Jump to content

shadowfiend

Dormant
  • Posts

    87
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Everything posted by shadowfiend

  1. I found it eventually. There is some strange behaviour with the input fields going on. So upon changing the value in the input field, the enter key does not set the changed value. The TAB key does set the changed value. If the value is changed and then the mouse is clicked elsewhere the change is reverted back. Has anyone else found this behaviour to be very confusing?
  2. Hi, I am trying to disable infill like I have done many times before, but since version 3(ish) Infill Density just keeps jumping to 20%. I have a small part that I want to be hollow, but Cura 4.1.0 is refusing to cooperate with me. I feel like I'm going crazy please help!
  3. Thank you Labern, There's still a long way to go with the foundry, but I have some big projects coming up. I'm hoping to get started on my burnout kiln for the ceramic shell wax / PLA removal soon. Then I will be able to fire larger items, such as this Beethoven bust I sculpted in ZBrush. The plan is to get him printed life size, in separate sections, covered with foundry wax, in part to hide the layer lines but also to allow me to sculpt in in very fine detail. Then after several complex moulding processes, he will be cast in bronze. Cheers, Ian.
  4. Hi, I have been busy over the last 16 months upgrading the foundry equipment and have made a few mods to my Ultimaker original. I would very much like to hear from people that have tried metal casting 3d prints, ether from sand moulds or lost PLA. I hope you enjoy the video. Many thanks.
  5. Hi robinmdh, Thanks for your reply, I know that there are a couple of online firmware builders for the UMO and might have used one before, although I can remember any details. So I'm guessing that I would download the latest firmware build from GitHub and use an Ultimaker firmware builder to make it compatible. Was this your line of thinking? If anybody else has managed to implement Mesh Bed Levelling on an Ultimaker Original, I would be grateful to hear your experiences. I have an Arduino sketch saved on my computer, so I'm assuming, that if anything goes wrong I can just re-upload the image. Cheers, Ian.
  6. Hi firmware gurus! So I have been having problems with bed levelling on my UMO with official heated bed upgrade and strongly suspect that the glass is not flat. Then found this video and it blew my mind! Manual Mesh Bed Leveling - YouTube I have searched for any info on someone doing this on an Ultimaker Original, but can not find anything. I recently updated the firmware over USB from Cura latest version I think. From the Ulticontroller:- Firmware version Ultimaker: DEV GIthub checkout May 3 2018 16:59:11 In the video they guy says to search for Mesh Bed Levelling in the configuration.h tab (from Arduino software) and enable it there. I did this but there is no Mesh Bed Levelling in my version of the firmware. So my questions are:- Has anybody done this and would anybody be able to explain how to do it please? Many thanks in advance. Cheers, Ian.
  7. These are the videos from my YouTube channel. The second video is of the casting process for the Easter Island head as proof of concept, where 3D prints can be used as patterns for sand casting. The videos concentrate more on the metal casting process and less on the 3D printing aspect. The overall purpose being that the 3D prints are the patterns. I currently do not have many photographs as I have only just started this process. More will be coming in the very near future and I will be shooting the third video today. A brass hook is on its way! I look forward to any and all feedback. I would like to know what others have experienced if/when they have tried getting their prints cast at a traditional foundry. Introduction video that explains my business and shows some of the processes of casting. The second video shows some of the steps involved in casting the Easter Island head. Unfortunately I had a problem with my DSLR camera and lost a few minutes of footage. This image shows the top of the casting flask (cope) for a Nema 17 heat sink mould. This was my first brass casting and it failed :c( I will be casting this again soon, with lots of media :c) You can see the two holes are the 'spure' and 'riser' for the metal to flow in and out of the mould. The radial lines are vents to allow gasses to escape during casting. Many thanks. Ian.
  8. Hi geert, I have a website and YouTube channel, would it be ok to post the link and embed the videos here? The last thing I want to do is appear spammy. Thanks.
