aaronalai

Woah Skint, that looks awesome! I like the poses and robot for scale, it looks like it's a bunch of fun to fiddle with and move around. Congratulations on such a nice print.

That's exactly what I thought when it finished, I didn't want to disturb it because it looked so nice sitting there on the print bed and I wasn't sure how difficult my epoxy idea was going to be. Sounds like the final exam of prints, very comprehensive and difficult :mrgreen:; but sounds totally worth it. I bet you've got almost every printing challenge in that terminator arm. Your friend would be crazy not to be impressed!! BTW, I've gone to work with plastic in my beard several times; I wouldn't be surprised if I've eaten a good bit of plastic myself.

Thanks Skint, there have been so many really great prints since I last checked this thread!! Every day I'm still amazed with what people are printing. Very excited to see the final terminator arm, looks like an intricate print. I printed a human foot skeletal structure last evening; someone at work needs one for their experiments. I essentially printed it with the Ultimaker support then glued all the articulating surfaces together with transparent epoxy then removed the support structure. The support structure was actually really easy to remove, epoxying the bony surfaces together was a different story. 0.2 layer resolution 40 mm/s 210 C ColorFabb Standard White (Perhaps my favorite of all my filaments at the moment) 26 hour print time

Thanks guys, I'll be more considerate next time I drop off the face of the Earth I have some more prints I did while in limbo, I printed the gear skull here on Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:27388. I do biomechanics research and made this for my boss, it seemed very applicable. While printing the gear skull I also got the exciting opportunity to print these: That thing on the right was jammed into the cavity the heater block sits resides in. I'm pretty sure what happened was that the gear dislodged from the bed, probably a leveling mistake on my part. I usually watch the skirt to make sure it is applied well to the printing bed, but I went to sleep while this last out of three pieces printed; so I didn't get to see the skirt being applied. it took about 1.5 hours. but I got everything cleaned up and almost perfect. I printed out a couple of cylinders to make sure everything was running smoothly. The printer itself has not caused any problems they were all oversights on my part. I had a 50 hour print fail half way through because the end of the filament was crossed under filament on the spool and it tightened up and prevented the spool from displacing filament. The filament was ground down and had severe kinks where it bends around the filament guides; telling me that there was quite a bit for force pulling on the filament before it started to grind down.

Hey guys I know I've been MIA for a while, but I've been printing the entire time, almost gone through 2.5 spools of plastic already. I've been wearing my printed glasses for about 3 weeks now and they are the best glasses I've ever had. I never need to readjust them, and they stay on my head even if I'm doing a lot of sweaty physical activity. No one has noticed my glasses though, I suppose that's a testament to how well they printed out. I printed them out of black ABS plastic and have already broken a stem; no matter, I printed out a new one and was off to business. I printed out the robot and it turned out great on my first try: I also printed out my gyroscope thing, with a couple of modifications, I'll post that when the new frame is finished. Many of the other things are in progress prototypes.

Hey guys I was wondering where the Ultiamker wallet and clutch files went from YouMagine. I saw the before I got my printer and was going to make the wallet, and thought I was going crazy because there is no trace of them, then I found this site proving they did exist at some point: http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printable-Mens-Wallet-and-Womens-Clutch/ What gives?

Hey Ian thanks!! Yeah you are totally right about the filament guide not sticking out far enough and rubbing on the power cord. I noticed this after my first print with it on, I was hoping it would not get too close and rub against the plug, but merely graze it; but I could feel the plug vibrating and knew it was rubbing too much. So I hunted through my bolt collection and found a longer M3 bolt and found a more optimal place to put the guide: I should have just moved the one I had already printed but I wasn't sure how much the filament would curl after moving past the new guide, the old guide does effectively nothing. Also, for those wondering where my YouMagine feet post is, I've discovered there is a very large variation in the wall thickness of the UM2 panels. I made some custom .stl feet files for Pikey and his are almost half a mm thicker than mine. I wanted to wait to see if his would fit correctly; Pikey has reported back with great success so I'm just going to make a bunch of different thickness feet and you can measure your panels and select the appropriate ones as needed. One day I'll get into the parametric models thing, but for now it's just easier to make a dozen different .stl files.

