Jump to content

asb

Dormant
  • Posts

    107
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    1

Everything posted by asb

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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!
  7. When engineering a new product, aren't research, product development and testing the steps which comes before selling the actual product?
  8. 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.
  9. 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?
  10. @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.
  11. 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.
  12. > […] 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.
  13. 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!
  14. 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?
  15. 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.
  16. If we use the analogy that enabling developer mode is 'opening the hood', it would be the same like popping the hood on my car. I can do that without loosing factory warranty, and in the glove compartment of my car I have a detailed manual where stuff like spark plugs is and how I can change them. I don't know about other brands, by mine is maintenance-fiendly. So if the S5 would be engineered like a car in this analogy, we wouldn't have this discussion. Having that said, I confirm that @SandervG send me partial instructions how to set up a static IP address, which is really cool. So thank you! It's basically the same what is (or was) on the forum somewhere last year when we had the same issue with the UM3. However, the instructions are for the Ethernet interface, that's the one I can not activate on the S5. So I need to read about using ConnMan how to configure the Wifi interface first, which is a bit more complicated. Also, going onto the S5 requires SSH, which requires routed networking. So far I'm getting those pesky APIPA addresses which give me a "no route to host" from our subnet. So I need to figure out how to access the S5, then figure out how to use ConnMan, and then I can take a look how to resolve the actual problem - calibrating the printer so it outputs mechanical parts that are usable for assembling.
  17. For a couple of days I have been talking back and forth with my vendor about developer mode and factory warranty. The vendor (ELV) forwards everything to the German distributor (iGo3D), so getting answers takes some time. I am afraid we have a serious dealbreaker here. As far as I understand the rather cryptic response, you will loose factory warranty and guarantee by enabling developer mode. Also, the distributor refuses to provide documentation or support for developer mode. This is a Catch 22. Without developer mode it is impossible to set up a static IP address, and also, without developer mode it is impossible to calibrate X-, Y- and Z-axis to gain better print accuracy for technical objects with precise measurements. Honestly , I don't like to gamble with an 6,533 Euro value, without even knowing that the issues actually can be resolved with developer mode. I am quoting the original statements for your information. Distributor (iGo3D) statement, as of July 27th, 2018: Since you can not know exactly what you are doing when there is no documentation, this means pretty clearly that whatever happens after enabling developer mode once, factory warranty and guarantee can be refused without further discussion. Thereon I asked to confirm my understanding of this statement and to give a clear yes/no answer. Vendor (ELV) statement, as of July 31st, 2018: Paraphrased this says that the distributor refuses to make a unambiguous statement. The vendor recommends not to use the developer mode because of a possible loss of factory warranty and suggests to return the printer. To state this clearly: I do not want to return the printer. But I need to set up a static IP address, and I need to calibrate it. I do not care how this is accomplished, but I am not willing to risk warranty for it. Question to Team Ultimaker: Is this handling really the way you want it?
  18. Hi, again some quick updates after the first week with the S5. 1) Networking. No real progress here. It's interesting that the Ethernet MAC address is part of the device name and workarounds like this should definitely be listed in a FAQ or troubleshooting guide. However, I needed the Wifi MAC address since the Ethernet port won't activate on my S5, so I tried another workaround by setting up a rogue WLAN AP, connecting the S5 to this volatile network, and then writing down the MAC address on paper. Please note that this is a really bad workaround. Depending on your company security policy, if restrictions are strictly enforced, and if you get cought, setting up rogue networks can get you into severe trouble. So this approach is not recommended to imitate. With the MAC address I still have no networking support as the S5 does not support to configure static IP addresses. You probably need additional things in your environment which are neither listed in the system requirements or the user manual. So without these requirements which I can only guess, it uses an APIPA address; in my case it was 169.254.85.135. APIPA addresses are special IP addresses like 127.0.0.1 (locahost), and they are volatile (= they change). With the APIPA address, Cura 3.3.1-PPA could connect to the S5 and send print jobs to the device. That only works temporary; as I already mentioned, the APIPA address will change, at the latest with the next restart of the S5. However, it worked for about a day. Even with the little webcam and print progress monitoring. Very nice, if it works. With emphasis on if. After