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mattgriffin

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Everything posted by mattgriffin

  1. I have been finding that using the various tricks shared my community members and ultimaker staff here to dry out TPU — the low temp oven trick, similar to refreshing stereo audio tapes, or food dehydrator (like PrintDry or sorting out your own solution), or drying the filament on the bed overnight all lead to happier TPU processing. Any other trick that I am looking into that is new to me is bracing the Bowden tube up a few inches/cm so that the insertion angle is at a fixed true 90 degrees down into the hot end seems to reduce friction where it matters and allows retractions to perform more accurately even when being driven from a distant filament drive. The results I have seen are a remarkable improvement, exciting in particular because this is even without changing anything other than drying the TPU and bracing the insertion point. But I have not attempted this new trick myself, just drying TPU which I certainly encourage, so I can only suggest that these are promising directions. Depending on your type of use, you might consider crushing the TPU element a few 0.1s into the ABS. This is an old hack but I have liked it for living hinges and less compatible bonding. Wanna share a photo or two of your attempts so far?
  2. Hey Shaun! There are a few answers there -- some high-tech solutions and some practical solutions. But it really comes down to the environment around your printer. If you are in, say, Arizona, you can basically ignore the worry and print away! If you are in Malaysia, you'd better come up with an end to end sealed filament box chock full of dessicant to help counteract the hygroscopic thirst of that material. There are a bunch of PVAs and some are thirstier than others. I have found the Ultimaker PVA a bit hardier than I'm used to from the early days of desktop 3D printing and PVA, but I defer to other's more recent experiences for formfutura etc. I print multiple day prints with PVA all the time in Brooklyn, sometimes in my apartment that occasionally is blasted by steam heat (not too effective for heat, but hey), and sometimes at New Lab where humidity seems fairly consistent. And I haven't seen print-destroying degradation during long prints. I usually mess up my PVA when I complete a cool project and leave the PVA on the spool when I go on the road for a few weeks. d'oh! So remember when you aren't using it to box it up. And get it fully out of that BB core! If humidity where you print is a tough issue, you might consider grabbing one of those food dehydrators like PrintDry kit Matterhackers offers. That gives you a shot to dry it out. It maybe just cargo cult, but this seems to restore waterlogged PVA spools better than the build-plate trick. But there are community members and staff here who swear by the overnight build plate trick. There are some great PVA resources in this forums AMA event from this past summer:
  3. Let me know if that technique is working for you! You can also take trusted elements and roll them into a machine and material profile etc. -- but I really like the Cura 3MF project files for templating right now. (Probably because I change slicing goals all the time, so am not zeroing in on only one.)
  4. By the way, I don't recommend taking apart your core, @gr5 has hundreds of hours of experience under his belt with that, and there are parts that are easy to break if you dissemble. If the PVA has sorta glassed in there, trying to get it reamed out of there with hand tools will be frustrating and not that succesful. So your best bet is using the heater cartridge as still assembled to get things moving again. And keep @kmanstudios 's best practices in mind for backing out material from the core in mind for the future. I'd suggest trying to cleaning examples above, grab cleaning sticks if you can (or us a high-temp warpy material like PC if you have some handy) Where are you physically located? Just in case there are folks on the ground local to you who might have some tricks up their sleeves to help.
  5. ah, heck. there was a bug, the bug was squashed, and then I used this tool happily just a few weeks ago in 3.1 with a whole workshop full of people. Can you share the resulting patch of gcode at that height to match with these settings? And of course the cura version. I don't just want to help you (which I do of course), but I also need to use that plugin on Saturday!
  6. there are a couple of places to check, but i have a quick (if not cheap) thing you should start with -- keep those settings and grab some better filament than that Hatchbox. I'm not saying hatchbox is bad, but i think you should look at two similar filaments from different vendors and see if you get similar results. And then drop the temperature 5degrees or so and try again. How firmly is your bowden clamped on both ends? If there is play, well, that is not good. ;-)
  7. that is not big. The check is opening it in meshlab, meshmixer, and checking the density of the triangles. If it is just black with tight triangles everywhere, you might not need that much resolution assigned to that geometry (so it might be introducing more lines of gcode to process than you need). If not, the problem is elsewhere. Matt
  8. Well, while there isn't a handy api resource page for you to help you understand and interpret the various settings, there ARE a number of great custom profiles and the Ultimaker machine profiles themselves that you can load and inspect to learn how they function. The "house style" for Ultimaker is to use a cascade to stack profiles against each other, so that tweaks for a particular model or configuration are later in the cascade of inheritance than the features that apply to more ranges of models and configurations earlier in the inheritance treee. What this also means for you is that you can setup a simple default profile for your custom machine, and then add other selectable configurations to tune or tweak to help with specific nozzle/hotend configurations. I wish we had a developers manual as well as an operating manual, but with Cura advancing so quickly, that's tough! Spend some time in some profiles and then see if you can ask some of your deeper questions here or at Freenode on IRC #cura or #cura-dev channels.
