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marko_m

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  1. Since there's already a thread, I thought I'd add a couple of my favourites onto the "begging list" for consideration... 1. Separate processing of non-geometry affecting parameters so that, for example, an entire model is not re-sliced if I change the temperature of the bed or extruder head 2. I often have trouble with keeping my prints sticking (more so after the heated bed upgrade) and with curled ends (especially on the fan side, of course). I find the raft option very good at ensuring good starts and minimum curls. The trouble with raft of course is that it's a huge p.i.t.a. to get it off the bottom of the part itself. Protruding bits are quite easy to break off or slice off with exacto knife, but scraping it off the bottom is usually a nightmare (in a few rare cases bulk of it peels off - most often scraping it off takes quite a while). Many of the parts I print, I split along the "parting plane" and that plane is what is sitting on the bed. In that (for me, quite common) scenario - it is very important that the bottom is flat (not curled) so quite often (perhaps after a few failures) I end up turning on the raft to ensure flatness. Of course, then I am stuck with the tedious job of scraping the bottom. The thing is, with these types of models (because they get glued to each other) - the quality of the bottom layer doesn't matter (only that it's flat). In fact, a patterned finish (like raft produces) would be quite beneficial for retaining glue and giving it textured surface for better keying together. I would love to see another "integrated" raft - where the model does not sit on the raft itself but rather is sunk into the raft by a thickness of the raft itself. Sure, I can do this myself in the CAD program (when I split my model on what I decide should be a parting plane) but by doing it directly in Cura, you could integrate the outer wall into the raft mesh (which will make the seam smaller after gluing and also, probably, make it even easier to cut out the excess raft). While writing this and checking Cura's parameters, I noticed "Cut off object bottom" in advanced tab - which pretty much sums up what I was talking about (duh! :-)). It would still be nice to have an automatic option (perhaps in Raft Expert Config?) so that the amount of "sink" is automatically calculated by Cura based on raft parameters. Also (if possible) so that the outer shell of the object is incorporated into raft mesh). 3. I don't know how others feel, but I think the time has come for Cura to have its own file format (fitting between the stl model and the gcode) - basically recording all of the geometry and parameters of the print. Perhaps it could be saved automatically whenever gcode is produced? It would be nice to be able to go back and check the parameters used on a specific print later on (including exact positioning etc.)... 4. A really nice (simple yet very powerful!) feature would be the ability to designate a colour as a "fluff print" colour! It would allow us to easily create custom supports that would be very easy to remove. The way I see it working, is that we would import an STL file containing objects of two different colours and designate one of the two colours as "fluff print" colour - meaning that objects of that colour would be sliced and produced as fluff. I saw people asking for a "tree supports" earlier in this thread - well, those would be extremely easy to produce in your CAD program simply by making a cube (or another shape appropriate to your object) and subtracting your object from it (making sure that support cube is different colour than the object itself). Then export both objects as STL and tell Cura that the colour of the cube is the "fluff print colour". A little bit more work than automatic tree support generation but not hard and certainly more flexible than an automated process could ever be (since you can arrange your supports the way you want). Many CAD programs have a "drape" function which could be used to generate a support object and subtract the original from. It would be even better/more powerful if the fluff density could be controlled... I have a few more thoughts (of course - don't we all) but Daid probably needs to sleep some time... :-) Marko
  2. @gr5 - Well, I'm not sure how to explain my good fortune with the old bed. I suppose I had always thought that everyone's was like that. My basement (where my UM is located) is very humidity stable (whole-house humidifier comes on when the furnace is on and the rest of the time, usually while the a/c is on it stays off - and the basement itself goes through least changes in temperature and humidity) - so that may have been a factor (since, as I mentioned earlier, wood/plywood is dimensionally stable with respect to temperature but sensitive to humidity). The other possible factor is that every last plywood piece of my machine is varnished with 2 coats of polyurethane (and stained blue-jean blue :-P ) - and, yes, that means all of the individual pieces making up the bed have been coated PRIOR to being laminated in the sandwich. I also glued the sandwich together (seeing as I didn't think it would ever need to come apart) rather than relying just on the M3 bolts to keep it all together. The end result was that, it's true, I honestly don't think I EVER re-adjusted the bed since the initial calibration. Though, to be honest, I would imagine my UM doesn't go through quite the "duty cycle" of some of the ones from other users on this forum... Still, I was very pleased with the "set&forget" nature of the machine to date... In fact, when I saw the aluminum bed frame of the new one and seen how it connects - it was a bit of a cause for concern as I immediately pictured the lower bed expanding