Dim3nsioneer

Although still using the standard unheated bed I use Kapton tape with a width of 200mm. These are the pros/cons: + VERY smooth surface of your prints +/- reasonable adhesion + no joint of the tape stripes visible on the print + PLA warping doesn't loose the tape from the bed + the same tape can be used much longer than the Painter's tape + no degrading of the adhesion after some prints - changing the tape requires some time It is often mentioned that Kapton tape is more expensive than the blue Painter's tape. I'm not sure this is really true. I think the widest blue Painter's tape you can get is 38.5mm. Therefore you need quite some tape for covering the whole bed. And you have to change it much more often than Kapton tape. But I haven't done a proper calculation yet. However, I didn't throw my blue Painter's tape away. For some prints it is nice to have a rough surface on the bottom. Especially the blue Painter's tape from Ultimaker is quite rough... @gr5: I do the fine tuning of the z-positon in the start.gcode accordingly to "never change a proper leveled system"... :-)

Hi Daid Congratulations to all of you at Ultimaker. Bringing a new product to life isn't easy and it doesn't get easier if it's the second one. Especially not if it's not for the same group of clients. A lot of people already mentioned what you should do in future, but you also asked what you should not do. As I see it, you have limited man-power for R&D. Use them wise. Don't start something too big like creating your own CAD software or similar. This is not your core business I guess. From this point I think R&D should take two directions in hardware for the two products. Try whatever you think is cool for the original Ultimaker; continue the revolution. Not for the Ultimaker2; there, start now with evolution. One example: Focussing on arbitrary, technically not-experienced clients, safety of the product is a must. I don't know, if the Ultimaker2 already complies with the standard IEC 60335. If it doesn't, this must be your next step (I know safety standards are a pain, but you have to go through this...). There are also some health concerns regarding 3D printers at home coming up recently. Please take them seriously and give a strong answer to them with the Ultimaker2. You've done a great job with Cura so far. Compared to other slicing software it is very handsome. Still there are some things left to do which will certainly please both the Original Ultimaker and the Ultimaker2 users: - Slic3r offers some cool settings like printing the outermost layer slower than the rest wich results in a great optical quality of the print. Certainly something to copy in Cura... - Cura plugins work only as post-processors today, right? On the plugin website it is mentioned to have UI-plugins, i.e. plugins which run while processing. Changing the layer height during print is one of the most frequently mentioned desire. What about implementing it in a way that Cura selects the layer height itself? - There are a lot of things which can be implemented for the Dual extruder setup, e.g. switching off heating of the unused hotend, the cleaning tower issue,... - I personally would really like to have a correct print time estimation. So far I managed to write a plugin which does it quite well but having it directly in Cura would really be nice... :-) And thank you for asking! ;-) Stefan

RicardoGA updated the TweakAtZ plugin so it should work with the current Cura version, see: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/2454-cura-13064-plugins/

Recently I had serveral breaks in PLA filament (not from Ultimaker) which was still mounted to the Ultimaker but not used (therefore stayed at the same position). It's clear that (standard) PLA is a quite brittle material. But these breaks did not occur when the PLA was 'fresh' out of the plastic. Of course I had to twist the filament by 90° between reel and bowden tube. The room I run my Ultimaker has a temperature between 19 and 25°C and a relative humidity of 50-60%. I would like to ask the PLA experts among you what might be the cause for these breaks. Humidity? Too much stress in the filament? Poor quality of the filament? thxs

I had my clog in the brand new hotend between the Teflon part and the brass tube. As far as I can see, the hotends are not well clamped by the wood parts in the Dual setup (compared to the Single setup where the bottom plate is fixed to the rest of the wooden part of the print head). There should be a better way to control the spacing between the middle and the botton plate of the print head as the bottom plate clamps the Teflon part... I'm currently thinking of adding four springs between middle and bottom plate to push the bottom plate down...

Thank you for confirming! I thought the 16mm might be a bit too much... I'll try the tower/wall thing. However, if one uses a tower for each color, switching off the heater for the second extruder isn't an option anymore... B.t.w.: Does anyone know if there will be a new stable Cura version comming soon? Maybe on the 21st? Maybe with the extended support material structure some people already tested?

After having upgraded my Ultimaker with the Dual Extrusion Kit, I ran into my very first clog today after having run the Ultimaker for quite some time in a single extruder setup without any clogs. As gr5 pointed out in a previous post (http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/3022-ultimaker-suddenly-stopped-working/?hl=clog&do=findComment&comment=22238), it can happen if the PLA stays inside the heated hotend for too long. With the dual extrusion this situation becomes more likely. For larger prints at small velocities, an idle time of up to 10 minutes becomes possible. Has anyone made a similar experience? What strategy for the retract length might be good? The second topic to be addressed is the underextrusion happening after a long idle time as the remaining filament in the hotend is slowly oozing out of the nozzle and missing at reactivation of the extruder.

If you just want to print one color in a single run, then it can be realised by a Cura Plugin.However, if you want to print multiple objects in one run with different colors, then it gets a bit tricky... but not impossible with some restrictions...

Then I guess you may find it with a multimeter checking the resistance and the connections... :wink:

I'm not sure if I got you right: do you get a different temperature reading from the Ultimaker compared to a external measurement?

