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jens3

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Everything posted by jens3

  1. While the 'make overhead printable' was definitively causing issues, I am still not getting the results I am expecting. I think there is a second issue at work. Here is a screen shot of the first layer preview: You can see that the area of the blind ring (refer to the picture in first post) has two loops of 'helpers' which are screwing up the works. I have also included the project file. The 'helper' lines only seem to be printed on the first layer as if they are there to hold the inside post in place. On the assumption that maybe the details were too small to print, I increased the depth and width of the blind channel with the same result. Edit: For some reason I decided to go from 'brim' to 'skirt' mode under adhesion and the helper lines went away. Now when I had 'Brim' mode selected, I had also checked 'brim on outside only'. Does Cura possibly think that feature is a new model as the inside post has no connection to the rest of the model on the first layer? Is there some option that I could enable to print with a brim but not have brims generated for these kind of 'inside' features ? (hope that makes sense) Is this one of those situations where I have to adjust the model design to make it printable (small bridge on the first layer to attach the inside post to the outside)? Another edit: I redesigned the model to have a tiny bridge over the blind channel which fixed the issue of the helpers. I am still wondering if there is something I can do in the Cura configuration or if model redesign is the only option. printing blind channel fail.3mf
  2. I am happy to report that setting 'combing' to 'not in skin' helped .. but the real star was 'pressure advance' which is a function in the controller and not in Cura. I have a very long bowden tube (somewhere around 650 mm) and this caused a considerable delay between the printer starting to print a circle and filament actually coming out of the nozzle. Pressure advance has eliminated this issue and now when Cura tells the printer to put down filament, it actually happens ! I am using a Duet controller and the suggested setting for the average bowden tube setup is a value of 0.2. A direct drive printer needs about 0.05. I am using a value of 0.8 (!!!!) and am producing a MUCH cleaner print then before when I was using a value of 0.2.
  3. Found the wrench that I had stuck into the works: 'Make overhead printable' in the experimental section was enabled.
  4. Thanks, I will give that a try.
  5. project file attached as requested. sucker foot.3mf
  6. I have a small model that Cura is ignoring features of .... I obviously have a setting wrong but I have been messing with it for an hour now and can't figure out why Cura is doing what it's doing .... In the attached picture, you see a small piece of round rod. It has a center hole and then a blind ring around the center hole. The ring is 1 mm wide and 1 mm deep/high. When the model sits flat on the build plate with the blind ring down, Cura ignores the blind feature. If I rotate the blind ring so it is not on the build plate, Cura is happy with it. Gaaaaaaa ....... 😞 😞 😞 I need an emoji of ripping out my non-existing hair ! 0.4 mm nozzle, 0.2 mm line width to visualize the problem better, 0.2 mm layer height
  7. The printer is a CR10-S5 with a Duet controller and chimera clone hot end. The rest of the print sticks very well (on glass). Only the first loop/circle of the hole doesn't stick. If I increase the squish, the rest of the print has too much material extruded making it a mess. Height above the build plate is very accurately controlled with a hight mapped bed. I will play with the height a bit as well as the printing order. Currently it only prints one (inner) circle but if I set for optimized print order it will print the first two circles and that might help. If I could get the printer to not drool filament as much, I would expect the issue would be reduced as well.
  8. I also have a lot of issues with small holes on the first layer. The biggest issue seems to be that there is always a tiny delay before filament is extruded (from drooling filament as the nozzle moves from the outside of the model to the inside position of the hole. Because the very first circle put down by Cura is a single circle, there isn't anything else to support the circle. The drooling also pulls on the still soft circle and in the majority of the cases the filament from the first circle gets pulled all over the place and gets embedded someplace else. Cura comes back later and prints more layers of wall and then everything starts to stick properly. I could add extra flow to the first layer to give the first circles more stick but that usually haunts me on the rest of the first layer. Possible solutions I could see - extra flow in small first layer features separate from the overall first layer flow when there is nothing else printed that the first circle can hang on to. No idea how this could be implemented <shrug> Maybe a special extra slow mode when printing that first circle for the hole. If the holes could be printed from the outside in, that would also help as the inside circle, that is normally printed first, has something to hang on to. Larger circles tend to stay put by themselves. The kinds of holes that give me issues are 3 mm inside diameter with a 0.4 mm nozzle and a 0.5 mm trace width. I tend to print a lot of those for some reason.
  9. Either I am missing something - in which case I would appreciate a pointer to the right place to look, or this is a request for an additional feature. When setting up a dual nozzle print with two different materials, I can only select one profile. It would be nice if I could select Petg for example on print head one and support material on print head two instead of having to change all the settings for printhead two manually to reflect the different parameters of support material. As I said above, if there is a mechanism that allows that, I would appreciate a pointer to that.. A somewhat related question or request for clarification .... I am currently running two printers and slice with a single copy of Cura, selecting the printer to do the slicing for first. I then select a custom profile from the list shown to me by Cura. If I have a profile called "PLA on glass" that shows in the profile list for printer one, is it kept as a separate copy from the profile "PLA on glass" that I made for printer two ? Is Cura smart enough to keep these two profiles separate or is the appropriate method to deal with the situation to name the profiles as "CR10-PLA on glass" and "Duet-PLA on glass"?