about a day, the S5 lost it's networking connection. I guess the APIPA address is similarily handled like a lease in DHCP, the address might have a limited life span, then might get discarded. I don't know for sure and have not further investigated as it's the normal behaviour of APIPA addresses which makes them unsuitable for regular operations. After the networking connection was lost, Cura could not reestablish a networking connection. The "Connect" button in Cura has no effect, likewise "Update" or "Add" (new printer). After a restart of Cura, it lists a different APIPA address (169.254.188.109) which it can not connect to, either. Again, this is why a static IP address is crucial. If you try to work productively with APIPA addresses, everything gets totally borked after a couple of days. This is well-known behaviour since the UM3 and not a new bug in the S5, it's just how APIPA works. So the next challenge will be to resolve the static networking issue. There might be a showstopper involved. According to the distributor, the S5 does not support static IP addresses. I double checked this, and it was confirmed. This information is partially accurate as neither the UM3 nor the S5 provide a configuration method for end users. Enabling the developer mode might have side effects for factory warranty. I need to check this as well before risking the warranty for a 6,533 Euro investment. 2) Printing with ToughPLA, (vanilla) PLA and PVA. These materials print relatively smoothly, as long as you don't ventilate the room where the S5 is located (half-open build space, so build platform adhesion weakens if there is a draft). Keeping this in mind, most prints up to ~12 hrs come out fine. I encountered only one issue with PVA support structures and PLA brim. What I really like is that there is no need to glue or other messy stuff. It just prints fine directly on glass. What did not work for me is the flow sensor. As far as I understand this new feature, it is supposed to recognize if a filament spool is empty. In my case in only recognized that the spool was empty when I could not load a replacement anymore. So this print failed and I don't think that I will rely on the flow sensor again. The workaround I'm using since UM3 times is to (visually) look at the filament spool, and to pause the print when it gets empty. Then unload the old spool, load a new spool and resume. For me, that works reliably; though it's quite annoying to keep looking at the back of the printer to see if the spool is getting empty, but it is good enough to not waste too much material. Another issue I mentioned before is that the prints coming out of the S5 are not precise. On X-, Y- and Z-axis they are up to about 1% off from the intended size, on some axis smaller, on other axis bigger (checked by printing a measured calibration object with Ultimaker Tough PLA). The nonsense distributor reply was that material has shrinkage. Yeah right, that's why the parts gets bigger on some axis. Anyway, the calibration is another open issue to resolve. Similar to configuring a static IP address, the distributor claims that the X-/Y-/Z axis can not be calibrated (probably same reason as there is no end user method available, so calibration is unsupported or has the same ramifications as enabling developer mode). So there is no easy fix for getting precise prints. After a longer uptime I ran into another problem. Suddenly everything I tried to print failed, build platform adhesion became inexistant, probably because auto bed leveling failed. After a couple of retries I got an error message in the printer: "An unspecified error has occured. Restart the printer or go to ultimaker.com/ER27". The explanation there says that an unspecified error has occured and I should update the firmware. Not very helpful. Anyway, after switching off, letting it cool down and switching back on after a while, normal operations could be resumed. I have absolutely no idea what this error is supposed to indicate. Maybe the S5 should not run for a couple of days? Don't know… Addendum: On the USB stick I found a a large number of (276) logfiles.They are labeled like so: "cap_Ultimaker-005f24_1970-01-01_00.09.10_N1_X46.5Y33.5_sensor_reset.log" (size: 0 Bytes) or "cap_Ultimaker-005f24_1970-01-01_00.09.10_N1_X46.5Y33.5Z7.79745.log" (size: 26 Bytes; content: "7.79745 // ok N202 P14 *B941", all dated January 1st, 1980.
  19. Has anyone actually tried to connect the S5 with a cross cable with a laptop? Here is what happens with mine: Plugging in cross cable into Ethernet port on laptop, the other end goes into the Ethernet port on the back of the S5. No connection LED goes on. Don't know if the S5 even has one. Then trying to toggle the switch in Network setup on Ultimaker. Cog appears and rotates for a couple of seconds, then toggle switches back to deactivated. See attached file (MP4 converted to animated GIF). The same happens with a regular network cable. If Ethernet can not even be activated, I doubt that it will broadcast anything to this ad-hoc network.