Hey tonycstech, you are correct in your first interpretation of my request. To have the changes affect a number of layers instead of just the 1 layer I selected. I would like to apply the changes I make to every second or third or whatever consecutive layer. For example, if I start on layer 6 and want to print at 10% print speed for every other layer (nth layer = 2) then layer 6 would print at 10% speed, layer 7 would not be changed, while layer 8 would reflect the 10% print speed and so on. So I could select a layer and have an "apply to nth layer" option; this would apply the settings I made to one layer, to every nth layer I choose. This could either be for a set number of layers or the whole layer sequence, and I could just change all the layers below the one where I wanted to stop the sequence. Only the nth layers would be affected without affecting the layers that are not included in the consecutive nth layer sequence When I adjusted the code for the video I posted above I had to change each layer one by one. I started at layer 6, changed the print speed to 10%, then changed layer 7 to 100%, then layer 8 to 10% so on and so forth. This wasn't too bad for a small print but if the print was any bigger it would take a lot of time to change each layer one by one. I'm not sure if this is a difficult request to fulfill, if it doesn't fall neatly into the way your code is already structured I will totally understand if you don't want to implement it.

Hey tonycstech, I do expect the edge to curl up; but I've managed to control the curling from accumulating as the print progresses with great success. I've tried speeding up the print with the lower nozzle temperatures (175-180C) and I still get the curling accumulation throughout the print. Only when I slow down the print to a snails pace of about 4 mm/s can I consistently manage the curling of the edges. For example I tried to print the bearing piece attached to the string in the image below with many different settings, cold nozzle fast and sow print speeds, and hot nozzle fast and slow print speeds; and the only way to prevent curling was with cold nozzle slow print speeds. The slow print speed seems to give the material enough time to evenly heat and then consequently evenly cool down, preventing the curling from happening. Without these settings I would start to get a bowl shape after a couple of layers just like in foehnsturm's print video: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/4094-raised-edges/?p=33464 @gr5 I printed the cylinder at the same settings I posted above, 4 mm/s. Without going this slowly I would get the same type of lip accumulation foehnsturm would see in his prints. I picked the arbitrary angle as a function of foehnsturm's comment. I thought the portion of the sentence I did not understand in his comment was in reference to my settings not working on round support structures that have an oblong cross section. I just wanted to print out a simulated support structure to show that the lip curling effect does not accumulate with the settings posted earlier.

Hey guys I finished Version 1 of my Yo-Yo. I first want to apologize to anyone that tried to print it out in the past without messing with the SolidWorks files, I posted them because I didn't have my printer yet and wasn't sure what the tolerances were going to be after shrinking; uhhh also my threaded bolt and nut were not threaded, but just had rings the same geometries as the threads. I thought SolidWorks would put the spiral in the threads, but I had to do that manually. Anyway, I have a couple of little tweaks so people who print the parts don't have to file the center pieces where the axle goes through. Here is a video of the Yo-Yo in action: And here are some photos of all the pieces, and how it fits together, it's all printable except the string : I printed the two halves of the Yo-Yo with a 0.2 mm layer thickness, and the nut, bolt, and bearing core with 0.1 mm layer thickness. I had to use my Ultra-Low settings to print out the core else it would start to form a lip and wouldn't turn out right. I also had to print the core in the orientation it's in with all the pieces displayed, so I could get the fine ridges to line up with the fine ridges of the bolt (axle) to minimize friction and increase hang time. I'm going to try and increase the mass of the outer ring to increase hang time; although I get a pretty decent hang time as it is. I'll post the final pieces on YouMagine when I'm comfortable with the tolerances.

I also tested the settings posted above on a 4 mm diameter 0.1 layer thickness cylinder protruding from the build plate at 60 degrees. The lip did not accumulate in this print either; the print was designed to simulate what a support structure would look like at this angle. The lip did not accumulate throughout the print, just like the other overhang tests.

Thanks for the clarification, I'll make the appropriate changes to my post. Lol, yeah I still need to print out the Ultimaker robot :lol:. Will do soon :-P.

