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None of the vendors/distributors I get listed at Buying options mentions that there will not be an aluminum build plate. The only difference between these resellers is if they advertise that the aluminum build plate will be shipped free of charge to existing S5 owners or if it will be an add-on accessory. That's only the official resellers ultimaker.com. If you look at the numerous other vendors, it's exactly the same. They all keep advertising the aluminum build plate.

It would help if you'd read what the issue is before commenting. So again, you can get the S5 onto a LAN or Wifi network only under a very limited set of conditions. It is not sufficient if your environment meets the documented system requirements. The actual system requirements are nowhere documented. This is bad ony many levels, and it is dishonest. Among the limitations of Ultimakers networking support is the lack of an interface to set up a static IP address. Your smartphone and even your $10 home router have such interfaces and you can not brick your smartphone by setting up a static IP address. For people with network environments requiring to disclose the MAC address to the AP or switch, or to use a static IP address, you are forced to use an undocumented development mode. So your choices are: Risk loosing factory warranty by using an undocumented and unsupported feature, or don't use networking. Both are bad choices, and they are caused because Ultimaker does not provide a simple UI to set up a static network config. The S5 is promoted to be a network ready device; one key claim is that it is "designed to connect". This claim is clearly not true, considering that it does not even meet the most basic networking requirements, e.g. having a sticker with the MAC address on the back. A lot of people have confirmed that the only actually supported setup - DHCP server, dynamic IP address etc. - is a lot less robust than a static networking configuration. That's why Ultimaker is most ignorant by refusing to make this €6,500 product truly network ready. And by the way, I just checked the resellers which are listed under "Buying options". They all keep advertising the aluminum build plate which is misleading and an obvious reason for revocation. So my guess is that so far Ultimaker has failed to communicate to their distributors and resellers that there will be no aluminum build plate. This is another indicator for ignorance. For sure, a honest company would not encourage misleading advertising. I also checked with our vendor, and they don't know anything about the unavailable aluminum build plate, either.

Once more: yes, if it is undocumented. No, if it is properly documented. And if a manufacturer is willing to make it failsafe, he can provide a validating user interface. The same applies for other unsupported "features" like the configuration of a static IP address or the disclosure of the network devices MAC address. This has been discussed before. Some people need to use static IP addresses, some people need the MAC address of a network device. And everybody who needs dimensionally precise prints needs to calibrate the steps values. That's the basic calibration. Everything Ultimaker is sharing (in private) is tinkering on optimization parameters. I think that's pretty pointless if the basic ex factory calibration is crap. And the way our S5 was calibrated ex factory was pretty much as bad as the our UM3 Extended last year - unusable for items like gears. If you have tried to print engineered objects in materials like nylon you know what I am talking about. Linux - or at least one or two of the major distributions - is as hard to support as any other operating system. I guess you are aware how many Windows versions are out in the wild? But that's not the point. Ultimaker claims to support Linux and states system requirements. I am complaining that Ultimaker lacks the willingness to listen to customers who paid them several thousend Euros. They do not take Linux support seriously. Otherwise the PPA would be supported, like the one operated by Lulzbot. It is very well possible, if you take your customers serious. What Ultimaker does is take the money. But not much more. De facto refusing to support a "supported" software environment it is actually a breach of trust. Claiming networking support and refusing to support the stated system requirements is another breach of trust. Selling a product with an aluminum build plate and not keeping a promise is yet another breach of trust.

Yes, if it is undocumented. No, if it is clearly documented. For comparison, please check the manual for your car or your dishwasher. At least mine are very well documented. The documentation matches with the delivered product, and it includes instruction what to do when popping the hood. In both cases it helped me to fix faults myself without being a car mechanic or a service technician. Just one example: So far, nobody was willing or able to point me to a firmware documentation. I need this for calibration. All I could find out within the past months is that 'somewhere' is a 'JSON file'. Having to figure out myself which file is reference and which parameters have which effect is exactly what one commonly considers as "unsupported". As I wrote above, I can not see any difference anymore between "Ultimaker supported" and "Ultimaker unsupported". Both version occasionally do not work, and for both there is nobody resposible you can ask. If you ask a question about the appimage and get the respnse that it is unsupported, where exactly is the difference to the PPA which you are considering unsupported? And by the way, the point of these bloody appimages is that they are supposed to come with all required components. They duplicate parts of the operating system files. That's why appimages are so huge and sluggish.