  10. Just to close this thread out, I determined that replacing the hot end with a Micro Swiss hotend was not practical as I am using a piezo z sensor and would have to design and print new mounting hardware for it and re-tune everything. I am now doing many many prints and also printing out the settings for those prints. When each print is done it is taped to the sheet with the settings on it. I found that when I was doing this in a more casual manner (without recording settings) I was getting myself more confused rather than figuring out what works. Hopefully, doing the systematic approach will get me to where I want to go. Thanks again !
  11. Thank you ! I found the file under ~/.local/share/cura/4.1/user/custom_extruder_1+%232_user.inst.cfg but it seems that the file is only up-to-date after printing or possibly after doing a preview. It seems to display only a subset of the configuration but sufficient for my purposes so far.
  12. I am trying to dial in my Cura settings and am printing many many test samples with only one parameter changed. Unfortunately I am loosing track of what I have changed. Is there a file (under Linux Ubuntu) that has all the current settings in it in a printable form ? The file ~/.local/share/cura/4.1/user/custom_extruderxxxxxxxxxxxxxuser.inst.cfg seems to have this information but it doesn't seem complete. The idea being to print out all the settings, print the test model and attach the printout to the model so that I can see which settings generated the attached model.
  13. Thank you for your input Ahoeben! I agree that different hot ends produce different results. Initially I had an E3D Volcano mounted on the stringy printer and, just like you mentioned, I thought that the extra volume of molten filament would possibly produce more oozing. That is why I changed to a regular E3D (clone) hot end. The heat block and the nozzle volume appear to be more or less identical to the Micro Swiss mounted on the non-stringing printer. Of course the heat sink of the non stringing printer is much smaller than the Chimera heatsink that is normally expected to cool two hot ends. I agree, there are some differences in the hot end between printers. Question now is 'is it worthwhile to pull the Chimera hotend and replace it with a Micro Swiss hotend to trace the issue further?' What is your opinion on the hypothetical question of two identical printers with the same controllers and same hotends - is it reasonable to assume that given the same settings they would print the same or do you feel that each printer is an 'individual' with it's own quirks?
  14. I would like to add that I am continuing to search for the magic configuration that will work but I am seeking to understand why, with the same settings, one printer produces a nice print and the second printer produces all kinds of stringing. What makes one printer string and another not string? Is it the luck of the draw? Let's say that I had two identical printers .... is it reasonable to expect them to print identical given identical settings or is the nature of the beast such that two physically different printers may print the same but also may be completely different (in which case I can understand what is happening). I would also like to add that there are two rolls of filament involved .... but they are the same brand, the same color and received at the same time so I excluded the filament as a source of the issue. Maybe I need to explore that side of things more ..... Late edit: both rolls are from the same production batch
  15. I don't understand what you are saying. The Duet speaks RepRap and the Creality speaks Marlin. If I choose Marlin gcode and send that to the Duet, isn't it like sending French to someone who only speaks English ? The French content may be identical to the English content but it would not be understood by the English speaking person.
  16. I don't know if this belongs here or not but I got to start somewhere .... I have two Creality CR10S printers. One is the standard 'S' model and one is the much larger S5 model. The smaller printer uses a standard Creality controller and the hotend has been upgraded to a Micro Swiss hotend. The larger printer only uses the mechanics from Creality - it has a Duet WiFi controller and uses an E3d clone Chimera hot end. The problem - I am getting a lot of stringing on the S5 and I am running out of things to check. I spent hours messing with retraction settings and everything else I could think of with no improvement. I am using Cura as a slicer for both printers. I am also using the same stringing test object from Thingiverse. I finally copied all profile parameters from the small printer that prints with minimal stringing to the large printer with no reduction in stringing. Having tried everything I could think of, I decided that the only other major difference between the two printers was the length of the bowden tube. I installed a tube of the same length as was in the CR10-5S in the smaller printer. The end result was that the smaller printer with the longer bowden tube showed a tiny amount more stringing but it was really insignificant. At this point I am grasping at straws .... could the fact that one printer uses a Creality controller and the other is a Duet controller cause a difference ? The Creality controller uses Marlin, the Duet controller uses RepRap. Does Cura generated gcode differ significantly between RepRap and Marlin ? I have messed around with nozzle temperatures both lower and higher (from 180 to 225) with very little change. Can anyone suggest something I could try to figure out why the larger printer is stringing badly ?
