Dim3nsioneer

It might be a bit off-topic, but Ultimaker https://www.ultimaker.com/pages/our-printers/ultimaker-2 (with the green checks) of which the last one is 'low cost material'. Maybe it's because I'm Swiss and we are used to high-quality products in Switzerland, but for me this point would be rather a reason not to buy this product. What do you think about that phrase (with the view of a customer who want's a nice and shiny machine, as discussed above)?

Auch nicht auf direkte Anfrage per trouble ticket?

Ich habe bisher noch auf keinem UM2-Foto ein Teil entdeckt, das ich von meinem UM Original her kenne. Soweit ich mich erinnere, hat jemand von Ultimaker, ich glaube, es war Sander, im Forum geschrieben, dass die Pläne zum UM2 irgendwann 2014 folgen würden. Im Prinzip könnte man die Daten jetzt aufschalten. Denn inzwischen wird wohl jeder Konkurrent, der einen UM2 auseinander nehmen und analysieren will, einen in seinem Entwicklungslabor stehen haben.

This might be legally possible, but wouldn't that be somehow bad style?

You can do with it as you please but not a partner. He would be bound to the NC term, wouldn't he?

I guess this is the main reason why people buy a 3D printer: because they cannot handle ordinary tools... In this regard: Hi, my name is Dim3nsioneer and I have an Ultimaker... :wink: EDIT: Seriously, I see it as one big advantage of the 3D printer technology: People with not too much mechanical skills can create solid things... no offense to any of you!

I guess this is not possible if you put your design under a non-commercial license, right?

It's completely irresponsible of the Swiss to produce such a dangerous device! :huh: Get well soon! P.S.: Uhm... usually train station roofs are kind of dark red to brown, aren't they...?

Don't panic! At first sight it really looks as if the new Makerbot models are more or less the same as the Replicator 2. But I think they were clever enough to build the three new models with a maximum number of common parts. This helps to reduce e.g. storage costs. And this is certainly something Ultimaker should be aware of. I don't know if there is any common part between UM1 and UM2. It is a very strong commitment Ultimaker did when telling, at the moment of the UM2 launch, that they will still care about the UM1 users. However, there might be a time when they will have to break that commitment. It could as well be, when launching the UM3 one day, they will reduce support for the UM2 and still support the UM1 clients. It might happen that the traditional printer manufacturers will enter the stage. But I think rather not. A main competitor in a few years from now may be Google which has started with a quite huge Motorola team recently. And nobody knows what the guys in Cupertino are currently working at. And don't forget that the tiger and the dragon are still sleeping. At least China might be an important force in the 3D home printing market, capable of mass producing cheap devices. So what to do for a small European company like Ultimaker? Find your enthusiastic clients. Don't grow at any prize. Do something no other company does, don't copy. Up to now, I think this is still the case. Cura is a very good example. I had the chance to work on the key development of a completely new device (in HVAC, not 3D printing) for the last few years. I learned a lot of things during that time. But one of the most important things was, that creating something very innovative and new takes at least four years with a small team (we were about 5-10 people). If you want it to work properly when delivered to your customers.

Habe ich mir auch schon überlegt, da ich relativ dickes Filament in der Grössenordnung von 2.95mm verwende und es einige Leute für Soft-PLA auch schon erfolgreich gemacht haben (gibt im Material-Unterforum mind. einen Bericht). Allerdings habe ich einen ziemlichen Respekt davor, dass Öl auf die Extruder-Rändelschraube kommt (sei es nur durch einen Retract) und der Gripp damit dahin ist... das ist bei einem Bowden-Extruder wie dem vom Ultimaker eine verschärfte Situation... :eek: Du darfst es gerne versuchen; ich würde mir aber vorher überlegen, wie ich im schlechten Fall das Öl wieder von den Komponenten wegbekomme... :wink: Und Du solltest hocherhitzbares (HOLL) Rapsöl nehmen (die Amis nehmen Mais-Öl), da Dir sonst das Hotend zu rauchen beginnt.

This one works... :wink:

I also thought that the motor should skip and I would hear it. Obviously not. Or I'm deaf... :wacko:

First, I have to point out the TweakAtZ is not my invention. First version was written by smorloc. RicardoGA then adapted it for use with Cura 13.06.4+. I've recently contacted the two gentlemen by PM asking how to proceed with the TweakAtZ-plugin but haven't got any answer so far (maybe they read it here?). It's certainly possible to change the speed over multiple layers. Let's say you want it to decrease from 100% to 50% over 10 layers. Then a plugin could reduce the speed to 95, 90,...50%. However you would need to put in the number of layers. If the speed should effectively be matched to the current temperature, then it would be a job to be done in Marlin, the Ultimaker firmware. That might actually be a nice feature for an easy-to-use printer as the UM2. Do you know the flowthermostat plugin? If not: it does it the other way round; it sets the temperature accordingly to the current speed.

To be honest, after that adventure I'm rather thinking about a way to get rid of all belts... but you're right about the banana tensioners. However, mines are nearly not used at all right now...

Exactly. The old video was ok. The new one is - uhm - suboptimal... You're right. And the additional friction was a result of the high tension. Anyway, these kind of belts are form-locked. There should actually be no need for a high tension in contrast to a V-belt.

