donmilne

Oh please, let this topic not degenerate into another "which 3D design software" topic. There are at least two big threads existing already (e.g. here), and there's really no new ground to cover! The original question was more interesting.

Hmm. I rather suspect that a number of people contributing to this thread have not really grasped the distinction between 3D drafting (CAD) and 3D solid modelling packages. The latter will generally produce "good" (printable) models, but the process with the former is much more hit and miss. Unfortunately, good hobby-priced solid modelling packages are few and far between. In fact DSM and OpenSCAD are the only two I know of offhand.

With practice, yes they can. In my experience (and I'm really only talking about PLA here), the right tension leaves a well defined knurled pattern in the filament, but the filament roundness is not distorted, and the feeder is not skipping (in cases where the tension is excessive, the feeder motor will have trouble even pushing the filament through the feeder.

When you say "old filament", do you mean that you were running towards the end of the spool? If yes then it could have been the high curvature of the filament caused binding and friction, rather than the filament per se. It's a problem. The clicking btw is caused by the stepper motor not having enough oomph to reach the next step, so on the step after that it jumps to the nearest stable state - hence the audible click. It tells you for certain that there's a big buildup of pressure and/or friction somewhere. Now that you have a working printer, I'd get Robert's feeder printed, even if only to be held in reserve!

Yes, it's normal for the impressions to be prominent, though I can't really tell from the picture if those are especially deep. The filament itself looks mishapen, but that might just be a camera illusion. I find that the depth of the impression is my main guide as to whether my tension is right. Impressions too light? The drive wheel might slip or grind. Impressions too deep? I might get skipping or stalling. If it looks like the knurled wheel has a good enough (but not too much) grip, then I should get reliable feeding. Basically I'm looked for the knurling and the impressions to mesh like gears. The feeder clicking makes it possible that the tension is too high, and the filament is having trouble even making it through the feeder. Ditto the fact that temperature makes no differences (obviously that can't help the feeder end). Incidentally, I suggest you switch to Robert's feeder. Among many other advantages it's a lot easier to tune the tension.

Try turning off the "Fix Horrible" options in Advanced Settings. If your model is watertight then these should't be needed.

Actually, I don't think you need to be quite so paranoid about breaking your printer. Yes, it's an expensive object, but if it you look at it it is mostly just standard bright steel rods, stepper motors, threaded rods, tubing etc. All easily replaceable if they break. The only specialised parts are the controller and bits in the hot end - and I'm sure you can get spare parts of those from UM. In regards to your question, I don't know of any internal feature: the power supply is probably quite basic. However you can easily buy a timer power socket.

I've grown up with bagpipes (check my location!), and detest them with a passion. However I have to admit that's pretty impressive.

In fact I did the test with Ultimaker White at 210°C (by accident - I didn't read the instructions properly), and I got a perfect result all the way to the top, though that was with Robert's feeder. IMHO underextrusion that bad means that something fundamental is wrong. I would check that the nozzle is reaching temperature - I guess that the Atomic cleaning method tells you that too. I'd also look for a problem inside the feeder, if it isn't Robert's one. I.e. open up the stock feeder and make sure it's clean and tensioned properly. Another possibility is a deformed teflon spacer, or the filament itself binding on the spool (tidy it up) or in the tube (add wiper attachment with a dab of sewing machine oil?).

Well, keeping the spool stored tightly wound should reduce the chance of it happening. If it was me then another thing I might consider is cutting off exactly the right amount of filament needed, and either let it hang, or wind it on one of the large diam spools that people use. I've also wondered if it wouldn't feasible to wind some filament around a larger diameter spool or drum, then put it in a low oven for a while to "relax" it, i.e. reduce the excessive springiness you get when reaching the end of a normal diam spool.

Welcome aboard, and let us know when you've finished reassembling the feeder! (sorry, that's a little joke: for a surprising number of new users one of the first things they do is take apart the feeder to investigate a filament jam, and then they have problems getting it back together).

That's very nice.

STL is just about perfect for 3D printing IMHO, provided you have a robust parser that can deal with precision problems. The best thing about STL is its simplicity - anyone can understand it. OBJ is perfect for the 3D simulation application I'm writing at the moment, where I want to have information about colour, transparency etc passed from the user to my model. This aspect might become more important with 3D printing in the future (when printers can choose different materials on the fly). And, OBJ lets different objects retain separate identities too. I find that it needn't be much harder to understand - I'm currently simply ignoring features I don't need! Neither format makes it impossible to have illegal models!