Hey gr5!! Alright so I tried the acceleration and jerk settings, I brought them down as close to your recommended settings as I could, then brought them down to the lowest settings that were possible, while printing at 20 mm/s and there was no improvement on the curling. BUT... I tried out your suggestion number 4 with some interesting results. The one on the left is my manual attempt and the one on the right is with the use of tonycstech's Modify g-code program found here: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/4185-tweak-at-layer-number-windows-application/, I had a print speed of 20 mm/s and modified the g-code to print out at 100% every odd layer and 20% every even layer starting at the 6th layer. Here are a couple of videos, the first of me trying the every other layer thickness manually and the second using tonycstech's awesome program. Manual: tonycstench's g-code modifier program: I'm not sure what you mean about the first part of your sentence, the curling is maintained and does not accumulate with the settings I posted earlier. You are right about the print speed though, it would be silly to print out a large piece at such a low speed just to take care of some curling, but as a compromise between stopping curling and maintaining a reasonable print speed, I think doing the slow passes every other or maybe every 2nd layer would be worth it. Especially if you don't want to babysit your print to prevent the curls from hitting the printing head. I've sent a request to tonycstech in his thread, and hope it's not to difficult to make the appropriate addons. Here is a link to what I posted in his thread: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/4185-tweak-at-layer-number-windows-application/?p=41931

Hey tonycstech, first of all I don't know why I thought your name was toysync :oops:, so in the videos I'm showing you I am totally calling you by the wrong name; I am sorry. So I know beggars can't be choosers, but I have a request for your awesome gcode modifier program, btw did I mention how much I appreciate you spending your time working on such a great program ! Alright, so over in this thread I've been looking at curling and it's relation to overhangs (page two has the more applicable stuff): http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/4789-uglier-overhangs-with-finer-print-resolution/ A couple of months ago the same topic came up here: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/4094-raised-edges/ I wouldn't expect you to read through everything in the threads, the gist of it is that to avoid curling as a function of overhangs one needs to print as slow as possible and as cold as possible; I've gotten great results with 4 mm/s print speed at 175 C nozzle temp at varying layer thicknesses. So you can probably already figure out the problem with these settings; if someone is printing out something large they don't want to go at a snails pace of 4 mm/s for the entire print. After posting some of my results in the first thread I linked to, gr5 had a great suggestion to try printing with the ultra-slow/cold settings on every nth layer. So I tried it out manually and got some pretty alright results, then I used your fabulous program to do it for me automatically, and slowed the print down every other layer and got really great results take a look: These pieces are being shown upside down from how they were printed, because I couldn't get them to stand up on their own due to the mass of the overhang. The one on the left is my manual attempt and the one on the right is with the use of your code, I had a print speed of 20 mm/s and modified the g-code to print out at 100% every odd layer and 20% every even layer starting at the 6th layer. This is what happens if you try to print with about 20 mm/s the entire way: The curling gets worse as you continue to print. By slowing down the print speed you can stop the cumulative effects of curling and control it throughout the the entire print. Here is a video of me printing that overhang piece out by manually, changing the print speed back and forth during the print: And here is a video of me printing out the overhang piece with the use of you program: So what I'm asking for is an "apply to every nth layer option" starting at the layer selected in your program, where you can enter in the nth layer number. I'm not sure how difficult this would be to add to your code, you've already done a lot with the program so far and I do appreciate you hard work.