The PPA is maintained by an Ultimaker employee, and it is far superior to the appimage - at least if it works. Recently a 4.0 version was released. Now Cura does not even start anymore. Regarding what Ultimaker considers to be "supported": Officially, Cura seems not to be supported at all. If one asks a question, the support request if forwarded to the local distrubutor. And the local distributor considers Cura unsupported because "it is open source" and it "is not part of the Ultimaker printer package". It is some kind of an add-on goody. If I can not get answers to questions, I think this qualifies as "unsupported" as well. And yes, the Appimage doesn't work properly, either. Last version I checked could not connect to the S5. Besides that, it is terribly slow, not integrated into the operating system, it is not safe, and it does not get updated through the OS mechanisms. The appimage is a very, very bad crutch. Looking further into what Ultimaker considers to be "supported", next brick wall you will hit is the firmware and shell access. As far as distributors - which are responsible for the support - are concerned, shell access does not even exist. From the Ultimaker end, shell access is undocumented and also not officially supported. And it does not stop with de-facto unsupported software and firmware. Considering the aluminum build plate which we were led to believe to be a unique feature of the S5, it seems to be now "unsupported" as well as we won't get the aluminum build plate. When the S5 was introduced, it was considered a unique selling point and advertising focused on this feature which only the S5 offered. The first disillusionment happened when my S5 arrived without the aluminum build plate, three months after the product was put onthe retail shelfs. Altogether more than half a year after the product introduction, Ultimaker decides that the product introduction marketing was… well what - a mistake? … and that there will not be any aluminum build plate and neither a technicallly equivalent replacement nor another appropriate compensation. Offering a 2nd glass plate is nothing but an isult, especially considering the major benefits of the aluminum print bed. If the S5 wasn't so expensive, all of this would be a bad joke. But as it is, it's a massive offence.

Sure they did. Just ask the easter bunny or uncle santa. FFS, the aluminum bed was a key feature of the S5!!! This is from the official promotion video for the product. This video is not a technology preview!

When engineering a new product, aren't research, product development and testing the steps which comes before selling the actual product?

Switched that S5 thing on after several weeks of not touching it. And now the Slicer in Cura 3.6.0-PPA is broken. AGAIN. Same as a YEAR ago. No matter how small the file is, the slicer stops at about 40%. It is just hopeless trying to do anything with the S5. There is basically every time something broken. And, by the way, I still have not received the promised aluminum print bed. The S5 is an endless nightmare of disfunctionality and annoyances. For a horrible price tag. It ruins every attempt to work productively on a project. You will waste a lot of money and - much worse - time for debugging, more debugging, and even more debugging. It never ends. You won't do much else but trying to debug it. I would definitely not buy it again.

Hi, yesterday, the Cura PPA was updated, and today Cura was able to detect the S5 again. Yay! The printer offered me a firmware update from 5.0.19.20180622 to 5.1.7.20181023. Idiot me chose to install the fiormware update. It says now: for the past five hours! What the crap is happening?

