ultimaker is a version that works pretty well up to 220C but still it degrades after about 1000 hours of printing at 200C and degrades faster at 220C and even faster at 240C. What happens is the teflon gets soft. It only degrades at the very bottom where it touches the heater block. When it gets soft, and combined with pressure above - from the spring (or if you have a UM2+ from the aluminum cylinder) and also pressure from the bowden if you tighten the bowden too much - what happens is it compresses and squeezes the filament. A LOT! The PTFE tries to collapse (at the base/bottom of the PTFE part where it has degraded). If you remove the filament, remove the nozzle, let the block cool below 50C and then slide filament back through the print head you can feel the resistance of the filament through the print head. The feeder on the original UM2 can only push with about 5 pounds of force and UM2+ with about 10 pounds of force (5kg). The resistance from the PTFE alone can add about 2 pounds of resistance when it is time to change it. That can be half your budget! Plus when you push hard you get additional resistance at the top of the bowden and can add another pound of resistance. This can take up now 3/4 of your budget! Not much leftover for printing nice parts fast.

First realize the front fan only comes on when either core is above 60C (or 40C and a core is turned on). Here's the relevant part of the schematic of the UM3 print head circuit board. All 3 circuits use the same electronics and all 3 put out 0V and 5V. I'm guessing Q1 has failed. That part can get pretty hot. I'd just order a new print head board. Although if you are really good with surface mount soldering you could test the voltage at the base of Q1 (should be around 0V when fan is supposed to be off and around .7V when the fan is supposed to be on). It could be that the emitter is broken (pin going to ground) and the fan is powered from the previous circuit through that 330 ohm resistor. The fan gets 5V and 0V power separately from the other inputs (although maybe the fans don't use that second ground?) Normally if things are working, when the fan is off the top of Q1 is about 5V and when the fan is on the top of Q1 is approximately 0.2V.

It's probably flash memory - it's crashing when it tries to read part of the "hard drive" (flash memory). My instructions at the above link tell you how to reformat the partitions in new locations so you get fresh area of the flash memory as 90% of it isn't used anyway (the "user" area).

You should get the serial cable f - you can get at the logs and so much more. And you can check if it thinks it's an extended or not. And you can enable the sshd (ssh daemon) and much much more). Read gr5.org/unbricking/

By the way it is possible to disable active leveling but is tricky and you could brick your printer if you mess up (unbricking requires a uSD card, taking the bottom of the printer off and other things - basically you could lose a day). Also unless you are printing small prints - less than 100mm by 100mm then you really should be doing active leveling to compensate for a glass bed that is not flat.

You are the second person in the last hour to complain about this although your symptom is different. My advice to you is the same as the other person:

By the way, you should also run the level sensor test in the maintenance menu and tell them the result of that test.

You are observant! That's good. many people don't watch the calibration procedure. Yeah your detector is defective. Make sure there are no radio interference electronics nearby such as another printer, cell phone, laptop, or other electronic device. Keep electronica devices at least a meter away and see if that helps. If not then you probably need to start replacing parts. It looks like you are in the United states. if not then contact your reseller but if you are in USA I'd just contact fbrc8.com directly. They built all the UM printers sold in the USA. They are experts and have all the spare parts and they have a good support team that are experienced in this exact issue. Send them an email now at support@fbrc8.com explaining that it fails before the core touches the glass and include your serial number (if you don't include the SN they will just ask for that and this will delay your support some more).

The final print - the black one - has a cooling issue. You need to print 2 of those parts at the same time so that one is cooling while it prints the other. I have had very similar issues printing the two antennas on the Ultimaker robot head. If I print 2 robots then it's all good.

I get that sometimes - that's underextrusion. When I start to get that on my UM2 I know I need to replace the teflon part soon. Yes the rest of the print looks fine but that's still underextrusion. Pretty sure. You can test it with the temporary fix below to see if it gets better. You can get it if you print too cold or too fast. The temporary fix is to cut the speed to 60%, increase flow to 105% and increase temperature by 5C (but don't increase temp for ABS as ABS clogs too easily as you get hotter - PLA can print up to 240C ( recommend you don't go that hot - especially because the PTFE in your print head ages faster). I do these changes live in the TUNE menu as soon as it starts printing. If I have to do it everytime it is more annoying and motivates me to change the PTFE sooner (hopefully). How hold is your printer? When did you last change the PTFE? You should change it every 500 to 1000 hours of printing (depending how hot). I think Ultimaker calls it the "isolator" maybe? You can get them from Ultimaker at a really decent price or from 3rd party sellers like 3dsolex.com. I sell them for people in USA.

I have an S5 but I don't have the material station so I'm not certain but this sounds familiar from quite a while back (maybe a year) when a new firmware version fixed this or something similar. So make sure your firmware is at least no more than a year old.

Here is a video showing it happening and also what to be careful of so you don't break the delicate heat break:

When cura keeps the nozzle within the print to get to a new spot, that's called "combing". Versus a retraction move like shown above where it retracts the filament and moves directly to the new spot. You want combing. Combing is a feature going back at least to version 15.x (from 2015). It's currently under "combing mode". You can set it to "all" or I recommend "not in skin". In addition, check out "max combing distance with no retract". I'm not sure but if you set this to for example 1mm, it may switch out of combing mode for those movements. Although hopefully not. But consider experimenting with this as well. In addition note that those light blue lines inside your part are "retraction moves" and the darker blue moves (hidden as they are in internal layers) are non-retracting moves. It could be that you need to tweak your settings. I usually can't see any stringing on most of my parts. but it depends on a lot of things whether you get strings or not.

