GregValiant

I've written a little app (for Windows only) that moves some of the functions from the LCD button to a laptop or computer. It requires a data capable USB connection to the printer. There is a readme file included. It's not a complicated app. The App is unsigned so you may have to fool your anti-virus into allowing it to install. Pronterface/Printrun is also an option. I went for a simpler interface. If your interested I'll post it.

Those are really small. You my be falling below the threshold of what you can print. Does the printer have a .4 nozzle installed? If you go to the Custom settings and make all the settings visible then you will have a lot more options. You can try dropping the line width to .35. Those are really small though and you might need to go to a smaller nozzle. You can change the nozzle size in Cura and see if it helps.

@JD-Art said "I have tried cutting one of the models in half, and it actually looks like the problem section are "skipping" every second layer." (BTW - Nice job slicing the model.) I said "...the right model that is adjacent to the support almost looks like it is also going down at 2X layer height." When I sliced your 3mf file - the gcode it produced did not show that .30 layer height in the right side print. All the layers on the right print were at .15. The support Outer Wall layers on the left print were at .15 and the support infill on the left print was at .30. That's how it appeared to be set up in Cura, and when I read the gcode into AutoCad that's how the gcode file prints and it is exactly the same as the Cura preview shows. "Since there's a difference in what Cura shows and what gets printed can it be a firmware problem?" Once again, I'm not a UM guy but that would seem to be a good question. Are you printing from a UFP file? Can you print a plain gcode file on the S5? Is there anything between the slicing and plastic coming out of the extruder (Octoprint, Digital Factory, something that could have an effect on the printer output but down stream from Cura). If you can print a plain gcode file it may give a further clue. I can print and emulate gcode files but not UFP files. When I open a UFP file with Cura the preview is correct. Some of those images sure look like the printer is skipping the outer walls every other layer. I made up this 3mf file from your 3mf file. The only difference is the model itself (which is my own "support calibration" shape. It's all one piece rather than one instance of a model suspended over a second instance of the same model. GV UMS5_test.3mf

That was the problem I had with my Ender when it was new. I went with the Micro-Swiss. It's not perfect but now it's normal maintenance instead of being a complete PITA. If that's the Z seam in that failed print it looks much better.

What printer is it? Is it equipped with a Direct Drive? How long have you been printing? I never know if I'm talking basic stuff to an experienced person, or talking over the head of a new kid. The "Retraction Distance" on a bowden style printer vs a DD printer are very different. Typically a DD will be around 1.0mm and a bowden setup may be 6 or 7mm. There are retraction towers you can print to find the optimal Retraction Distance for the filament you are using, and for your hardware setup. Other settings like Retraction Speed and Prime Speed affect the retractions themselves while "Max comb distance with no retract" and "Retraction Minimum Travel" affect how far the print head moves before a retraction is considered. If you are printing a block that is 25 x 25 and you have Retraction Minimum Travel set to 100 then it's likely you won't get any retractions during that print. Because the real actual height of the first layer affects the overall Z dimension of the print the best way to fix the problem is to have the bed leveled correctly. Leveling is a stupid word for what is going on. You are really setting the initial Z gap so it is even everywhere. If you have an Auto Bed Leveler then you can probably adjust the Z offset. I use a piece of parchment paper (nothing sticks to it and it's only .04mm thick) and with practice I've gotten very consistent from print to print. Part of that consistency is that I always run the Initial Layer Flow at 105%. On many printers the E-Steps/mm must be calibrated. When the printer is asked to deliver 50mm of filament then exactly 50 should come out of the extruder. Nozzle size doesn't matter, the amount of filament pushed matters a lot. Once the E-steps are correct and the Z gap is good then you can test with a regular calibration cube. In Cura you can scale the cube to 100 x 100 x 1mm thick. As it prints you (depending on the printer again) adjust the flow from the LCD. At 100 x 100 you can make two or three changes per layer and see how it goes. When you make the change there may be 7 or 8 moves that were in the printer buffer that have to clear out before the change takes effect.

I just finished a large print and had this problem. Because it was a large model I was able to brush away the ooze before it became part of the model. There is no setting in Cura to re-order the print sequence other than Infill Before Walls. For the first layer, there is no infill and so that setting likely won't help. Your retraction distance of 0.8 appears to be for a Direct Drive. I will assume that you have that dialed in. Looking at the second photo - are you talking about the line I highlighted? That looks like an extrusion with no retraction at all. It almost looks as if the lines that should cross it didn't do so. BTW zooming in like that I see that first layer is either under-extruded by ~20% or the nozzle is too far up from the bed during the initial layer. There are a lot of gaps in there.) Here is what I'm talking about.

The "Minimum Layer Time" is affecting the speed. The default is 10 seconds. You can lower it, but the layers may not cool enough before the nozzle comes back again and deposits more hot plastic. Prints can get very sloppy.

