danilius

I have a glass shower screen held in place by some plastic gubbins. Of course one broke, and I told myself the first thing I'm going to print when I get an Ultimaker is a new part for the shower. That promise took almost six months to materialise, but here are the results finally... Freecad model: Half of the broken part: The prints: Action shot:

I disagree here - the release at this stage was the correct thing to do. It gives Ultimaker the chance to do a more thorough job of debugging, feature and UI testing. I applaud them for doing that! Or more likely I will once the Ubuntu 14.04 version comes out :-) The only thing that went wrong was that they forgot to scream from the rooftops that this was a flaky beta. Or maybe they thought it was a great beta. Who cares. They have not disappointed me; I used to be a software developer and know that there are bugs in every piece of software except for "hallo world". I expect an initial release to be buggy. I work with buggy software day in day out (Blender, FreeCAD, Ubuntu, GIMP etc.). Regular users, however, want "regular" software releases. They should have been warned off, or at least told that this release might kill their goldfish, as happened to me.

Hi, John. Nice idea, but i fail to see what this is solving. Why would I want my printer on the cloud? What will my printer do if it's on the cloud that it cannot do at home?

This sounds a lot like marketing-driven management. Horrible, horrible, horrible. It simply does not work with the geek community. We are way too canny to get sucked into something like this. Far, far better is to do what Ultimaker is really good at: simply say what the reality is. I think the most important thing is to avoid all the old-economy marketing ploys, and go for new-economy marketing. This means being 100% honest the whole time. After all, this is what open-source is all about. Now, I am not accusing Ultimaker of being dishonest, let's be clear about that. I'm just saying that you should take all this feedback to whoever made the rather poor decisions on this release and shove it in their face and tell them: "They are geeks. Wake up. It's perfectly OK to say to a geek 'this is a sucky beta; enjoy' because that's exactly what geeks enjoy. Sucky betas. It makes them feel they are getting a shiny new toy before anyone else. Sad, but that's how they are."

I can't see any reason your file should not print. It looks quite straight forward. Well, at least we can eliminate that. It's going to need a lot of support, though.

@nallath, communication is definitely the issue here. I think that if you would have said something like: "beta with limited functionality, warning may fall apart if you look too hard at it" you would have saved yourself a great deal of grief. My experience from Blender is that people who do not depend on that software for their income whine a great deal while professional users (i.e. people who do make a living out of Blender) simply file a bug report, find a workaround and soldier on. One reason I am no longer active in the blenderartists forum is because some amateurs there are very vocal, rude and demanding and will attack anyone who dares mention that Blender was never aimed at hobbyists, constantly claim it's broken and lousy. This despite the amazing stuff that is created with Blender every day, and its great price point. There is nothing wrong with releasing a flaky, limited beta. Far from it, it's the best way to ensure you create a robust product with all the correct features in the right places. You just need to upgrade your users :-)

Before you drive yourself completely crazy you want to test various PLA filaments first. The variance in quality between brands/unbranded and colours within even the same brands is quite unreal.

Is there a plan to make this run on Ubuntu 14.04?

2.85mm is really the standard, and generally speaking when people speak of 3mm, they mean 2.85mm. Also, you might want to try http://3dfilaprint.com/ (who I have nothing to do with). I have bought their black RepRapperTech PLA, it is way cheaper than faberdashery (£17 delivered) and really high quality. I don't know about their other colours or materials. Consumables include glue stick for the bed (I swear by UHU glue stick which you can buy cheap anywhere except for ebay - no idea what they are smoking there), a new teflon coupler every 1000 hours printing or maybe more (I got at least 1500 hours out of it) which will cost you £11.50 plus who knows how much for shipping, and apart from filament that's really it. When changing filament of the same material, I usually do nothing other than swap over filaments and extrude a few centimeters to make sure everything is OK. If swapping from PLA to ABS, I do much the same, since ABS melts at a much higher temperature than PLA. When swapping from ABS to PLA, I extrude some filament at 240C or higher until I see the PLA coming through, then I drop the temperature down to 210C. This seems to work fine. Occasionally though the nozzle needs clearing, and then the Atomic pull is your friend. Printing elastomers such as NinjaFlex seems to vary from person to person. I have printed various parts in NinjaFlex without too much hassle. Some people here had a really rough time. A while ago I bought some really cheap Chinese PLA filament off ebay, some of it was really good and one roll essentially unusable. I bought some unbranded ABS and the print quality is amazing. Way better than ColourFabb PLA, which for some reason people use as the gold standard, but in my experience is OK, but not gold. YMMV buying cheap stuff.

If you post your print file (the STL or whatever you have) then I will open it in CURA, generate g-code for you and return you the g-code for you to try. That will eliminate a major area of problems.