  9. Note that gr5s suggestion works best after a successful print, etc., where one of the last end.gcode actions is to withdraw the filament a bit, enough that you can use the lever to pull away the tensioner and do exactly what he says! As a result, my machines when cold can work great for swapping material quickly even when I don't have time to load it officially. You miss out from recognizing the precise filament if you are using the Ultimaker filament, though.
  10. I haven't seen an example where people have been dissolving away Breakaway Material, but it might help to note that there is a mix of PLA and TPU in this material. So the solvents like acetone and MEK would probably work BUT they would likely scar the PLA and needs some serious ventilation for you. It might work best to try a twisting action, should you be able to grip it, to dislodge it from the PLA so you can try to squeeze it out of tight openings. I'll keep my eyes out for tricks for trapped Breakway!
  11. Grab meshmixer from Autodesk for free and you can use that to intelligently repair and decimate. You can also use Netfabb. But probably there are export resolution settings you can adjust for fewer polys and a similar printed result. Check the filesize of your STL and if it is really large, this is possibly having an effect.
  12. yeah, I'd suggest taking a look at projects in the forums here, as well as checking out the how-tos for Octoprint out there in the world. There are some existing tools for octoprint that make this easier now, but there are also TONS of articles with details about which route to forward a port safely to access the camera. Combining those with some insights into how UM3 functions here from Daid will help:
  13. @kmanstudios - what is your luck with the PrintDry for processing waterlogged full spools? That was its intention, though I haven't finished setting mine up to really use it. I hear it is fantastic for nylons.
  14. The points in this thread about TPU (in each of its forms) being hygroscopic is worth taking seriously -- dry out that filament, and it will treat you better! but darned if I can fully eliminate retraction stringiness myself. I just tweak the model to prepare for this and disable retraction where I can. That won't necessarily help you now that you have something you want to print, but consider whether you can clip strings with a flush cutter afterwards.... I think you'd do fine with TPU 95A or NinjaTek's Cheetah -- very similar materials and the slightly less squishy durameter can make it easier to predict and print at higher speeds than NinjaFlex (at Shore 85A) and softer materials.
  15. There are a bunch of places where you can grab a borosilicate glass place that will remain flat at high heat from many suppliers, not just for 3D printing. Though there are plenty of off-brand suppliers that will offer you cheap borosilicate glass printing plates at the same or better that you can get from a local glazier! I would not just use any sort of glass, especially if you play with materials like PC or tough nylons that might bond to glass and break it! You'll cut yourself! But that said, glad you are able to make progress and get some good prints off of there, though. Those projects are starting to look great! One quick note re: hairspray. The reason people use cheap hairsprays like Acquanet is because ... it has a lot of PVA glue in it. Yep, this is glue for your hair -- which might explain why it is so aggressively effective at sticking things in place, and then washes away in the shower. Well, spray dispensing it is kinda handy (you need so little) until you start gumming up your drive rods over time. But what about a glue stick? Or grab a polyester sticker label or a piece of PEI material, and you'll be happier. Or BuildTak and its peers! I am no fan of hairspray these days, but the good news is that which "flavor" of PVA you use will probably work fine, as long as you don't pick one (like UHU gluesticks over time!) that crusts over between heating cycles, requiring you to clean the plate and re-apply. As for z-hop and cura ... well, it works in certain cases, but might not be doing what you assume for a z-hop. If you look at the paths in the layer viewer you may see some oddities in the paths that explain what happens with your actual print. If you just want clean top surfaces, look at the "ironing" features to do another pass with the nozzle at the end to rework the top surface and help eliminate some travel scars and other weirdness. Matt
  16. There are a bunch of compatible substrates. Like for example, polyester clear plastic inkjet shipping labels are perfect — great bonding on the surface designed to accept inkjet, and transmits heat. Also, there are acrylic “digital ground” primers that bond to lots if stuff and similarly allow good cohesion. But the place to start is to look at the technical data sheets for the materials you want to bond to each other. Find out if they actually repel each other — requiring priming or mechanical cohesion strategies such as crushing the new material into the substrate so that you are tearjng down into it a bit and using the tip of the nozzle to iron. As pdrinkut says, the key thing is knowing that top surface calibration to nozzle, which you can cheat by the above trick of “tramming” by running a top surface that is a bit lower (thus thinner) than you would print on a calibrationed glass bed, so that by the time you get a few layers down, you are printing on a surface corrected to your nozzle.