Case solved! (sorry for shouting... :eek: ) First I would really like to thank all of you who helped me finding the way to this extremely satisfying moment for the last two weeks! This is the solution: gr5 was actually right, but he was wrong... :wink: As I wrote earlier, sometimes you first have to make a situation worse to make it better in the end. This is exactly what I did today. After finishing four times two Ultimaker Wiki Calibrate page. The print I made after this was the one with the absolutely worst displacement I got for the last few weeks! The shift was nearly 1mm! I didn't had to think very thoroughly what was wrong as I had realised the print head needed a tremendous force to be moved. So the next step was to make the long belts rather sloppy. I just tensioned them enough that they will not slip on the pulleys. The result you see above. So my problem never was too much play. I actually have some now which results in an increased wobble from layer to layer. However, this wobble is magnitudes smaller than the displacement I had before. I didn't have enough play with the belts tensioned too much. Thus, the video on the Ultimaker page is absolut nonsense in my opinion! If you put that kind of tension onto your long belts, you'll get exactly the troubles I had... I have to add that the tension on the short belts is still quite high. I will not lower it as I know I'll get troubles doing so.

Sounds to me as a USB communication problem. The display doesn't flicker if you have the printer just connected but it is not printing, correct? Could you please post a screenshot of your Cura print dialog showing the temperature slope while you're printing? Including the sudden switch off...

Maybe it's not Facebook but the same guy who listened to Frau Bundeskanzler's mobile phone?

Did you download the plugins from the wiki plugin website? These version don't work anymore since Cura 13.06.4 due to the change of the GCODE command for z-movements. There are a few updated versions of various plugins posted in the forum. Setting the tweak height to 0 will not work with any of the different version of TweakAtZ. The plugin expects you to have at least one layer below the tweak height. It is executed when passing the tweak height from bottom to top. If you want to have a certain setting right from the start, put it into the basic/advanced tabs of Cura. It's also not necessary to fill in a temperature for three hotends (as far as I know, UM2 only has one extruder up to now). Leave the Temp2 and the Temp3 box empty. The plugin will recognize an empty box and will not change temperature for that hotend. If you build more than one object within one run, I recommend you use https://github.com/Dim3nsioneer/Cura-Plugins/raw/master/TweakAtZ.3.0.1.py. This version resets the values when starting the second object. But it only works with RepRap-GCODE.

Ginge's Marlin Builder version, dual extruder w/o heatbed

First of all, having a look at the last few posts is quite impressive. Within last 24 hours this has changed from being an issue of just one machine to something more general. I made it again with shell thickness 1.6mm. It worked for the model of which gr5 just posted a picture! I then tried it for the original troublemaker: The displacement might be a bit smaller, but is still there. The same with shell thickness 2.0mm. Thanks for testing the file. I think it's important to know it is nothing mechanical or an issue of the electronics hardware. If you want to slice it yourself and test it: here is the stl. I'll be happy to see the result when you slice it yourself with your settings. I also had the idea it might have something to do with the number of travels on the x axis. I had the impression it's printing it differently on layers with an odd number of travels compared to layers with an even number of travels. But this is much more guessing than knowing. At the moment it looks to me as if there is something in Marlin causing this. I wouldn't call it a bug; maybe it's a feature which makes absolutely sense for something completely different. If it would be really a slicing error or similar, the probability it comes out exactly the same for Cura 13.12 and Slic3r is relatively small (but not zero of course). But with a nice gcode viewer such as gcode.ws or repetier host or whatever you prefer, one should see a difference between the layers if it is a slicing error. So we may need a volunteer who has a look into Marlin to check if something in there could cause such an issue...

On your video, I see the display of the Ulticontroller first showing a target temperature of 210°C (is this set by Cura over USB?) switching to 0 (this happens e.g. when you open the print dialog in Cura with a USB-connected printer). After that I see just some flickering. If you have your printer connected on USB, try printing from SD card. To my personal experience, connections over USB are quite unsafe and error-prone without a very good error handling of the connection (its ok to upload new firmware but not for printing). On the mechanical side, first thing to check are the connector screws on the amplifier print on top of the print head. I found they can get loose from vibrations after some time.

Although illuminarti already had a look onto one of the gcode files (and didn't find anything suspect), I'll send you a link in a PM. As physicist, I believe in statistics... (well, mainly the statistics I faked myself... :grin: ) @Ian: I've a similar problem. I actually want to use my Ultimaker to produce prints for other people (let's call them customers) in a not to distant future... so I'm running out of time. Timeline says, the case has to be solved a.s.a.p. I know, reality sometimes says something else... :( But as I see it, you have a slightly different problem. It looks as if the print gets larger all around it and is not shifted in one direction. However, it looks as ugly as my displacements... :wacko:

Update: Reducing XY-Jerk to 5 doesn't change anything. A smaller version of the test model (20mm x and y size instead of 40mm) shows the very same effect. Thus it's independent of the travel distance. Visual check of both Arduino and Ultimaker board showed no visible defect. All contacts between the boards are fine (checked with multi-meter). I could also exclude pickup from radio devices. I switched off everything except the printer (e.g. WiFi etc.) and it was the same.

More precisely: it's related to longer travel moves. At some layers the travel move ends at the place where it shows the shift, at some layers it begins there (alternately). GCODE analysator says it's approaching from opposite of the direction the displacement goes to for the strongest ones. To make a video of that in which you actually see the printer producing the displacment one would need something like a super-macro-high-speed-high-res-camera which I do not have. I can't see it by eye, I only see the result after some layers.