  9. Hi Ultimakers, I would like to share my experience with making patterns for metal casting with my Ultimaker Original. I started a business last year with the intention of setting up a metal casting foundry tailored to casting 3D printed patterns in metal specifically for the 3D printing community. I have a small industrial unit and have made most of my own equipment; one small furnace and a much larger one that is a work in progress. I have the means to produce small sand castings, but I hope to expand this to include investment casting in the future. I am using oil bonded sand to produce the moulds and I have tried aluminium and brass so far. After a lot of failed castings in the beginning, I ditched my 'home made' green sand and bought in some proper foundry oil bonded sand. This improved things tremendously and I am now getting good castings. One of the reasons for choosing sand casting is that 3D printing seems to be a perfect match for making sand casting patterns. Often a split pattern is ideal for many shapes, this is where the pattern is cut along the parting line; the beauty of this is that the need for support material can often be eliminated. The Easter Island head I cast last week was 34mm tall and was printed in PLA at 0.2mm layer height after some light sanding I simply pushed the pattern into the sand, smoothed out the parting line and rammed up the second part of the flask. I melted some brass and poured it into the mould. Some minutes later, I knocked out the flask and out came a successful casting. I will be casting more objects very soon and will keep posting my results here. I would be very interested in questions, suggestions and comments. I would be happy to offer advice on designing patterns for sand casting. If you would like to check out my progress so far, please check out my profile for the link to my web site. Cheers, Ian.
  10. This is the sort of behaviour that has been driving me nuts for ages in all versions of Cura. Here is a thread I started on the topic. https://ultimaker.com/en/community/51264-cura-27-toolpath?page=last I would like to bring attention to this ongoing issue as I know that all users would benefit from an intensive look at the code by the Cura team.
  11. Hi smartavionics, I understand what you are saying here, but I do appreciate you taking the time to have looked into it. Perhaps GitHub would be the place for me to make a nuisance of myself ;c) Many thanks for your efforts.
  12. Hi smartavionics, Sorry I've been busy with some real life stuff, so I missed your post. This looks very interesting, if you post the gcode before and after and I will happily look through to help identify any remaining strange behaviours, if that is helpful. Many thanks.
  13. That's excellent smartavionics, I'm sure a lot of people will be delighted to see the improvement this would make to print quality and performance. When there are a lot of unnecessary moves, retractions and extra time spent on a layer there is more stress on the printer and more inconsistency in filament deposition and failed prints. With the announcement of Cura v3, It would be great to see this issue finally put to rest and help to make Cura the market leader that I know it can be.
  14. Thanks smartavionics, I think that if there was some way of tracking down who had corrected the code for the top and bottom surfaces, we might politely ask them to do the same for the infill patterns ;c)
  15. Hi smartavionics, Yes the v 2.7 top and bottom layers do seem to be working much better, however the infill is still doing some crazy stuff. Please see the gocode in the link:- GCODE On layer 5 the squre shape is behaving badly. The infill (zig zag) is starting in the bottom right and going to the bottom left corner, but then when it starts the other part it does not pick up at the starting point of the infill. Instead it starts a new line in the top left, comes back to the bottom right corner and meets up with the starting point. This is where it gets funky; the lines touching the shell are drawn out of sequence forcing a non extrusion move over the top of each previously printed short line. In Gcode Analyzer you can step through this line by line and see this happening using the scroll handles and cursor keys. If I was to make a suggestion, I would say this. Choose a polyline and start printing at the beginning and continue to the end. I'm sure that this is an easy fix to those who know the slicing code. No need for any 'travelling salesman' gymnastics, just follow the polyline from start to end. Are you with me? Many thanks
  16. I'm very interested in knowing if there is any way to control the way that the toolpath is generated, or to be more accurate, the order in which the computed paths are printed. For the most part when I have looked at the gcode in Gcode Analyzer the actual toolpath is exactly what I want. The problem is that the code that optimises the order of printing seems to undo the good work the toolpath generation code has made. For example, we have all seen the situation where, say in a simple rectangle, it starts in the middle somewhere and then moves somewhere else for a bit, then leaves gaps and finally comes back and fills them in all the while creating unnecessary retractions and moves. When our human intuition would say start at the bottom left and continue to the top right corner and don't do anything crazy in the middle. I apologise if I am going over old ground here but the thing that bugs me the most is that on some layers it is totally perfect!!! I'm sure that I'm not the only one to be frustrated by this, as it would make such a difference to the quality and reduce the number of failed prints. Thanks.