@Shadowman: Thanks for backing me up. I fully agree that there are a lot of good things about Ultimaker. For example this forum and the idea behind the Cura software. However, we started with Ultimakers a couple of years ago. Went through UM2 to UM3 and then to the S5. Price increased massively, some gimmicks were added, a few flaws were ironed out. But quality did not increase in a healthy relation to the price. The UM3 (Extended) could have been a decent printer. But Ultimaker messed it up with dishonest specs about the build space and disfunctional software. Yes, I am referring to the Appimage last year. Connecting through the network was hit & miss over months, people started to hate working with it; build space was much smaller than advertised; print accuracy was inferior due to the lack of X/Y/Z axis calibration. Bottomline is, it was not a productive tool, only a nasty time & material waster with erratic results. Until we pulled the plug and dumped it. The S5 could have become a really nice printer, but again, Ultimaker is messing it up big time. Big promises and marketing blurb, but weak engineering. And what is really annoying - all these issues have been there before, some were promised to be fixed, others are being ignored completely. Trying to work productively with the S5 is 'Groundhog Day' every time - déjà vu, Cura doesn't find the printer, like last year. Déjà vu, printed parts crack and break because accuracy is not fit to print engineering parts. $1000 printers can be calibrated. And they can print engineering parts after X/Y/Z axis calibration. The Ultimaker people should think about this before romancing that X/Y/Z axis calibration is not necessary. They are just wrong. My wish for Ultimaker in 2019 would be: Spend less money on marketing, spend more money for proper engineering.

Firstly, Ultimaker hired the repository maintainer, if memory serves right, about a year ago. It's nothing but ridiculous to keep refusing to support this one repository. Secondly, who says that the PPA version is the root cause for Cura's problems to connect with the printer? Last year it was that bloody Appimage which could not connect with the Ultimaker 3 (which became a showstopper for productive use). Honestly I am sick and tired of a company who sells a device in this price range and refuses support on all levels. Cura? Help yourself, it's open source. Configure a static IP address? Unsupported. X/Y/Z axis calibration? Undocumented or supposedly even impossible, if you attempt to calibrate you risk your warranty as it requires SSH access to the printer which is - you might have guessed it - unsupported, undocumented and explicitely not recommended. Refusing to support their device does not stop Ultimaker from selling it incomplete. When the Ultimaker 2, 3, and S5 come onto the market, documentation was fragmentary at best. Documentation became usable about 6-9 months later. That's a whole product cycle for certain products. The Ultimaker products are put onto the market much too early, when they are still immature or simply not fully functional. We purchased the S5 three months ago, including an aluminum build plate. All we got until now is a piece of paper saying that they will sometime send this part. They did not tell us before purchasing that the device wasn't functional yet. In the past three months we did not get the aluminum plate, so we have payed for vaporware. FFS, the S5 is supposed to be an easy to use device for professional use, not a toy for geeks. If I switch it on, I want that it just works. I do not get payed to debug this thing week after week.

> […] we can't make old software magically do new tricks. Connecting a printer with Wifi is not a "new trick". It worked before. The Appimage is trash. It's slow, it does not integrate with the os environment and it is not maintained through os mechanisms (apt package management). The existence of a operational Debian repository was one of three criteria to purchase the S5. If the repository is broken like last year, it's a clear reason for Debian/Ubuntu/Mint users not to buy a S5.

For me, the S5 is becoming a massive dissapointment. After several months, it is still not possible to calibrate the X/Y/Z axis for accuracy; there is still no aluminum print bed; and Cura 3.4.1 PPA does not recognize the printer anymore when connected through Wifi. Except for the aluminum plate, all these issues already are existing for years. They have not been resolved. In reality that might mean for you: You can not access your printer through networking, only with USB stick - bad! You can not get precise prints with exact dimensions - bad!