Proprietary just means it is designed and/or controlled by one company, rather than being an officially recognized standard (e.g. ISO/ANSI/CCITT). The term has nothing to do with licensing. In any case, as I mentioned before, you can't copyright or patent a data structure, nor have I signed any NDA, nor licensed an SDK. There's nothing civil or criminal which Wavefront can threaten me with. I'm a software developer, formerly freelance (situation very similar to Daid's I recently noticed) so believe me that I make it my business to know the law in this area, at least in parts of the world I operate in.

Sorry guys, but I'm pretty sure that the tool you're hoping for isn't really practical - in my opinion. STL is the compiled/rendered form of the 3D model, similar to how object code is the compiled form of a source code, or a paperback is the rendered form of a novel. Going from STL back to a fully operational 3D model is a bit like trying to scan a book and reproduce the original word processor document. It may seem like it worked but in fact it's just a static image, you can't do much with it except render it again, perhaps at a different scale. Going from STL to a working model in any intelligent sense would require something equivalent to Optical Character Recognition for 3D images... and just like OCR, there would probably be a lot of manual fixing involved. I'm willing to bet that the SolidWorks "recognize features" feature only works when Solidworks produced the STL, i.e. if it can assume that everything started off as a SolidWorks feature. Perhaps relying on "hints" embedded as comments in the STL.

Actually, I wasn't asking for anything: I was just pointing out that a bbcode exists to highlight and bracket code blocks. You bracket the code with [code] xxx [/code] markers. This can allow people to copy and test your code and help you more easily, whereas from an image they have to type in the whole thing.

Yes, I've investigated similar fixed precision conversion schemes. Of course that is workable for some applications, but it involves making arbitrary decisions as to the rounding direction - and when you have two faces that were defined to be exactly overlapping in the same plane then there just isn't any robust way to choose a z-order, at least not without some really complex fuzzy logic. I assume you also round the normals? So that two adjoining faces can end up with slight different normals which is visible when you shade the faces (at least that's one of the problems I hit when I tried a similar idea).

Really? I wasn't aware of that... and I'm not sure what the basis would be either. As far as I know you can't either copyright or patent a data structure. The only thing you might license from Wavefront is an SDK - which doesn't apply to me as I wrote my own code.

Limit switch broken?

OBJ is much better, but still has its own problems, e.g. AFAICT it doesn't seem to have a binary option (unlike STL), which encourages applications to output in very low precision ascii floating point. On the other hand at least it references vertices by index rather than repeat them, so at least the model shouldn't fall apart due to precision problems! I wrote an OBJ parser just a couple of weeks ago for my own 3D viewer, just added colour and transparency support last week in fact, so this is all quite fresh!

I don't see BLEN_C in that image, so I'd guess that it's part of the LCD_CLICKED macro, which I'd expect to see defined in a header file, and I guess that header includes another which is supposed to define BLEN_C, but currently doesn't because of a header version mismatch. (In C conventions, anything all CAPS is usually a constant. In traditional C it might be a preprocessor define). p.s. It would be better if you posted code using BBcode code blocks.

What printer? A bit of debris stuck in the leadscrew thread?

Yes, I can see an inexperienced person believing the problem was as simple as that. I take it then that you've never tried anything like this. If you had then you probably wouldn't believe that using terms like "connected", "flat", "opposite" etc served as a precise problem description in a floating point universe - in fact none of those can be mathematically tested using less than infinite numerical precision. And finding 3D intersections itself is an NP complete problem (a variation on nearest neighbour), so hardly trivial. Any student who solved that shouldn't just get an A, they should get a Nobel prize. Let's set precision aside and look at another issue. How does the software know what the normals mean? (answer: the assumption is that only outside faces are defined, and all normals point outwards, but you already violated that). What I'm saying boils down to: I'm surprised that Daid is entertaining your suggestion at all. He must know that the old rule applies: garbage in, garbage out, and that nothing he can do will change that fundamentally.

You mean automatic post processing? I'd be surprised if such a thing exists (to clarify: I'm sure that someone is willing to charge money and make grand claims, I just doubt that it'll always work), since no software can know what you intended, it can only see what you did. 3D printing is not like other 3D modelling applications such as the ones you mention. STL is a language - it can be used to describe any shape, whether it could exist in reality or not. But a 3D printer can only print the former.

The filament occasionally catches on the entrance to the white (teflon) part of the hot end, given that the printer is new (AIUI), then that was probably the problem rather than dirt. You can avoid it in future by giving the filament a point rather a flat end. I would avoid resorting to excessively high temperatures, as that can cause longer term issues.