Hey gr5, I tried the older version of Cura, boy has that program matured! Printing the outside layer first didn't do anything to help the print. I even printed at the settings I posted at the bottom of this post but my overhang test piece would curl up like I was printing with normal settings. I still have yet to try your acceleration reduction, although I'm not sure how well it will work with such a cold nozzle; I think I'm stuck printing out the overhang layers really slowly. Will report my findings. Alright so here is how I figured out how to minimize curling around the corners of my prints. I hope this can help others out there and I'm very interested to hear your feedback/success/difficulties with the technique. So to start out with here are some pictures comparing the results I was getting, these are only a fraction of the little overhang pieces I printed out. Before I knew what I was doing, we have 0.2 mm layer thickness on the very left and the remainder are 0.1 mm layer thickness, all with a bunch of different print settings but the same g-code: And after I watched enough of these stupid things print out, same as before with a 0.2 mm layer thickness on the left and the remainder being 0.1 mm layer thickness all with varying printer settings centered about specific thresholds, and all with the same g-code: That little lip doesn't get any bigger than what you see in the image above. Also, if I were to abort the print while it was printing the inner of two shell layers, the lip would probably be even smaller. Alright, now for gr5's test print (0.1 mm thickness); the distorted ring near the base is because I put a folded up piece of stock card too close to the print which resulted in cooling the head too much. I was trying to use the card to focus the a video I was recording, and noticed I was getting a tiny bit of under extrusion almost instantly when I moved the card too close; yeah that's how cold the nozzle was, I call the settings my Ultra-Low settings: Here are a couple of videos of gr5's test piece printing out, notice the same blob grabbing phenomena as in my previous videos. I accidentally had three shell thicknesses from a previous test in Cura so the first inner shell print does nothing. To recap from my previous video, I noticed that if I printed really slowly the nozzle grabbed the blob that got generated on the outer shell move, and dragged it into the inner shell where it couldn't accumulate. In my previous attempts to control this action the piece still wasn't turning out as well as I wanted with the corners melting too much sometimes. So I decided to take things as far as I could, take a look at the videos, the piece is printed with a 0.1 mm layer thickness: This video shows the amount of curling in the middle of the print, and the next two videos show how the curling stayed constant and didn't build up over time. This video shows the blobs being re-absorbed into the print, like my previous video does, but the results are much cleaner. This is a video of following the nozzle as it prints the shells of the test piece, remember I accidentally set Cura to do three shell passes, so the first pass does nothing. So from the video you can already tell what one of the settings is, it's to print slow; Ultra-Slow. I have tested the speed and get good success from 2-4 mm/s any faster than that and the prints start to curl too much. The other setting if you haven't already guessed is to print Ultra-Cold, I had my nozzle zeroed in at 175C. I could go to 170 but the nozzle was so close to under-extrusion that if it got just a couple of degrees C lower, I would get under-extrusion. I tested all the way up to 180 and saw good results; around 190 was too warm and would start to melt too many layers at time. The fans were turned on to 100% after the first layer, and the heated bed started at 60C and was brought down to 40C after the first layer was applied (a tip from Yellow-Shark, they suggested in this thread). To figure out how cold I could print with my red PLA, I printed my overhang test, starting at 210 and went down all the way to 175 in 5 degree increments waiting to see under-extrusion. Anyway, I'm sure there is more than one way to skin a cat and would like to know how other people wrestle with gr5's and my overhang test pieces. Also, if you change specific layers in your code to reflect the settings posted, I would really be interested in the results.

Alright so I just got out of the shower, and am really going to run those errands; I have almost no food in the house :shock:. Can someone provide me an .stl file for a sandwich :lol:. But I was thinking what if there was a setting to do something like cool head lift does and then the head comes back inside the corner and sweeps it to the outside like you suggested, but while still not extruding any material, then it comes back in onto the inner shell, after the sweep, to continue it's business while avoiding the outer shell edges. Sort of like the lift cool head actions again, but this time when the nozzle reenters the piece it doesn't come in from the edges and instead drops down onto the inner shell layer.

Never mind what I said about your suggestion number 1. I see what you mean, if without a retraction the filament would still have a tendency to come out and with a retraction the filament already deposited could get sucked back into the nozzle. Edit: I don't know still, I think it would be at the very least an interesting idea to try and implement.

Nice! I like the overhang piece you generated. I'll test it out later today. I'm about run some errands, but I have a couple of photos of the results from your suggestions above and also of more tests I've been running on my overhang piece. I wanted to comment on your clarification of suggestion 1. I think this is a really good idea. I have been messing around with the lift cool head settings and watching my nozzle while it sits and waits for the part to cool and have found a fairly wide temperature band where there is no oozing of filament from the nozzle while it waits a for several seconds, this gave me better surface detail and no blobs upon reentry of the nozzle to the part. How would one go about trying to implement something like this? Are requests of this nature sent to Daid, he seems pretty busy with his RCs I think he's on number 6 right now, and everyday there seem to be more bugs found. Yeah, I can imagine the lip getting fairly high fairly fast, and when it cools it will definitely hit the head; in the video I posted of my overhang test the nozzle is buried into the part by 1+mm. When I was printing out my overhang test in post #26 I was able to keep the curling to a constant minimum, and the only reason there was any real curling towards the top was because I printed it with zero infill and forgot to uncheck top fill in expert settings. I think if you alter the code for delicate parts that tend to curl and apply those settings to only those layers you can substantially reduce the curling building up over time. I'll post some better prints than the one in #26 and the settings I used to make them, when I get back home later today. The picture in post #26 came out as flat as it looks in the picture, I didn't do any post processing to the piece after I pulled it from the bed.