and contracting from the heat and messing up the alignment. So, I am very pleased to hear from you and Daid that both of your experiences have been that the new bed is MORE stable than the old one. As I said, if my new one is even close to as stable as the old one - I will be perfectly happy - especially since one has to take into the account that the old bed was never subjected to the kind of heat output and (fairly) rapid temperature variations that this one will be (if, that is, I ever get to that point where I'm using the heated bed LOL). As per your suggestion, I updated my location (and gender :oops: didn't mean to be ambiguous about that LOL). I am also in Toronto (well, Toronto "area" to be precise) but I've never met Valcrow (or anyone else, for that matter, with a 3D printer). Like on this forum, I guess I just quietly went about my business and didn't get engaged (so far) in the 3D printing "community"... Perhaps I should do more of that... Cheers (and thanks again), Marko
  3. Hi everyone, First of all, let me say that I’ve had the Ultimaker for over a year and a half now but it had given me so little trouble in that time – from the ease of putting it all together (owing to a really well thought out kit and excellent documentation) to day-to-day operation (blue tape worked great and, Daid, well Cura is just a fantastic piece of software both in capabilities and ease-of-use) which, I guess, why in all this time I never posted anything on this site. I guess I just merrily went about my business – 3D printing at will. Funny as it sounds, I would say that over the last year and a half my regular, networked laser printer gave me more grief with intermittent problems than Ultimaker did… I guess this lulled me into thinking that all this will be even better with a heated bed option – everything will be as easy as before except now I will also be able to print ABS. Well, it kind of makes sense that it isn’t QUITE like that (and that I may have been a bit lucky with the performance of my machine to start with) but it seems clear that getting optimum use out of the heated bed (or any use at all LOL) will take some tinkering and experimentation. Which is OK, of course… But the point I was trying to set up with the above preamble is that I was impressed and humbled by the number (and quality) of replies I received on the first occasion when help was needed. Clearly a passionate and caring community (which makes me very glad to be a part of it) – and I thank you one and all. Lots of good advice and links – that will clearly take a bit of time to digest and test in practice but I’m hoping that the end result will make it worthwhile… For now, however, I really had to get a couple of parts printed (some drilling jigs I designed for the table top of my CNC machine) so I flipped the glass around (it had Capton tape on one side and the glue stick goo), taped it up with blue painter’s tape and re-leveled the bed. Then proceeded to print my parts on a cold bed with no issues. I know it’s a bit of a copout but, hey, I needed to get them printed so I can continue on with my new table top. Then this morning I went out and picked up another piece of glass cut to right size – which I’m gonna use strictly with blue tape and cold printing. That way I will have the original bed to mess around with – glue, hairspray, acetone sluice, and so on but will still be able to just swap it out for the other glass with blue tape on quickly when I actually need to print something… As for the other issues I brought up or asked about… Daid's explanation on how pause/resume works makes perfect sense and demystifies that. Of course, when you wish to stop printing – you can simply interrupt the process immediately (and dump the buffers) but when you’re just pausing (presumably you have to leave the system in the state where it could be resumed) so you have to let the printer process everything that’s already been queued up. Duh! I imagine it always worked that way – buy I might have only done it once in the past just to check if/how it worked and at that time it may have stopped (I mean paused!) rather quickly – so trying it now (coming off the runaway head occurrences which made me paranoid to begin with) I had just assumed that something was wrong when the only apparent response to Pause command was to turn the menu item into Resume. But, yes, it makes sense now… With regards to runaway axis issue – it has not happened in my testing yesterday. Over the initial 4-5 days it happened at least 3 or 4 times – so it was not just a single, freak occurrence. Not sure how to replicate it (not that I want to either LOL). I re-flashed the firmware from a different laptop – though I doubt that would’ve made any difference since it was the same version of Cura (14.09) both times. If it happens again, I’ll start a new thread dedicated solely to that issue… But, hopefully not… @jameshs – I think my issue with under-extruding on the early layers had to do with the nozzle being too close to the bed. On my old bed I had 2 layers of blue tape which gave it a bit spongier feel and made it a bit more forgiving. Here with just a single layer (or, worse, Capton tape instead of blue) and hardness of glass – even a bit too close is enough to clog the opening… Re-leveled again and the results are much better… @Dim3nsioneer – thanks for the explanation of the thought process that went into the design of the menu structure… I do think it might have made sense to at least have an option to turn off the bed heating (since I can see how, with multiple extruders, giving an option for nozzle, bed or both for each extruder would be cumbersome and sort of confusing). Nevertheless, as you said – it’s not a big deal to navigate over to Control menu and bring the bed temp back to 0. Or simply use the Control menu to dial up the nozzle temp as