Harry Plotter

Hey Gr5, I just got back yesterday from skiing. :O). Now it´s back to work (back to reallity)... Thank you for the help with DSM... I´ll try a couple of things there as time goes by. I´ll start with simple things and then go on from there. I´ll use some tutorials in youtube (I´m sure there are loads (hopefully)) and then I move on. With Sketchup I am quite firm but I am cumming to a point especcially when I am trying some harder stuff that I am ending up fixing mistakes from the program rather than advancing. Sometimes it just kills walls.. then another the lines aren´t parallel anymore and thus the walls aren´t building up anymore (as it was doing with this post). If those mistakes happen from the beginning they are easy to fix but if you are building something more complex this is more or less usless to go and try to fix this. Because if you´re trying to fix one end the programm kills 2 other things and there you go and end up in an infinite sauce of problems... maybe this programm is interlinked to the string theory :O). So I will try on with DSM and hopefully as you said in 1 year I will be able to cut away Sketchup or just use it for simple things... Greetings Daniel

Yep, I will try to "upgrade" myself slowly to another programm. I will want to try this programm. 2 Days ago I tried "design spark" but it is kind of hard to adapt to the different settings and it´s hard for me at the moment to leave the plain simplicity of Sketchup and go to virtually "designing" every single line. I also tried to open up a simple drawing from me in .stl that I have drawn previously in Sketchup and I couldn´t even go to a single part at this moment. Nor could I delete one :O( So I really have to learn a new program-handling from scratch. I´ll probably go both ways in the future. Still doing things with Sketchup and meanwhile trying to find a better programm to adapt and "grow" with. I´ll try Fusion 360 after my kids are back in school. Right now there is little time ;O). See ya and thank you again. Daniel

Hello to everybody, I am encountering various problems getting my first drafts to reality. One of them is that a "simple" box design will not be sliced right... I see that Cura is opening the .stl file right (shades). But thenn if I move it on the build plate Cura slizes the inverse of my draft. Why? Can I do something to help Cura slizing the draft right? I add the stl-file so you can try for yourself. It is just a plain box I drafted in a couple of minutes with Sketchup. Even though Skechup is limited in function and use this simple thing should have come out the right way... Greetings and a happy new year to all. Daniel Box2.stl

Hi Yellowshark, 0,15mm (you are perfectly right)! As for the cube I will print it next year. I am out of PLA and the other filament I have will only be used if these issues are a bit better under control... As for "Solidworks" you are right. 6-8K are blowing my budget for playing around at home... but maby with time there will come another solution to this question. For now it is only this bug which is probably Sketchup not exporting it right. But the next think I will check is if I can read the sizes out of the G-Code so this would be a nice thing to control about. Next thing I will do is to change the export from ASCII to Binary and see what happens. So far my other prints all were in perfect match to size and shape. Maybe this was just a first use problem so far but waiting aprox 28 hours to find out that dimensions are off limits is kind of hard.. I´ll provide you with the cube after 9th of Jan. cause now I´m off skiing with my kids... :O) Greetings Daniel PS: The fan is alwas on with PLA. I just turned it off with PVA as this turns out to get me better results... I added a foto so you see the main settings at the right side of CURA..

Hi Gigi, Hi Robert, Hi yellowshark, thank you so much for your replies! Robert seems to be right about Sketchup. Since I have bought the 3D-Printer I used it to "design" some things for my private home prior to realising them (walls, windows, terrace... a grill-place outside), but that were other dimensions and as I researched prior that would also work for the printer... so I added an .stl export plug and export the drawings in mm and ASCI-Code. Maybe this has to be altered. There are other variables, like meter / inch (which would not make sense since I am using the metric system here and the objects I draw are relativly small to use meter as output units...) then there is something called "model units" --> would that improove the output data? As well there is a choice to choose between ASCII or BINARY output.. Cura is using mm and the dimenstions were displaid correctly... There is a preinstalled .obj exporter to this programm but that will not match the details in CURA as I already tried that... Anyhow just to let you know. The second model I scaled up to 106% of the original came out on the right dimension (without the shrinking factor). So now the dimensions are good but the thing is kind of "too big" now... But at least I can use it. Hope this will not happen randomly. If any of you has another idear what to improove I will most appreciat that. @yellowshark : I used the preinstalled "normal" installation code from cura and the layer hight was 1.5. I didn´t tweek anything because that is something that will come with time (only one thing now as I continues i lowered a bit the temp for PVA and the fan speed I turned completely off, because for me that solved the issue of too much errors in printing the dissolvable aids).. Last question in the future if I choose to use another programm. What are you working with? It is just that I rather use a graphic interface than using formulas or trying to cope with a programm like CAD... Have a nice time comming into 2018! Greetings Daniel

A smooth "hi" to everybody here in the community! I am all new here so please understand if I might ask questions that sound familiar or are already widely knows. As christmas came by I decided to get the pope to buy me a 3D-Printer. So now as I started out I wanted first to design me a simple extruder-box to hold my extruders in place.. Said done: I took the basic measurements and added 1-3 mm to each side in order to compesate for any "human"-mistakes there might be. The print itself took some 28 hours (man was I curious..-->like Ren&Stimpy (who remembers)). I think I didn´t sleep well that night. And after dissolving the PVA (which caused some other problems, but that is another topic) I tried out the box only to find out that it was too small. The error was found very fast, but I probably lack some basic information and or knowledge... There is a difference of 5-6% from my original drawing to the printout. I use Sketchup to draw the models and then I export them in ".stl". From there Cura 3.1 takes over and prints the box over LAN. I also looked at the datasheet. But I couldn´t find any information about the "thermal expansion" as this information would have helped me somehow. But how to know in first place? Now to my questions. 1. Is there a known ratio, that has to be considered in order to print out exact copies from the original drafts? 2. If not do we have to "compensate" this every time, or 3. Is there maybe a "ratio"-Button in Cura hidden, that allows me to leave out further calculations for getting a 100% out of what I originally drafted. It is a pain... if you wait 1 day only to find the box beeing 4 mm too small thus giving you the double middle finger this is a really big downer... But maybe it is only me forgetting to consider something that to you is normal and "everyday"-business... If there is a "ratio-table" for every material used maybe you could PM this to me that would be sooooo great! Thank you Daniel