leon-grossman

For number 1, that seems to be the bad firmware upload from this morning. I'll update this afternoon.

1. My firmware is 14.01.1. Aborting a print causes the UM2 to restart itself. I'm presuming this is unintended. 2. I hope my feedback is useful to them. 3. Once I read that the system assumes 0.1mm offset on calibration, I used a feeler gage to set it to 0.08mm this morning (that's the closest I have) and it seems to be sticking but it really looks too far from the bed. The material is "dropping" onto the glass rather than squishing. Maybe my reprap experience doesn't apply here. 4. This is an area that needs significant work. Seriously, I'm cool with no printing from Cura but product management, etc, should be doable from somewhere other than the display! After my initial problems, I did a firmware download this morning. I've restarted a print and the buzzing noise is not there. I'm not going to worry about this unless it returns. I've also restarted my print that made it 15mm through the base plate and failed when it had to start printing pylons. I don't think it is a clogged nozzle or a direct under-extrusion. If it fails again, my guess will be something wrong with retraction between moves but I'm not sure if that's a user setting I should be dealing with.

OK, that wasn't good... I installed the new firmware. Aborting a print causes the machine to have a heart attack. The first time, it just rebooted. The second time the LCD display went blank. I've done a re-flash just in case but don't have time for more testing today. Additionally, the filament drive motor was making a crackling/buzzing noise for awhile and when I went back to my print the noise was gone but I was wildly under-extruding.

Last ranty post, I promise... The glass clip on the right side mechanically interferes with the nozzle. I have to pull the clip away from the bed to level the printer. The recommendation procedure of using a piece of paper does not work. The nozzle winds up way above the bed during printing. I have to actually move the printer down so that it just touches the glass. This is very similar to the way we used to have to level the Thing-O-Matic we had.

Let me clarify, the rod was out of the hole when I pulled it out of the box. They were in the right order, just shifted along the rod.

They had moved along the axis. They did not appear to be loose bu the left Y axis rod was shifted far enough back that it was out of the housing. For that to happen, both the front and rear pulleys had to be shifted back. It appears to be an original placement defect rather than a shifting due to being loose. I don't need USB printing but PC controlled jogging, heating, etc. *like every other printer on the market* would be very useful and would mitigate many of my complaints about the information available on the built in display. I don't like the 2.85mm filament because it feels hard to work with. I know it's not a very well formed or good reason. It could just be that my printer at home uses 1.75 and I'm comfortable with that. A few other annoyances I forgot to put in the list: Why is there no preheat option? I have to dig down into maintenance to preheat. The bed takes forever to heat up. I can understand due to the mass of glass. I refer back to the preheat option... I hate the progress bar. Give me numbers. If I'm heating, I don't want to have to go to the tune window to see the current heat bed temperature. This information exists. Show it to me with the progress bar. The same goes for the progress bar during print. Show me the percent complete along with the bar. The information exists, show it. Why is there no feed filament option? Let's say I removed the filament and aborted the re-feed process. Now I have to go through the remove filament process when there is none in the printer. When I'm not dealing with machine QC defects or fighting the annoying UI, the printer puts out fabulous quality. That is certainly one thing I have no complaints about.

I recently received my UM2 at my company. The package is really pretty but I've got a few thoughts based on doing a few test prints and dealing with some annoyances. One of the Y axis gantry rods was completely misadjusted and was not in the hole when it arrived to me. This was not a shipping issue, the pulleys were in the wrong place on the rod. The drive pulley for the filament was not tight and spun off after the second print job. I can't figure out how to control the printer using Cura. The LCD menu is poorly laid out for doing certain common functions. So, I get annoyed every time I need to setup the printer for use. To be fair, I've only spent five minutes trying to figure out how to connect from Cura. Every time I abort a print, the filament retracts so far that I have to manually use the scroll wheel to re-feed the filament. This is annoying because it takes forever to do with the scroll wheel. The concept of filament independent g-code is awesome in theory. In practice, it's cumbersome. The predefined ABS settings warp like mad and I haven't been able to fix that. The predefined PLA settings don't work for the transparent PLA. Adding a custom setting is annoying and the interface is confusing. I spent one minute on it but it looks like I can only have one custom setting? This should be, at least, downloadable from the PC because I've got ABS, PLA, Clear PLA and Soft PLA right now with intentions of playing with other materials in the future. Continuing on the materials issue. Having hardcoded ABS and PLA settings is really frustrating. Unless UM filament is dramatically better than everyone else's (which I haven't had a chance to verify), different batches and different colors may have significantly different behavior and need different settings. Changing filament is a PITA. Why couldn't I just have a spring I pull out of the way so that I can just pull out and insert filament? I hate, hate, hate 2.85mm filament. There are a lot of things to like about the UM2 but the annoyances are driving me crazy. Basically, the printer feels like a half step towards a truly plug and print solution but a half step is not far enough to justify taking away the capability that hackers need to get great results. Yes, I'll admit that I may be missing something, but that also says a lot about the process of interacting with this printer.