Dim3nsioneer

A picture of the teeth marks in your filament with the current feeder setting might help people to answer your question about the right tension.

Typically, a fan can draw much more current at startup than specified for running at full speed. Maybe that's what happened. Did you try to run the fan with PWM? Typically, fans from ebmpapst St. Georgen are not specified to run with a PWM 24VDC (means they could produce some spikes?). They have seperate models with a PWM signal line.

@Labern: Sounds as if you have you have some more insights into that hotend than is commonly known (or have it even tested?). Can you say something about how it is actually constructed close to the nozzle opening (pressure situation, geometry,...)?

Guys, there is a potmeter on the Ulticontroller PCB which allows for adjusting the contrast. Try it...

Well, retraction should be on... And the filament amount before next retraction should be very small or 0. I would put the minimum distance between retraction to something like 2mm.

Here comes the correction... TweakAtZ can be used in multiple instances, just add it once more to the list. However, depending on the print, it might be quite painful to use it more than five times as it reprocesses the whole gcode for each instance. But on an UM2, the second instance of the TweakAtZ plugin 'sees' the changes of the first one and is able to use these settings even if it's a dimension you usually set at the machine like temperature. Just to avoid any misunderstandings: It's Cura itself which allows for printing the infill faster than the outer shell, not the TweakAtZ plugin...

If you send me the gcode file to dim3nsioneer@gmx.ch I'll have a look at it. Any other information about your TweakAtZ settings might help as well.

Yes and no. Yes, x and y axis are important but (no) don't underestimate the extruder motor(s). Just unhook it during a print and you will hear the difference.

If combing is enabled (check in the expert settings) you may try to disable it or use the RetractWhileCombing plugin for the exposed top layers. If combing is disabled try increasing the zhop to e.g. 0.2mm and increase the travel speed to 250mm/s.

The current version of TweakAtZ (bundled with Cura 15.02.1) also supports tweaking the print speed only without altering the travel speed. The lifting and lowering feature is called zhop and can be found in the expert settings of Cura.

Yes, less travel moves would be much appreciated. But we have to be aware that this ends up very quickly in solving the travelling salesman problem. Certainly something worth to have a deeper look into for the new Cura.

You can run the z stage with higher multistepping. You just have to adjust the steps per mm settings (doesn't even require a new firmware).

I don't think this will happen. Mainly out of the reason the key elements of the troubles are well known in the meantime: thermal troubles at the hotend when both nozzles are fully heated (e.g. for ABS) print quality not good enough to stick the label 'Ultimaker' on it second nozzle hits already printed regions There are good concepts for a properly working dual extrusion. See e.g. Foehnsturm's recent work on the dual extrusion and his earlier work on mechanically rectracting hotends. http://reprap.me/front-page-show/diamond-hotend.html seems to be a promising approach to me as well, at least for materials printed at about the same temperature. I expect a working dual extrusion for the UM2 within a year. But it wont come from Ultimaker but from the community as e.g. the Olsson heater block for the UM2.

Indeed a great print. It's just a pity that it can only be printed on a single day of the year... :lol:

Do you want to buy the filament in the States or would you also import it?

Same here: heat it up to 200°C, let it cool down (77°C works best on my UM2) and then a cold pull. Every time. I never use the change material setting as it leads to a thin string inside the Bowden tube (hardly, almost not visible) which then blocks everything and leads to underextrusion.

No reason not to calibrate the (one?) extruder right now by a M303 (autotune). But if you have two different hotends, they will use the same PID settings atm which might lead to sub-optimal results for the second hotend. If they are of the same type (e.g. a for the dual extrusion of the UMO), differences are small and everything works fine.

Absolutely right as the correct PID is different for each individual machine. Unfortunately there is only one PID setting for all extruders in Marlin so far (but is likely going to change soon; I recently saw a discussion / pull request about this on Github).

The next Cura version will offer an alternative way to display the progress bar of the plugins (without stealing the focus). The bundled TweakAtZ (V4.0.2) plugin will immediately use this alternative. There will be updated versions of the RetractWhileCombing and the SelectExtruder plugin as well.

Hmmm... never had a problem with bent filament causing underextrusion. But I'm using Robert's feeder (highly recommended!). Doesn't make much sense to me to straighten filament that will be bent again in the Bowden tube afterwards... I think it's much more important to keep the inside of the Bowden tube clean. I do this by wrapping a pipe-cleaner around the filament before it enters the feeder.

Hmmm... that's maybe a value the printer is not comfortable with. Try 0.1mm as this is the z resolution of the Simple Metal, isn't it? What print speed do you use? A lower print speed might smooth the effect as it doesn't have to slow down that much for the z step... Can you reduce the temperature a bit without getting underextrusion or are you already at the lower limit?

@MendellS: So you often had to relevel the bed?

That's only in Cura. In Marlin, the diameters of all three (four?) possible hotends are properly implemented. The flow is anyway an independent scaling factor and not the same as is used for the diameter.

Correct. And what is the heat sink for? Which part do you actually want to cool? I guess it's the part with the highest risk of degrading and melting. And this is hardly the stainless steel part.

Does that mean UM hires people which are unexperienced in support for doing support? That would explain a lot... But response times got shorter recently... B)