  17. Hi ahoeben, Thanks for your contribution :c) Yes it got set automatically, I thought it may have been a 'safety' feature to avoid breaking the graphics hardware, I've had similar things happen in other software. Will your fix make it into an official update? Best regards.
  18. Ok I fixed it. I went to Preferences > Configure Cura > Plugins > Solid View (was disabled) So I turned it back on and restarted Cura, all be it in ‘compatibility mode’. So then go Preferences > Configure Cura > General > Viewport Behaviour > [uncheck] Force layer view compatibility mode (restart required) All is now working again. Yay.
  19. Hi Ultimakers, I have encountered a problem with Cura 2.7, whilst playing with the support structure settings, the 3D view went blank and I thought it was just a crash and quit. I reloaded Cura and still nothing, but also the view menu and the view mode button are devoid of any options, see below. There was an unusual 'configuring windows' thing that happened when I restarted, because I have all updates turned off, I figured the antivirus may have done this. I am running Windows 7 Ultimate, on an i7 with 12Gb ram. I reinstalled Cura a couple of times and updated the Nvidia diver (Gforce GT 630) to the latest version but it's the same issue. Just for kicks, I cloned a clean windows 7 VM in Virtual box and installed Cura 2.7 there and after enabling hardware 2d and 3d acceleration it worked fine, as you would expect. I'm at a loss what is going on here and would greatly appreciate some help. Kind regards.
  20. Hi jonnybischof, I set a 2 hour print running the other night and everything worked great :c) In the morning the print was done the e3d hot end had delivered the goods, the little fan was still running and nothing went wrong :c) So thanks to your help I am in business again. After being quite frustrated with the whole thing a week ago, I've developed a new found interest in electronics, your help with the calculations was great. So many many thanks and happy printing :cD Ian.
  21. Hi jonnybischof, I have success, well kind of. I took note of your comment about the resistors getting hot and since I already had a 100 ohm 2W resistor, I decided to buy another one and run it in parallel giving 50 ohm as you suggested. I measured the resistors after soldering and they come out at 50.1 ohm. I have hooked this up as per your diagram and tried it out. I think the small fan may be inaccurately rated or something because I am reading 14.5V across the fan when everything is running. I have also measured the input voltage at the board socket and that gives me 19.44V The fan is running fine, if a bit noisy and the two resistors are just getting slightly warm but not hot. According to the E3D article, the small fan is rated from 7v - 13.8v so it looks like I am pushing this. Am I right in my assumption that the fan is the dubious component here? I cannot understand how the voltage can be so high. Many thanks again for your super detailed information :c)
  22. Hi jonnybischof, Thank you for your very detailed infomation :c) THe E3D small fan is rated at 12V 0.15A. After working through the numbers I worked out that there would be 1.55W going through the resistor, which is rated at 0.6W, would this handle the extra load? Also as far as I can see, the only way to power the fan is to de-solder the power socket from the UM board and wire the fan in series, does anyone know of a better way to do this? Many thanks and kind regards. Ian.
  23. Hi Macua85, Thank you for your suggestion, what would the circuit look like and how would you control it? Sorry I'm not good with electronics :c/ Many thanks.
  24. Hi all, I have baught an E3D V6 1.75mm bowden verson and managed to get it installed with a modular hot end mount. A had to make a gizmo out of polycarbonate to keep the smaller coupler from popping out of the old wooden extruder, but now all I need to get up and running is the littile 12v fan to be powered from somewhere. I have spoken to Joshua at E3D and he was kind enough to talk me through setting the firmware to accept the 12v heater cartridge and thermister settings. However he had said that I need to wire the fan in series from where the 19v comes into the UMO (1.5.7) board, together with a resistor to step down the voltage. I went to maplin and got a 90 Ohm resistor, but after checking the calcs again, I got 101.4 Ohm, is this going to be too small? He also pointed me here:- http://forum.e3d-online.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2&p=2 After reading many posts on this topic I am still none the wiser and dont know the best place to take the power from, as I don't like the idea of trying to wire a resistor onto the main power terminal of the board. The other thing of course is that the fan needs to be 'always on' Many thanks in advance. Ian.
×
×
  • Create New...