Just being curious: do you see the missing parts in the Gcode view of Cura? I had once a print where some thin walls (0.8mm if I remember correctly) were missing as well. They did not appear in the Gcode view as well.

Daid, thanks for the information. Please let me know if I can help you with tracking it down...

Hi there Today I wanted to switch from 50mm/s speed to 100mm/s, something I've done before w/o any problems. I was then very surprised finding my Ultimaker rush at nearly light speed on the first layer as the bottom layer speed was set to 20mm/s. After having tested around with old Cura settings, I found this configuration to work properly: Basic settings: Advanced settings: Expert settings: There are no plugins activated, but present in the plugin folder. Then I tried to change the Minimal layer time in the Advanced settings from 5s to 7s. The result was, that the speed for the first layer G1 commands increased from 1200 (equal to 20mm/s) to insane 5940... Changing back to 5s and it became sane again. The same effect I got when changing the number of skirt lines from 3 to 1: the F-argument of the first layer G1 command increased to 5900. There is no such effect when the standard speed is set to 50mm/s. I already de-installed Cura and re-installed it: no change... Has someone ever experienced a similar effect? Any idea how I could cure Cura? thxs

I agree on Blender's (non-)precision... And Cura is doing a fine job usually (no offense...), but I'm just thinking of those people who now buy the Ultimaker2 as they are told it's plug-n-play. I think the software is a major piece in this 'one-button-3D-printer' puzzle. And it has to be almost fail-save for those people...independet of the model's quality as non-experts will certainly deal with non-perfect models. It may be a very simpel idea, but what about giving the user a choice? Cura could for instance slice the STL three times, once the 'normal' way, once with an offset of +something and the third time with an offset of -something. Then the three results could be compared. Identical layers are then identified as 'stable'. For the 'unstable' layers, Cura could ask the user which version he wants. As any file-sync-software is doing it when both file locations have been changed... maybe there are even some criteria to decide which of the three versions is the best and Cura could do the job itself...

Sometimes Cura 13.06.4 makes strange things when dealing with a horizontal surface created in Blender: The layer height was set to 0.1mm. To me it looks as if Cura interprets a z-position of e.g. 3.00001mm or similar as >3mm and adds a new layer. Depending on the program used to design a 3D model such artefacts may appear due to the numerical precision. To check this hypotesis, I moved the lowest z positions up by 0.05mm in Blender. This is what I got: Yes, this is what it should look like... To the Cura designers: Is there a possibility to make Cura a bit less sensitive to such minor precision fluctuations? At least when not sclicing with a layer thickness of 20um....

You're right, I mixed it up with another issue... sorry! I was lucky the tension was just enough when I moved the x-motor as far as I could along the holes. Did you use threadlocker for the motor screws? That looks very promising...! Thanks!

Sounds familiar to me. It may come from the unevenness of the bed. Are you working with the standard Ultimaker bed? Ideally the cross-section of any line drawn would be a rectangle with the layer height and about the nozzle size (or a bit more) as width. If there is a valley in the bed, the cross section of the line becomes more like a half circle or similar. Consequently it becomes narrower and could detach from other lines. However, the effect should disappear after a few layers as the height difference between last layer and the nozzle balances out... So maybe a re-check of the bed leveling might help you?

I just realised that the FlowThermostat plugin is not working properly. It lacks to get the correct z position with Cura 13.06.4. I made an updated version: https://github.com/Dim3nsioneer/Cura-Plugins/raw/master/FlowThermostat1.1.py

Hi there Has anyone ever tried to build a heated bed with a carbon fibre plate? Is it the best of two worlds (fast as aluminum, flat as glass) or is it just rubbish?

Thanks!

Hi there Has anybody thought of or even tried to write a Cura plugin which changes the flow rate at a certain z? Changing (reducing) flow rate seems to be a good thing when printing small details like the tops of the Ultimaker robot. However, the same flow rate might lead to holes in larger parts of the same body...

Thank you very much! With the old version the Cura engine continued to crash on my PC, now it's stable again... :-)

There are scientific publications saying that below 100nm it doesn't really matter what materials the particles are made of (that's why you should e.g. not use ordinary tap water with ultrasonic humidifiers, at least in regions with large lime content...). They are physically dangerous, not chemically... as a physicist, I think one has to keep an eye on it... Laser printer made significant prograss within the last few years. In many (European) countries restrictions on particle densities are tough... And I agree with the cigarette... ;-)

I just switched from the Ultimaker silver metallic filament to a different PLA filament. I found the quality of the prints significantly better with the new filament. Especially the thickness of the printed lines seems to have less variation. As the orignial filament is named 'metallic' I think there are metallic particles included in the PLA. This means it is an emulsion which shows a different flow behavior than the pure stuff. The quality of silver metallic prints is therefore not an issue of poor filament quality but caused by the mixture of the material.

Thanks a lot for your help. I checked they pulleys; they show a very slight wobble which seems to origin from the natural play they have on the axis. But when checking I found the x-motor not fixed very vell to the back plane and the front x-belt being not as tight as the back belt and as it should be. After having fixed these two issues, I get quite accurate prints (9.8mm when 10mm in the model, 100.0mm when 100mm in the model, 30.5mm when 30.6mm in the model, etc...) even when printing with 150mm/s!