  17. I am happy to report that the issue seems to have been in my design in Fusion360. I started from scratch and made sure I used components properly in fusion360, exported the three layers as stl files and did all the right things in Cura and the result printed like it was expected to. I am not entirely sure what I did wrong but separating things into components is new to me and it is not surprising that I screwed it up. The surprising thing was that I ended up with three apparently good layers that were brought into Cura and all seemed well. In the past I used separate bodies for my different color layers but that was not practical with text as each letter ends up as a separate body which has to be exported as a separate stl and the whole thing gets very messy very fast. Using components I can export all letters at the same time making it much easier to manage. Thank you for the assistance !
  18. Has nobody else run into this issue ? Maybe I will try changing the way I design this thing in fusion360 to see if that might affect anything for any reason.Maybe the fact that the layers share the same base sketch causes some confusion ... who knows .... weird ....
  19. I designed a testsquare in Fusion360. It consists out of 3 layers. Layer 1 is 25 mm * 25 mm and 1 mm tall and solid, layer 2 is also 25* 25 and 1 mm tall but has the word 'world' cut out of it. Layer 3 are just the letters 'Hello'. The end result is a model to test how letters look like if printed on top (layer 3) of a layer or cut into a layer (layer 2). I imported all 3 layers from fusion360 into cura (4.1) and assigned layer 1 to the first extruder, layer 2 to the second extruder and layer 3 to the first extruder again. I then merged the models, sliced it and sent it to the printer. Seems all straight forward or so I thought. The outcome is that the printer does the first layer like it is supposed to do but then something odd happens ... it alternates one layer at a time (0.15 mm/layer) between extruder one and extruder two. The layers are printed as a mix between solid and a layer with the word 'world' cut out. It looks as if it alternates layer one and layer two. Layer 3, the letters, print just fine as one solid color (although the quality leaves a few things to be desired but that is another issue) Anyway, I tried re-arranging the layers in Cura and re-sliceing but the end results seems to be the same. I have a bit of trouble keeping the layers clear in my mind and in Cura as the color representation in Cura is only a minor shading different but again, this is another issue. Right now I would like to figure out what I am doing wrong with the middle layer of my model that is supposed to print as a solid color but prints each 0.15mm layer with a different color. Thanks
  20. I am using a Creality CR10-S5 for the mechanics, a Duet wifi for the controller, a chimera with volcano heatblock for the hot end. I have checked my stash of spare parts and I do not have a smaller nozzle. For now this arrangement will have to do. I will see if I can get some smaller nozzles specifically for lettering.
  21. The more I try, the more I am impressed with your results in the pictures. Could I ask what kind of printing temperature you are using ? I don't know if it was mentioned but I am assuming you print in PLA? I can't quite tell but the dog tags are printed with a solid white layer below a cutout black layer so the white shows through the cutouts ? My results with printing on top have not been much more successful as the inset text. A bit of an improvement but the small quantity of extrusion still prints spotty even with a substantial priming. I am printing a 0.15 mm layer but still have the 0.4 mm nozzle. I will be trying the solid layer with a top layer with a cutout next.
  22. That is even better than I had imagined! Well done and thank you for posting the pictures. I will redo my design and see what I can come up with now that I know what is possible. Thank you !
  23. Excellent input! Thank you! I am looking forward to seeing the pictures.
  24. I am designing a small electronic enclosure and would like to add text (for ports) in a different color.I have the two color printing more or less sorted out but am running into a fair bit of contamination of the base model with the color of the text and the text is a bit spotty as well. Before I start digging into all possibilities, I would like to do a sanity check about the practical size/definition limits of two color text. The way I am attempting to do the text is to cut out the text shape from the base model and the cut out portion is assigned to the second color. In the real world the printer prints the base model with empty space where the text is and then comes back to fill the empty space with the second (text) color. My questions: 1) what is the smallest text that can be reasonably printed - is it reasonable to print text that is one layer wide ? 2) is there a preferred orientation for text? I tried both printing flat (less contamination) and upright (more contamination but better definition) 3) is there a better way to get text on a model (should I design the text as laying on top of a solid model, should I print a solid layer of text color and then overlay it with a layer of base color that has the text shape cut out?) 4) am I trying to do something that a two color printer just wasn't designed to do? 5) any other thoughts ? Thanks in advance for any input!
  25. Again, thanks for the replies. I have now made initial and final printing temperature visible and set them all to the same 190C as the regular printing temperature. I have left 210C as the initial layer temperature for extruder 1. While I still don't understand the logic behind things, for the purposes of this question my problems appear to be solved. The temperature settings that were applied by Cura to the invisible temperature settings were a bit weird and probably caused my issues. I say 'probably' because I tried many different things and lost track of the exact details. Suffice it to say that I am currently running a dual color test print and I had 210C for the first layer only and all subsequent layer temperature swing between 170C (inactive) and 190C (active) as they are supposed to. No I can try and figure out why I can't get a clean dual color print even though I have a prime tower as well as an ooze shield enabled. Many things to learn ......
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