piphil

FYI for anyone looking for the answer to a similar problem - I contacted our support company and they suggested it was the back-left stepper motor belt that was loose. I tightened the belt as per the Ultimaker online manual and the noise has gone away.

Our year-old UM3E has become a bit noisy of late: Link to YouTube There doesn't seem to be any major effect on print quality, it's just noisy! Not quite as noisy as in the video BTW - the phone microphone obviously accentuates that particular noise, but it's not quite that loud in person. I suspected the belt controlling the Y-axis movement on the left hand side of the printer (the centre of the video above) was rubbing on the wires for the home sensor, but I can't see any evidence of this. Maybe a bearing has gone? Any ideas?

I'm going to bump this as I had time to try out the same reel of material and the same thing happened. Duff batch maybe?

Thanks for the update SandervG. I have performed the X/Y calibration on both my 3 Extended and S5 printers, using the 'manual feed' method, and although it's a bit messy (you need to push at the right point, and not too hard...) it does eventually work. I look forward to a permanent fix. One thing that does puzzle me however - why is it that the S5 didn't realise that there was no plastic flow during the calibration process? Wouldn't the flow sensor pick up that it was printing nothing?

Still waiting on Ultimaker to provide a hotfix, which they said would be available about two weeks ago...

Yeah, looks like you've been caught out by a bug in Ultimaker's brand new 'Unified' firmware. The 'Unified' being important because it's now been 2 and a half weeks since I've been able to X/Y calibrate either of our printers...

+1, it has now been 2 weeks. Even DM'ing Ultimaker staff gets no response. Service providers are doing their best but have no news from Ultimaker. What is going on?

Maht, is there any issue on the hot fix please?

+1 on this. I was very surprised to find there was no process to revert the firmware after this release. It smacks of hubris frankly - there is always a chance of bugs, even in an easier-to-maintain 'unified firmware' system.

I run a pair of Ultimaker printers in an industrial/corporate environment. At the moment I send jobs over LAN and can access the printers via VPN (although sometimes with difficulty), but the idea of easy remote monitoring through Ultimaker Cloud appeals. However, the models I'm building on the Ultimakers are often sensitive from an IP point of view. I've previously been advised against using cloud-based services, especially if the data is transferred between regions e.g. from Europe to the US due to the different legal systems. So there are some questions in my mind before I start using a system like this. How secure is the service? Where is the data hosted? Can Ultimaker employees access the data? Any advice appreciated!

Yeah, it'll definitely make me more cautious when prompted to upgrade in future. 2 Ultimakers out of action for 48 hours now and counting...

How did you do this? I can't find the older firmware online?

Any response from Ultimaker on this? I've got two printers in a business environment out of action at the moment. This doesn't appear to be an isolated issue. The lack of response is deafening.

I haven't - and haven't been advised to do so by our support provider. Is it possible this would have any effect? It feels more like they've tweaked the code for the levelling and accidentally removed the head prime command during the X/Y calibration.

I had this happen to our 3 Extended. I returned it under warranty and it was repaired - it's something the machine has done to itself, rather than damage you've caused due to your own mistake.

Both my S5 and 3 Extended are 'printing' half a mm or so above the plate. Does anyone know how to revert the firmware back to pre-5.2?

Not sure if this is the place for bugs, but if it is... Both my Ultimaker S5 and 3 Extended are having trouble running the X/Y calibration. It looks like the head aren't priming properly before printing the calibration pattern - see attached image. Both have only displayed the issue after the recent firmware update.

Exactly the same issue here. I have both an S5 and a 3 Extended, both have printed the same pictured calibration pattern as I set them up this morning. Both are updated with the new firmware. I guess it's a bug, and because the firmware is unified it's now affecting both printers rather than one or the other! 🤦‍♂️

I've had a couple of builds recently from the same reel of Breakaway where the material has issues with adhesion to the build plate (see attached picture) resulting in a 'spider's web'-like pattern. This is on an S5 build plate coated with Dimafix pen (pre-heated to 85C to cure). When I swapped to a new reel of Breakaway (same machine, same print head, same adhesive etc) the problem disappears. I don't see this problem with our reels of PVA, or any other material. My first thought was it might be a duff batch, but I wonder whether I might have over-dried it? We have a PrintDry filament dryer which I use on all of our filaments (apart from PVA, which I've found you definitely can over-dry *snap!*), and I'd dried this Breakaway reel at 45C overnight. More generally, I've not been that impressed with the Breakaway material with respect to the 'towers' of material created up the side of an object to meet a hole or other structure requiring support further up the build. Around 10-20% of these towers end up being knocked off part way through the build, which makes me wonder if there's something wrong with my support settings? Any advice appreciated!

My current workflow when trying to get Cura to start: I click the Cura icon. After several seconds, there's no sign it has started. I click again. Still no response. I wait for several minutes. It still hasn't started up. I click manically on the icon dozens of times like a Starcraft 2 player on speed. The program starts up fairly quickly...dozens of times. I close down the extra instances, and start using the program. What is going on here? I'm using the latest stable version of Cura on Windows 10, on an i5 laptop with 8 GB RAM and an SSD - i.e. not a slow computer, and no other programs show this behaviour.

I also was looking forward to the aluminium plate. From what I understood, it was aimed at materials that have issues sticking to the standard glass plate, such as ABS and PC. I was hoping to be able to avoid using the adhesion sheets with these materials, which I find a pain to use. Is there any news on the Ultimaker S5 adhesion sheets? I would actually personally prefer a pack of adhesion sheets to a spare build plate in this situation.

We've recently purchased an Ultimaker 3 Extended at work, and so far we're pretty impressed with it. One thing I have noticed is that if I build a cube (or any straight-sided part directly off the build plate) that the first layer is always a little bigger than the rest of the model, leaving a sharp ridge around the bottom of the part which throws the part tolerance off a little. I've otherwise been pleasantly surprised by how good the tolerances are on the U3E. (This is when the 'Build Plate Adhesion' setting is turned off, before anyone thinks I'm really confused!) This sort of initial inaccuracy is something I've noticed before on other FDM/FFF printers. I could get rid of it by rounding or chamfering the bottom edge, but is it not possible to correct for it in the printer settings? As it's quite a common thing to see, does the effect have a name?