needed. So, no big deal (certainly not big enough for me to fork my own – especially considering the multiple languages). I must add, however, that “Move Z” option is a most welcome addition (!). Move Axis -> 1 mm -> Z was just too cumbersome considering how often we want to move the bed down a little (compared to moving other axes). So – thanks for that one! @gr5 – I’m in Canada – Elmer’s glue (as well as any number of other differently branded PVAC based glues) are in ample supply. Will definitely give it a shot soon! For now, as I said – I just tried the glue stick that was included in the package (directly onto glass as well as on Capton tape). @Daid – with all due respect, I think it remains to be seen whether or not the new Z axis and bed will prove to be a significant improvement in stability. I certainly hope so, but time will tell! One thing about that is that wood (and plywood especially!) is extremely dimensionally stable with respect to temperature fluctuations (but not so much with respect to humidity fluctuation). The aluminum (or any metal) which is what the new bed relies on is quite the opposite – it is fantastically stable with respect to humidity but not so much to temperature. So, it is very much in doubt in my mind whether the new bed proves more stable (considering, of course, in our use large temperature variations are much more the norm than humidity variations). I’ll have to just wait and see! But, for what it’s worth, I found my old bed to be EXTREMELY stable – in fact, I don’t recall ever adjusting it after the initial build over a year and a half of use. So, if the new bed is even close to being as stable as that – I will be more than satisfied! And even if it has to be leveled more often – it’s not quite that big a deal – as the new 3 point adjustment with thumbscrews is way better than the old method. And the new bed and z axis is definitely gives a way smoother motion (when the steppers are off, the bed often just glides down on its own which was never the case with the old one – and moving it up and down manually is incomparably smoother and easier with the new bed). So, overall, a nice hardware upgrade to be sure…
  4. So last week I received the HBK I ordered for my Ultimaker (Original, of course) and, to date, it has proven a colossal disappointment to me! Now, I don’t wish to disparage the work of great folks at UM! In my opinion, these are still the best conceived and developed 3D printers around - and the work they’ve done on the heated bed upgrade kit continues the trend. I thought the whole thing was designed brilliantly and fitted the existing “infrastructure” perfectly (even down to providing a laser cut plywood cover for the bearings which, although I imagine not strictly necessary, ties the whole thing together and makes it look like it very much fits the “spirit” of the original machine. Very, very nice indeed! Three point levelling with thumb-screws is also a convenient and welcome addition (instead of the old 4 screws approach). However, compared to the way my machine worked before – this is a definite step in the wrong direction… :( I got the heated bed upgrade as soon as I was aware of it for, essentially, 2 reasons… Firstly, I wanted to be able to print ABS. PLA has some nice properties, to be sure, but it doesn’t sand well at all (for smoothing out the layers and making small moulds and tooling) and resulting parts are quite brittle and having an option to do ABS was the primary reason for spending extra money on HBK. I did (long ago) buy some ABS filament but quickly discovered (what everyone knew already, of course) that there’s just no way to use it on the cold bed covered with painter’s tape. The other reason was (the romantic notion) that, even when printing PLA, I would no longer have to be re-taping my bed every 2 or 3 prints – so (perceived) extra convenience of a heated bed was also a factor. Well, the problem is that over the last year my (pre-modification) machine was rock solid and dependable – feed it some PLA, select my model from the SD card, wait 2-3 minutes for the first couple of layers to start printing and make sure it’s going fine and… Walk away… Come back an hour, two or five later to a finished part waiting. Post modification machine is anything but… After playing with it for 5 days now (including the entire past weekend) – I have a total of one (1) PLA part that actually printed OK (and zero ABS parts). The closest I got with ABS was one part that got to about 6 or 7 mm height before I stopped it because it had peeled off on one end and was warped terribly. Most of the time, either nothing comes out of the nozzle on the first several passes or once it starts coming out it just gets dragged all over the place. PLA (on the heated bed) is a little better – but still often times nothing comes out or, if I move my bed a bit lower, it doesn’t stick at all. As I said, I only managed 1 print in innumerable tries over the last 5 days (the one that came out though – looked pretty decent – about the same quality as what I was getting before. I have capton tape on the glass and the whole thing is covered with the provided glue stick in the cross-hatched pattern as recommended. I tried without glue as well (directly onto capton tape) and with glue but directly on the glass (without capton tape) – no love… I haven’t tried the hairspray yet because everything I read suggests that glue stick provides stronger adhesion but I guess I will try that next. I have not tried the “ABS juice” and I don’t really intend to – that definitely does not qualify as clean and convenient… If that really is the only way to get ABS parts printed - I might try it down the road. For now, though, I’d like to AT LEAST get the PLA to print again… I just switched back to PLA (white this time) and (still) getting absolutely no love. Next thing