I am encountereing the same issue on an S5. All engineered parts are distorted and I am advised to calibrate the printer. What happens with the factory calibration is that prints are distorted with a different offset on each axis (yes, even with Ultimaker 'ToughPLA' filament and the factory profiles). This offset won't be noticable if you are printing artistic objects, but everything breaks what needs to have defined measurements, e.g. mechanical parts that need to fit together. I have printed a bunch in the past month, and it all falls apart respectively does not fit together because the offsets are different on each axis. I measured the offset with a simple calibration object (100mm on X and Y axis and 50mm on the Z-Axis), printed in Ultimaker Tough PLA. The resulting object is 100,5 × 100,3 × 49,8 mm. So on two axis, objects grow and on one axis objects shrink relative to the measurements they are supposed to have. With larger objects you get a deviation of up to 1.5mm bigger and 1.2mm smaller, which can result in completely unusable results. You simply can neither grind off 1.5mm from a mechanical part, nor you can not add 1.2mm material. The “Shell - Horizontal Expansion” setting does not help in this case as two offsets are positive and one is negative, so each global compensation would be counterproductive for the other distortion and make everything worse. Since the S5 seems not to provide an end-user method to accomplish measured (exact) printouts for mechanical parts, there are two approaches: 1) Tinkering with some jedi.json in share/usr/griffin/griffin/machines as suggested here. I have not tried yet and I do not want to do this, but there seems to be no better way as of now. 2) A theoretical and much more end-user friendly and less risky workaround would be an extension for the “Shell - Horizontal Expansion” settings in Cura. Currently this is a global setting which affects X-, Y- and Z-axis equally, as far as I understand it. With an extension it could be possible to compensate the offset separately for X-, Y- and Z-axis. Theoretically and with some guessing, that could work similarily good like a real calibration. However, this is not available in the current Cura version so it's only a theoretical option. Is it really required to compensate for the printer's miscalibration by facoting in the offsets into the model? Am I missing something?

Some quick updates about networking. I have set the S5 now to do Wifi with an static IP address. So far it works nicely and persists a reboot. Also, with networking the S5 starts to behave a bit different. E.g. it immediately offered an firmware upgrade, which also completed successfully; also, Cura discovers the S5 more reliably, and monitoring with thte webcam works smoothly. The steps to get networking configured for Wifi with an static IP address are not exactly trivial, but they are not overly complicated, either. Honestly I do not understand all this fuzz, it is totally unnecessary to make it so complicated to get proper networking enabled on a device with such an price tag as the S5. However, since SandervG explicitely asked me not to disclose any details about the network configuration on the forum I will just leave it at that. I have offered SandervG to make a tutorial, in case someone else asks about it. I am now dealing with the actual issue - the distorted prints which would require calibration. What happens with the factory calibration is that prints are distorted with a different offset on each axis (yes, with Ultimaker filament and the factory profiles). This offset won't be noticable if you are printing artistic objects, but everything breaks what needs to have defined measurements, e.g. mechanical parts that need to fit together. I have printed a bunch in the past month, and it all falls apart because the offsets are different on each axis. I measured the offset with a simple calibration object (100mm on X and Y axis and 50mm on the Z-Axis), printed in Ultimaker Tough PLA. The resulting object is 100,5 × 100,3 × 49,8 mm. So on two axis, objects grow and on one axis objects shrink relative to the measurements they are supposed to have. With larger objects you get a deviation of up to 1.5mm bigger and 1.2mm smaller, which can result in completely unusable results. You simply can neither grind off 1.5mm from a mechanical part, nor you can not add 1.2mm material. The “Shell - Horizontal Expansion” setting does not help in this case as two offsets are positive and one is negative, so each global compensation would be counterproductive for the other distortion and make everything worse. Since the S5 seems not to provide an end-user method to accomplish measured (exact) printouts for mechanical parts, there are two approaches: 1) Tinkering with some jedi.json in share/usr/griffin/griffin/machines as suggested here. I have not tried yet and I do not want to do this, but there seems to be no better way as of now. 2) A theoretical and much more end-user friendly and less risky workaround would be an extension for the “Shell - Horizontal Expansion” settings in Cura. Currently this is a global setting which affects X-, Y- and Z-axis equally, as far as I understand it. With an extension it could be possible to compensate the offset separately for X-, Y- and Z-axis. Theoretically and with some guessing, that could work similarily good like a real calibration. However, this is not available in the current Cura version so it's only a theoretical option.