Yeah you are definitely correct, when I started this thread I hadn't spent as much time watching the output as I should have. The edges look fantastic, this machine is quite something. Yeah, the inner shell prints before the outer shell does on that same layer, and on the next layer up the inner border is repairing the blob. I think because the nozzle is spending more time at the corners during the inner boarder move, heating up the blob created on the outer boarder move, then it sticks to the nozzle and gets dragged back into the print. Yeah, you can start to see very tiny lips the curl upwards form at the beginning of the print, for a couple of layers it looks like the layers are going to be smoothed out again, but the curling gets compounded until the curl disrupts the outer border. Great point, yeah it's hard to see the effect happening in real time with thinner layers; but it's definitely a cumulative effect and not really apparent right away. Very interesting suggestions: 1. Do you mean, lift the head at the tip of a corner? 2. I'll take a look at Cura 13.04 and see if reversing the shell print makes a difference. 3. Yeah, the head would have to remelt and lift then you would have to press down rather quickly, I've tried to mend the corners right after the head moves over them with a metal rod but the plastic solidifies too fast and perhaps the metal rod wicks away heat too quickly. Maybe a warm metal rod? 4. I see what you mean here, every nth layer gets repaired so the cumulative effects don't build up. I like your suggestions for the jerk and acceleration, I'll give them a try as well. I'll report back my findings; what are your opinions on doing these tests on the overhang piece? I've modeled it so I don't have to wait for the entire bottom gear piece to print out, I was trying to find a quicker way to test different ideas out.

Blam 0.1 layer resolution on the overhang test, almost perfect except for a little bent corner on the last layer; I watched the whole thing print. Apparently the UM2 is full of magic, I'm going to bed! Still don't know if this is going to work on the gear though.

Also, one one more thing I forgot to note is that I had cool head lift checked for the overhang test, so each layer was pretty well cooled. I also tried poking at that print and the little blobs that formed on the gear with a metal rod and they were solid pretty much right after the print head moved over them.

Hey Takei I was just responding to your PM, yeah I've seen the thread. It's a wealth of information for sure, I'm still looking through it for inspiration . Edit: O'yeah, that's not elephant foot, it's just a really tiny print and you are seeing the first layer that is smashed into the build platform. I think it might just look like elephant foot because the piece is so small it is more noticeable.

Also, forgot to post this image, it's of the 0.05 layer print settings but with 80% infill; the infill didn't seem to make any difference and the piece was forming the little blobs on the edges:

Forgot to ask in my last post, what do you mean by "open the door fully?"

Thanks for the tips yellowshark, but I don't think they made much of an improvement. Here is a photo of the gear piece being printed at 0.05 mm thickness, 20 mm/s, 90C and with the bed at 60C then turned down to 40 C after the first layer; almost all the prints I have been posting in this thread have had the fans come on at the second layer. I decided to make an "overhang test" in SolidWorks, it has a pretty steep overhang of about 23 degrees with respect to the earth; I wanted something to exemplify the overhang scenario. The overhang test in the image above was printed with the exact same settings as the gear piece was. I then printed it at 0.2 mm thickness and these are the results (note the 0.05 layer thickness piece popped off the bed during it's print): Both prints (0.05 and 0.2 mm layer thickness) curled up, but the 0.2 mm layer thickness seems to have held together better and retained most of the dimensions. Here is a video of the 0.05 mm layer one being printed, you can see that it has curled up significantly and that there is a bunch of plastic being deposited on the side facing away from the camera, similarly to the gear teeth edges being printed. I don't know if you are interested but here is the stl and amf file for both the gear and the overhang test: https://virginia.box.com/s/jbniu9wk2gd6rf378xyg