will be to tape the glass with painter’s tape, turn off the heat from the bed and hope that it works at least nearly as well as it did before. If it does, more than likely, I will just go on pretending that I don’t have a heated bed at all (though, pretending that I still have my 245 euros will be more difficult, of course LOL). After this long (and sad) preamble, I DO have a handful of questions for the helpful and knowledgeable folks at UM forums: What was the reason for changing the Z axis top limit switch in the kit? I did, of course, replace the existing one with the new one that came in the kit, but AFAICS the two are pretty much identical? I might have missed something in the installation steps but, again AFAICS, the bed will no longer ever trip the bottom Z switch? It is below the surface of the frame and there’s nothing on the moving part that protrudes to trip it… Did I miss some steps in the installation? Or does Cura/Ultimaker simply rely on “soft limits” for the extent of the Z axis? Cura (14.09) installed new firmware in response to the creating a new machine (Ultimaker with HBK upgrade) which changed some of the menus and the behaviour on the Ulticontroller and not all for the better! Couple of questions about that: In Pre-heat PLA and Pre-heat ABS menus there are now sub-options of Pre-heat PLA 1 and Pre-heat PLA bed (and the same for ABS of course). First one (Pre-heat PLA 1) sets the target temperature for BOTH extruder head AND bed while the second one sets it for just the bed. Is there a way of adding an option to preheat just the extruder head? I’m asking because, the way it looks now, I will be most likely going back to painter’s tape (at least in the short term – as I need to actually print a couple of parts and I’m having no love from the heated bed) and would like to be able to just pre-heat the extruder head and leave the bed cold… After the firmware upgrade Pause Print command does nothing! Well, selecting it changes the menu command name to Resume Print but the actual printing continues as normal. Selecting Resume Print also does nothing (other than turn the command name back to Pause Print). What gives? I don’t much care about #2 (as I’ve never actually had an occasion where I wanted to pause and resume printing) but another (much bigger!) problem is that “Stop Print” command also (intermittently) malfunctions! Every once in a while – selecting “Stop Print” (of which I’ve been doing quite a LOT lately) will NOT actually stop the head! Ulticontroller display goes back to the main screen – but it still says “Printing” and the head continues travelling in the same direction it was going and ignores the limit switch – and bangs a few times against the ends before giving up. This NEVER, EVER happened before and it is quite unnerving… It doesn’t happen ALL the time – sometimes the printing just stops properly and the bed moves down a few milimeters (which is not how it used to work before if I remember correctly – but is a nice and graceful way of stopping the print). But every once in a while – the head just continues in the direction it was going at the moment I selected Stop Print and bangs against the wall (possibly just mimicking the actions of the operator – as I’ve been banging my head against the wall quite a bit over the last few days :lol:). I may be wrong here (or biased by the shape of the part I was printing) but I’m fairly sure that the above behaviour only ever happened when the Stop Print was triggered while the head was travelling along the Y axis – never when it was travelling along the X axis or the compound path… At least I only ever recall head banging the front or back of the machine (in response to stop) and never the sides. Not sure if that means anything… Quite often when the printing starts there will be no filament coming out for quite some time (although the extruder stepper is happily churning away). This would on occasion happen with my machine even before the upgrade, but stopping the print and restarting it once or, at most, twice – would usually start things going. After the upgrade, even just printing PLA (therefore, things being equal to before) – I can restart it several times and it would just dry run along the bed leaving nothing behind. Stopping the flow and moving the bed down and manually driving the wheel (or driving the extruder stepper from Ulticontoller), will get the stuff flowing – but starting another print will, more often than not, result in dry runs… If anyone can help offer insight to any of the above – it would be greatly appreciated! As I stated above – I really DO think that HBK looks and feels fantastically conceived, designed and engineered (stuff we’ve come to expect from UM) but, on the whole, my experience with it has been very negative so far as, for 245 euros, I’ve taken a machine that printed PLA extremely reliably and ABS not-at-all and turned it into a machine that prints neither (well, maybe PLA – once on every 6 or 7 tries). Many thanks… Marko
  5. Glad I saw this post as that was the exact question I was going to ask... Like perlguy, I also tried (very hard :mrgreen: ) to stick the knurled bolt into the back of the extruder unit but had to concede that it was too short for that. Glad to know I didn't miss anything, although, it kind of would have been nice to be able to adjust the tension without a screwdriver. Why didn't UM just replace the knurled bolt with a longer one (obviously it can't be for cost cutting reasons because they are still including the, now useless, knurled bolt from previous assembly)... Anyway, my other "extra parts concern" had to do with a little baggy of set-screws - of which I didn't use any at all. Is this also an artifact from a previous version - or did I actually miss something with those? Thanks! Marko
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