So your power supply is doing that. You can replace it with a different power supply. There are 2 types: GST220A24-R7B GS220A24-R7B Most of the newer machines (last 5 years) have the GST version. Older ones have GS version. In my experience the GS ones put out much more power (like 20% more) before tripping like it did for you. So you could consider buying a new power supply of either type but I'd lean to the GS version. However these UM2 printers are always on the edge of failing like in your video so there is another solution: Get the "tinker" version of ultimaker marlin. Of course you need to edit pins.h again. You can get it here: https://github.com/TinkerGnome/Ultimaker2Marlin Make sure it says "geek_mode" in the dropdown towards the upper left corner and then click the green button and download as zip file. After building and compiling you have a new feature called "power budget". To me the power budget feature is very simple but it seems to confuse people. The power budget feature does not know how much power each element uses so you just tell it. Tell it how many watts everything is and what the budget is and it will make sure heaters are turned off or turned down a bit when they would exceed the budget. The bed gets lowest priority. In this version of Marlin is a power budget system. Set the bed to 150W (that's what it's supposed to be I think) and set the nozzle to 25W (if you have 3rd party nozzle such as 3dsolex then set this to what is truth - what nozzle actually is). Then if you set the budget to 175W (150+25) the power budget won't do anything and the printer will work normal. If you lower the budget to 150W then the power budget will lower the power to the bed when the nozzle is on. This changes many times per second (adjustments of power to nozzle). All the remaining power goes to the bed if the bed wants it. So for example if you use 150/25/150 as I mention above and the nozzle is on at 50% (12.5 watts) then the bed will only be allowed 12.5 watts below budget (150-12.5 is 137.5 watts) and so the bed will never exceed 92% power at that time. This changes 20 times per second (nozzle asking for more then less power, bed occasionally restricted a little bit).

I would also consider keeping the fan off until after one layer has printed above the shirt. If the print doesn't have overhangs or bridging (just a simple flat print only a few layers thick) then I'd turn off the fan completely. I would also experiment with higher bed temperatures. PLA softens slightly (like hard clay) at 52C and gets progressively softer as you go up to say 100C. It doesn't melt until much hotter - maybe 150C? So you can probably print fine at bed temps as high as 100C with fan off and get better bonding to the fabric. Maybe. Actually hopefully you aren't printing PLA but you are printing something flexible like TPU or ninjaflex or similar. But the same advice applies: play with fan and bed temp.

Once you get tired of editing the ufp file all the time you can write your own plugin. I would edit the existing "pause at height" plugin but change the name of the files and such to "pause and skip up" or something. Add a parameter for how much to skip upwards. The coding change is pretty simple even for someone who has never programmed before (in this specific example as you aren't doing any loops or conditionals or anything - just adding some more commands immediately after the pause).

There is a gcode to reset where an axis is. For example if the Z is at 3mm above bed you can tell it to reset everything in that axis such that it should consider itself to be only 2.5mm above the bed. This is G92 and G1 goes to a specific location. I don't know if G92 accepts negative values for the S5 firmware so that complicates things slightly. In other words you need to use both gcodes. So right after the pause I'd go to a specific location above the shirt and then tell the printer it's lower than it things so it prints a bit high going forwards. Example: G1 Z10 (move Z axis to exactly 10mm above the glass) G92 Z9 (tell printer that it's is now only 9mm above the glass (even though it's 10mm)) Going forwards it will print 1mm higher than all the gcodes say to print. If you want to increase printing height (after pause) by 1.2mm then do G92 Z8.9 If you want to increase by only 0.5mm then do G92 Z9.5 Next problem - how to insert these gcodes into the file. It's pretty simple. S5 uses "UFP" file. Rename that to zip and open up the zip file and look around. There are only 5 or so files in the directory structure. Extract out the file that ends with ".gcode" and edit that with a text editor (not microsoft word - a simpler editor) and look for the pause. It should have I think "M1". I think M1 or M0 is the pause. I forget but there should only be one of those and also there will likely be some comments that say "pause" or something. Add your 2 gcodes after the pause. Put the gcode back into the zip file. Print it. There may also be an "add gcode after height" plugin? I don't think there is but there used to be one for the older version of cura.

@TimonR is this moisture issue also true with CPE and CPE+ filament? Do they also have the viscosity issue caused by moisture?

All the changes you did need to be undone as well.

First of all you want the "ultiboard v2.0 pin assignment" section. that's the ultimaker 2. aka "motherboard == 72". Then this section: #define HEATER_BED_PIN 4 // PG5 #define TEMP_BED_PIN 10 // PK2 => Analog10 #define HEATER_0_PIN 2 // PE4 #define TEMP_0_PIN 8 // PK0 => Analog8 #define HEATER_1_PIN 3 // PE5 #define TEMP_1_PIN 9 // PK1 => Analog9 You want the gcodes and the firmware to still use "heater0/temp0" but you want to tell the firmware that the heater and temp sensor are now using different pins. #define HEATER_BED_PIN 4 // PG5 #define TEMP_BED_PIN 10 // PK2 => Analog10 #define HEATER_0_PIN 3 // PE4 USING DIFFERENT ELECTRICAL PINS #define TEMP_0_PIN 9 // PK0 => Analog8 #define HEATER_1_PIN 3 // PE5 #define TEMP_1_PIN 9 // PK1 => Analog9