  17. Make sure to check the paths in Layer View in cura. You might be losing more of the really thin features if your model than you wqnt at that scale, and might have more luck if you scale it up a bit!
  18. There are a bunch of projects to convert cheap food dehydrators to filament dryers. In the US you can buy PrintDry from Matterhackers (the maker is canadian, so if in canada you might be able to get directly from him) — precisely this scenario all setup as a kit for you, but with some custom parts to make it work easy already solved by the kit builder. works great with pva and nylon, i have found! Also, i hear it is good for tpu, but never tried. I like this better than platform trip, and second KristelB’s notion of not using home oven. Not just because there is a risk if you bake it too much of fumes (pretty safe up to a high cooking temp, but why experiment there!) but because the accuracy of heat measurement for a home oven is not as predictable as you want — other scenarios are a bit more even to heat them.
  19. Have you tried decimating the design and reprinting? Those blobs usually result from issues with either underrun gcode caching, or fans/electrical pegging thet cause a tiny unintended delay. That would explain while placement is perfect, just results look ugly. If you exported from a pro CAD package and the resolution is over 1million polygons even though the part is simple, that would be something to encourage my theory.
  20. Yeah, right now you need to forward a port on your home router to allow sharing images from um3x to world. Do so carefully and intentionally! great advice shared with you above, just copied that to my own resources! Only three things to add: 1) save cura project files and date stamp them each time you print. Sure, you just need the gcode to print with, but that project file HAS all the settings in there, and you can even duplicate one, kill the mesh part currently loaded, and apply favorite settings to the new job. 2) print a feature test part before you print large parts. You’ll have better luck iterating design and slicing tweaks if you select and chop a tiny but critical part of your design such that you can run that little sample with less than 60-90min print time more than once. You’ll eventually realize it is a waste to print a 24hr model more than once without testing and dialing in your needs. Architects are the worst culprits — printing multiday prints for weeks because they want to see how the crown of the building prints. A nice cheat for selecting part of your model? Shift into move tool and force most of your part under the build platform. It will be ignored at moment of slicing. So printing a 1inch crown on the top of a 12in building model becomes a 90min print that teaches you everything about how your slicing worked out instead if wasting plastic and filling your trash can. 3) round-trip-to-real: export something simple from your design tools as an stl or 3mf as soon as you can to check to see what opening it in cura looks like — scale, placement, watertype geometry, etc.. Almost all design packages are getting better at export for 3dp, so you might not see much that is alarming, but if you can resist the temptation to scale with a mouse in cura (25.4x scale to go from inches to mm, if you gotta do that), and can measure your resulting part as a print to compare to your design measurement, you’ll know the baseline for your workflow. In the words of a long time fdm user who switched to ultimaker after 5 years, “wait, you mean ultimakers are accurate and i don’t have to always tweak my designs in cura? That’s crazy!?” Make sure you aren’t making assumptions and know how your designs relate See if you can satisfy all tolerance/allowance needs in your design tool, not cura!
  21. You can breakout the first layer and “bottom” layers (lowest vertical surfaces of the skin) to allow you to tweak just that distance and also the bed temp, active cooling, and extruder temp, depending on how machine is configured. My advice tends to be to raise bed temp a touch and make sure to get height right, but to be honest, i usually find my bed calibration isn’t true, my plate wasn’t clean, i wasn’t getting even heat transmission from my hbp (dust/glue etc between plate and hbp), or my extruder has muck on it when i’m tearing up first layers. I say that, but i think i just tend to reload material, reset bed, and bruteforce test it until i get good firat layers, as what is going on is very printer and material specific. If those bottom layers stick like they appear to, though, you can just up the number if bottom skin layer count (which are solid instead of sparse layers) so that stuff irons over and self corrects before you really get into sparse infill above.
  22. Did you check to seen if that print length is out of scope for ui? Might be a bug with parsing the data to display, thus the date is correct. Ever submitted a job of this length before?
  23. Did you save stls, 3mfs, cura projects (has meshes!), and/or gcode for each? I’d love to hear which asset you version/archive and why!
  24. hey Zach, did the 130mm stipulation translate into a rough printing time goal? This is something that educators using 3D printing are always asking -- what's a handy size reference to encourage more parts to get printed. ;-)
  25. And make sure to check out the hundreds of leads and articles in the Ultimaker Education Pioneer areas: https://ultimaker.com/en/education Here is the Resources by Subjects resource, with an article on 3D printing in art education by DesignMakeTeach: https://ultimaker.com/en/resources/21899-resources-by-subject https://designmaketeach.com/2014/04/02/3d-printing-for-the-art-classroom/ We also mentions Tom Burtonwood, one of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago educators I was talking about! You are in good company, and are also doing great work they'd like to see!
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