  20. A few quick updates. The second spool (PVA filament) which came with the S5 isn't recognized with NFC, either. Absolutely no progress in getting the S5 onto a network. Contacted vendor support, vendor support forwarded to distributor. Distributor replied: "... the MAC address can be found in the menu item 'Network'. It may be displayed only if the printer is connected to a network. It is currently not possible to configure the printer with a static IP address..." (translated; Original: "...die MAC-Adresse findet sich im Menüpunkt 'Netzwerk'. Es kann sein, dass diese nur angezeigt wird, wenn der Drucker mit einem Netzwerk verbunden ist. Es lässt sich aktuell keine feste IP-Adresse im Drucker selber vergeben...."). This is rubbish! Since the MAC address is an access control mechanism, it's completely idiotic to only disclose it after the device was connected to the network - which is impossible because it is an access control mechanism to prevent rogue devices to access the network. Even the cheapest network devices have a sticker with their MAC address attached on the back (see attached photo), or they clearly list the MAC address in their configuration dialogues (e.g. HP network printers) before the device is connected to a network. As well this as the lack of a possibility to configure a static IP address clearly indicates that the S5 is not truly engineered for a professional environment which usually comes with certain access control restrictions. It's obviously rather a deluxe toy for wealthy hobbyists which might be used in highly permissive commercial environments as well. But not the other way around. This is extremely dissapointing.
  21. I guess it will show up after establishing a connection, not before.
  22. Now you got me confused… Use SSH without networking? Unless someone reveals where I could find the MAC addresses of the two network interfaces, the S5 does not have any IP connectivity. And maybe there is some hidden magic that prevents the Ethernet toggle to keep to switching back to 'disabled'. Then I could at least try to connect a laptop with a cross cable and see what I get. Seriously, guys. Working around loops in first time setup, Going into Debug mode to set up an IP address, hacking undocumented JSON files to get accurately measured prints , this is your idea of a "Simple setup"?
  23. Thanks! Though/usr/share/griffin/griffin/machines/ does not exist on my system. I have a JSON file at /usr/share/cura/resources/definitions/ultimaker_s5.def.json, but it does not mention the string 'steps'.
  24. First test print completed, a little calibration object (100mm on X and Y axis and 50mm on the Z-Axis), printed from USB stick. Resulting object in Ultimaker Tough PLA is 100,5 × 100,3 × 49,8 mm. That's similar like our UM 3 Extended from last year (100,4 × 100,3 × 50,2 mm, REC PLA). Up to 0,5 mm deviation is not so great for a printer in this price range. More precision is indispensably required for technical objects, so calibration will be a necessity. The question would be if the X/Y/Z axis of the S5 can be calibrated independently. The UM3 could not. We had to use an nasty workaround and guess a (global) compensation with "Shell: Horizontal Expansion" in Cura. Since the deviation is different on every axis, a global compensation does not work well. The printed objects do not fit well and the imprecision caused a lot of trouble. Does anyone have suggestions how to calibrate X, Y and Z axis in Ultimaker S5? In earlier (pre UM3) printers you had to hack the Marlin firmware and calibrate with the STEPS value. If I remember correctly, this sisn't possible anymore since UM3. Other observations: Automatic bed leveling takes long(er), but works similarily good as in UM3. Platform adhesion with Tough PLA is similarily good as with REC PLA in UM3, much better than in UM2. Compared with the UM2, almost everything is better in the S5. Compared with the UM3, the only 'big' changes I have noticed so far are: more build space than UM 3 Extended, fancy display, much higher power consumption. As far as I can tell, the weaknesses of the UM3 have not been fixed. Can not tell if the aluminum bed will have benefits as the printer is shipped without it (which is quite odd - how hard can it be to produce an aluminum plate for a product with announced availability four months ago)?. On the positive side: At the moment, Cura 3.3.1-PPA works perfectly on Ubuntu Mate 18.04 LTS. It's fast and does not crash. Very nice. So much better than the horrible Appimage. The S5 display has some nice eye candy. If you select a file for printing, the display shows a small preview of the 3D model. It's probably more a gimmick, but it could be useful not to print the wrong thing if you are working with crudely labels files in crowded folders.
  25. @ultiarjan: Yes, that's what I did - just canceled the complete "first installation setup" since I do not even know if it does something what I could not do manually as well. If it just queries for build plate and material, it's totally redundant anyway. Yes, the NFC cable is connected and sits tight. If the chip is broken… well, for that a little self-diagnosis untility would be handy. Since 3rd party filament does not come with NFC tags, it does not matter too much for me if it works. It's just a crappy setup experience. Though, the networking is a serious issue. I am on a network which filters on MAC addresses, so without disclosing the MAC address, the S5 won't get onto the network. What really stinks is that I can not find the MAC address anywhere, e.g. under "About this printer" or "Networking". Also weird is that enabling Ethernet doesn't work, either. I get a rotating cog when trying to switch on Ethernet, then it just jumps back to disabled. So no need trying to connect with a cross cable and laptop. …and I guess that my next issue will be setting up a static IP address, unless they have fixed or documented it (same issue existed on UM3). Since this thread is about impressions & opinions: "Key features: Fast setup […] & Designed to connect" - IMHO no, definitely not. Quite the opposite. Getting the S5 operational within a couple of hours is limited to (undocumented) environments, be it open WLANs or maybe Apple computers. Now I'll try to print something legacy style with USB stick…
×
×
  • Create New...