jhirschman

Ugh. Please ignore this. After debugging (unimportant details, below), it turns out there was something wrong with Printcore 1, unrelated to either the Cura update or the cold pull. Super embarrassing, and I wish I knew how to delete the initial post. Debugging steps: Changed out Printcore 2 (thinking I damaged/displaced it with the cold pull). No change. Downgraded to 4.11. No change. Changed out Printcore 1. Everything is lined up again!!! Apologies to anyone who spent more than a few seconds reading this post.

My printheads seem to be drastically off right now -- you can see that most easily in the priming tower (upper right) where the circles are off in both the X and Y directions. Running a calibration shows the same sort of offset, although I haven't tried enter the "17s" and "18s" it would take to straighten this out. This happened after my upgrade to Cura 4.12.1. My prints over the last few weeks have been single head prints, so it's possible this happened before, but it seems like quite a coincidence. I also did 3 straight cold pull cleanings on printhead 2 (The first 2 tries the filament broke. Third was a hard pull, but I've done many cold pulls in the past without seeing this kind of offset problem) before this print. Is anyone else seeing this? Any suggestions other than trying the crazy offsets?

Since you've released the Cura and firmware support for PETG I've been using it, and it's working better than the settings I had hacked together myself! Thanks for continuing to support the UM3!

Thanks @gr5 -- this is really helpful! That said, it's been more than a year -- do you know if there is an intention to support the UM3 with "intent profiles" in the future, or at least an "engineering mode"? Or is the UM3 just too old of a printer to be supported any longer?

I'm printing a design that's raised on legs, but has holes punched vertically through the "bed". Cura generates a support with complicated circles underneath those holes -- shown here: Drawing all of those circles seems much slower than just building a flat support. Is there a setting to encourage Cura to build a simple base instead of supports with unnecessary holes through it?

Thanks for clarifying that! I was frustrated trying to get the profile loaded on my UM3. I'm glad it's being worked on!

I've been doing the same (face shields, first time PETG), and had the same problems (although I'm using vanilla UM3 print heads). For me, the problem seems to have been the retraction settings -- once I found this post, below from IwanBeentjes and used those retraction settings, the prints started doing MUCH better (although still a decent amount of stringing, which seems inevitable with PETG). I dropped my print temp down to 240, which improved things further, but I think this depends on the specific spool of PETG you have.

Thanks for all the help, @kmanstudios

My apologies -- this looks like pilot error. I first bought this spool of filament about a year ago, and did a little experimenting with it on a couple of very simple things, and then didn't really use it for any projects. I think during that initial use I created a new profile, forgot I did that, and then a year later erroneously thought this was an official Cura profile. I just created a clean, brand new project, used the default generic PLA profile, and retraction works fine. Again, sorry for the false alarm.

I'm a little new to Cura. Maybe I did clone a profile and modified it, but I don't know how I did. Regardless, it seems to me that if I have the retraction box checked, then retraction should work. I'm in the middle of a long print, but I'll try this again, validate the retraction not working, and post the profile.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting it's locked out. I can (and did) check the retraction checkbox -- it just isn't actually enabling retraction during the print. As I said in my first post here, assigning the extruder to "Ultimaker PLA" settings causes the retraction to work, and the ColorFabb prints very nicely.

Here's a screenshot of how I assigned a particular extruder to use ColorFabb PLA/PHA by clicking the "Material" pulldown. But it won't print well, because retraction seems to be disabled when I select that.

Oops -- hit submit too soon, and forgot to enter my specifics: This is ColorFabb PLA/PHA filament. Cura version 3.2.1 (MacOS X, 10.13.3) Ultimaker 3

I bought a spool of orange ColorFabb filament, and this is my first real try printing with non-Ultimaker filament. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there were presets for ColorFabb, and I used them. I got terrible results -- oozing, stringing, knotting. I tried multiple prints varying the print temperature, but saw the same thing. Then I put my fingers gently on the filament entering the feeder, and noticed that there was absolutely no retraction happening. None. I double checked, and "Retraction" was selected in the Cura settings. So I set Cura to Ultimaker PLA (forcing the temperatures and speeds to be the same as before, and printing worked much better: Is it possible that there's an error in the ColorFabb presets? Is there something that needs to be done other than checking the "retraction" box to get retraction going for non-Ultimaker filament?

I contacted fbrc8 for support on this, and even though they are closed on the weekend, Erin (Co-Founder of fbrc8) helped me diagnose this. She was fairly sure this was the wifi card, and she was right! Erin sent me very detailed instructions on how to remove it, and after I did, the UM3 started right up! They are processing a return for my wifi card, but I'm happily printing using the wired LAN connection. So I've learned a couple of things: 1. If your UM3 spins the fans up for a couple of seconds and then the printer acts dead, you probably have a defective wifi card that is drawing too much power. And 2. fbrc8 (and Erin in particular) is awesome!