@g_leopard this is why you want to stick with PLA until you are very confident you can handle really difficult materials. Don't dismiss ABS totally though; there will come a point you should really try it, because it gives superior results to PLA in terms of surface finish. It can be stronger than PLA for certain types of shapes, although delamination is always an issue.

@IRobertI, I get that oozing with the cool head lift. It's why I generally do not use it anymore, unless it's going to hand around for a second or so. Much longer than that the ooze becomes quite serious. Same if I place two parts really far apart on the bed, there will be some ooze deposited on the landing site, but it comes off easily after the print.

I'm amazed that you are printing at 150mm/s. As I said above, start with 30mm/s for a really long print and take it from there. It's really difficult to know what the problem is without a lot more information.

Good point. What I usually do is set the PLA on the UM2 to 200C, and then in CURA use the TweakAtLayer plugin to raise the temperature to 240C at the first layer. Sorry, should have thought about that!

PLA at 100mm/s and 200c temperature is like trying to pedal a bicycle at 100mph. You can do that going straight down a cliff, but the ride is going to be bumpy, and the finish might not be what you expected. At 200C, expect to print around 30mm/s depending on your filament of course. To print at 100mm/s you would have to go up to 240C or even higher, and the print quality will be simply horrible.

You will have to split this into something like 50 pieces and glue it all together. Be warned that Sketchup produces very poor quality files for 3D printing. If you have the possibility, switch to Blender or FreeCAD.

My longest print ever on my UM2 was close to forty hours, IIRC. I regularly print for 20 hours +, so you have some other issue. To work out what's going on, you need to print something simple with the best possible settings. For example, a cylinder in PLA at 30mm/s for 30 hours. Try to start the print so at the 18 hour mark you can sit by your printer and watch what happens.

My motors get really hot especially when printing ABS, because I keep the whole thing toasty by blocking all the big holes. The longest ABS print I have done is around 22 hours I think, no problems to report. So don't worry. Another thing is the UM2 is really superbly balanced; avoid messing with anything other than what's available via the UI. Even then, take cautious steps. I have reset to factory defaults on more than one occasion when my enthusiasm outpaced my knowledge :-)

It's the nature of software development. Unlike building houses, in which one house is built in much the same way 1,000,000 other houses have been built, every software project is unique. The bigger it gets, the more problems that have to be solved that are unique to that program. You can't just look at another program and say, OK, let's do that. BTW, I was not talking about grovelling, but simply being nice and friendly. I never had to grovel, but always try to be nice and friendly to people who are doing likewise to me. Funnily enough, in the open source economy, this represents more value than cash.

I think he wants the Ultimaker firmware interface in Czech. Google translate?

xeno, here is a bit of friendly advice. When I used to work as a developer, there were many users who made all kinds of demands. They needed x immediately. Never mind that everyone else wanted y. So I developed a sort of anti-PHB, a bit like anti-matter is to matter. Those demanding users and the idiot Big Chief were subjected to all manner of shenanigans, in which I demonstrated how their solution was going to be incorporated into the next iteration of function bla, and did that through technical obfuscation (i.e. I made up complicated stuff). Sometimes I convinced them that the function they wanted was already "in there". My fellow sufferers received free therapy at the expense of not busting a gut while keeping in their laughter. On the other hand, those users who were sweet to me got what they wanted. Every time. And I gave them more than they asked for. And I hand-held them, and even sat down with some of them to show them how to do things faster and better. Those people thought I was some kind of benevolent god. They bought me coffee and biscuits, too. And they didn't bother calling IT support, they would ask me during a break if I could sort out their issue, and I usually did. And they knew they owed me big time. So I got my expenses paid the moment I handed them in. No-one ever yelled at me for being consistently late, not even the Big Chief, because he had not quite figured out why so many people thought I was so important and thought I had a magical spell of some kind. Which, technically, I did. So this is the moral of the story: if you want to get your way, be very sweet, lavish praise and then make your request. You can do that quite a bit without becoming annoying. And then you might just be surprised how much more effective it is. The reason I did not make this a PM is that anyone who is being annoying can be pointed to this post.

@xeno, there is an oh-so-small difference between Microsoft and Cura. Microsoft have to support loads of printers out of the box, because otherwise no-one is going to buy Windows. CURA, on the other hand, does not, because people will buy it anyway. Hang on, it's free and open source. Oh well, there goes the argument then.

Huh, weird. What OS version are you using? Sorry, should have mentioned that. Ubuntu 14.04. Whole slew of dependencies issue.

I just Googled "Dependency is not satisfiable: python3-pyqt5 (>=5.4.0)" and got seven results! Yowser, that has got to be worth something. Longest almost-but-not-quite googlewhacking phrase? Is there a badge for that? Hallo? Hallo? Can anyone hear me? It's really dark in here.

Downloaded the DEB anyway, and got this: Dependency is not satisfiable: python3-pyqt5 (>=5.4.0) Yay!