Dougasaurus

See, it's good talking to someone who has more than a vague idea how these things actually work... very informative tidbit. I've not touched any plugins yet. Normally when you select a file to print, it beeps recognition that you pressed the button and goes to the warm up screen, and it's been doing neither. In further news, I went back to SolidWorks and remodelled from scratch, and though the final result is slightly different (less complex STL and physically a bit shorter) it does the same job. This is currently running on the UM2. I don't know what it is, but it seems something in the old model (which I modified and resliced many times) really didn't agree with Cura and the UM2. I'll have to see about uploading one of the iterations that didn't work.

Thanks for the reply, gr5, some good tips there. Winmerge says the files are identical, so transfer to card doesn't seem to be an issue. I tried out Meshlab, and it looks like it could be a useful tool in the future, but when I tried applying it to my model, I got what looked like some strange artefacts and self intersection. I might just simplify my model to some extent instead. I also went back to an STL that had worked previously, generated some new gcode from it, and that loads up fine. This does rather suggest to me that it's something to do with my model, and I have tried a few alterations to make it more printer friendly, but there's only so much you can do before compromising your aims for the design. Does the printer take a long time to load large files? Am I being just being impatient (though I did wander off for a bit and come back, so I doubt this), or did your 76MB file allow you to select it immediately? The model is a mix of thick and thin sections to the point where in a couple of places using the layer view, you can see slight overlap between red lines. I was under the impression that if Cura creates gcode, then the UM2 would attempt to follow it regardless of little issues like this, and they would just cause quality problems. I presume this is the case, and the UM2 doesn't check the gcode for anything shape related, just whether the gcode is readable and what flavour it is, correct?

Hi there. Just got an Ultimaker 2 a few days ago, and it's my first go at 3D printing. Printed a few little things that are obviously not up to the standard of the little test block that comes with it, but I thought I'd move on to an attempt at ABS anyway. After some trial runs of smaller simpler parts, I got it to stick and complete a build, and so moved on to the part I actually wanted to build out of ABS. I tried sticking with the same settings as worked for the smaller parts and this produced a file 600 layers thick, 35MB in disk space, but when I try to print it from the SD card, the printer won't select it. When highlighted, it just says 'no info available', and doesn't even beep when I press the clicky wheel. I've been progressively making the file smaller by making the print coarser, despite wanting high quality, but to no avail. So my questions are: Is there a maximum size for the gcode file? (and if that's the limitation I'm running into, why is that, given I'm not making a particularly large part which only uses 20 grammes of filament?) Am I going in the wrong direction... is there a likely cause I'm completely overlooking? I did try searching the forums before posting, and the nearest thing I found was someone getting empty files that printed nothing, but they were able to select them for printing, and I am not. Thanks for reading...