Hello. I am sorry about my reply in English. It sounds like you are using the basic controls. You need to move to the Custom settings. The settings you want are listed under Support. There is a button for settings visibility. Click it and set it to "All".

Speeds are 50 for everything except the outer walls at 35. All Accel at 1000 and all Jerk at 10. Initial Layer Flow is 105%. You can open the Gcode with a text editor. The F parameter in any line is the Feedrate and it's in mm/Minute so divide it by 60. G1 F2100 E0 <--An un-retract at 35mm/sec G1 F3000 X100.014 Y114.118 E0.05154 <-- An extrusion at 50mm/sec G1 X100.053 Y113.593 E0.08009 <-- since no speed is mentioned it remains at 50mm/sec G0 F9000 X100.386 Y115.08 <-- Travel moves are in a G0 line and this one is at 150mm/sec I figure it's a good use of filament when there isn't really enough left on a spool for anything else. In this case that red has been out in the Florida humidity and it isn't good for much except maybe to learn something from.

Here is my favorite theory of the M105 situation with the Cura USB printing plugin (which admittedly I haven't look at lately). Cura isn't the only one...PrintRun/Pronterface did this as well. M105 was sent every 5 seconds to ping the printer into making a response. That was all well and good. BUT If the printer buffer was ALMOST full then the M105 would be truncated to M0 which is emergency stop. That requires a button click to get the printer going again. Your startup gcode only sends it once at the beginning. You may not really need it as the response is via the USB port. I use it for my app. Does Octoprint need it for something? BTW the response I get over the USB is: "ok T:209.92 /210.00 B:50.26 /50.00 @:86 B@:0" so you see there was a print running when I sent the M105 command.

I have checked and the PLA (white material) was stuck. Is it normal that when I load the material extrudes like in the second and third photo?. My Ender does that pretty much constantly. It may be temperature related. Have you printed a Temperature tower to check the best temperature for that particular filament? Nozzle size also comes into play. Large nozzles will ooze more but the 0.4 cores you are using will also ooze to a lessor extent than say a 0.8 nozzle. That is the reason of the defects? Maybe. It is probably related to the filament and maybe moisture in the filament. Successive layers should go down flat. Whenever I have had something like that occur it has been with older filament. I'm in Florida and the high humidity is a factor in the shelf life of filament. ... and I have cleaned the print core About once a month I go over the entire printer for maintenance. There is always something that needs attention. The printers work for hour after hour and things change over time. Take your time and clean them BOTH again. Just as an observation - you may be going for a "look" on that print, but I would think the cleaner edges that even a single outer wall would give would sharpen up the demarcation between the colors. It's an S5 and so someone more familiar with the UM machines would be a better choice for advice. @gr5 is a moderator here and knows these machines and @Smithy is another knowledgeable choice.

Use Cura's "File | Save Project" command and post the 3mf file here. It's tough to tell what might be going on from the photos. Is the white portion supposed to be flush with the top of the black?

There is a post-processing plugin called "Retract Continue" that may be what you are looking for. A snippet looks like this: G1 F2100 E1171.74913 <-- The real retraction G1 F9000 X148.838 Y101.798 Z4.54 E1170.892546087006 <--more retraction during combing G1 X152.237 Y104.958 Z4.54 E1168.572050396426 <--more retraction during combing G1 X153.335 Y104.793 Z4.54 E1168.016886231516 <--more retraction during combing G1 F2100 E1176.74913 <-- Prime for the next extrusion I think that Z-hops in the gcode confuse the plugin (they short-stop the "continue" part), but this isn't something I use very often.

It wasn't an oven (although come to think of it it did have an oven on the bottom), it was a old commercial gas stove they bought from a restaurant. It did have serious burners though.

Heat treating your 3D prints eh? Time for a story. My friend was a mold maker. Occasionally a customer would bring a mold back for re-work due to a change in the produced parts, or for repairs. The molds were aluminum and some were quite large. Heat transfers very well through aluminum so to weld the large molds they needed to be heated up to around 370°C. A old commercial gas stove was used for that. So a new employee gets tasked with heating up a mold. He throws it onto the stove, cranks up the heat, and goes to lunch. When he got back the stove looked like a Salvadore Dali painting with the aluminum melted down all over it. They scrapped the $1500 stove, the $30K mold, and the new kid shortly after lunch.

Your settings look reasonable. I would suggest that you keep all the speeds closer together. When you constantly bounce the printing speed up and down then the pressure in the nozzle varies from "this area" to "that area" and you can get some visual blemishes. In particular is that area of the outer wall at the start of the extrusion. The nozzle is moving CCW and one problem may be the initial surge as the extrusion starts. It seems to take around a 1/4 of the way around before things settle down - and then it does it again on the next layer. Some layers are a tad worse than others. If you are confident that there is no wheel problem, no dirty trolley tracks, and nothing is loose (like maybe the hot end? For me it's often the last thing I worked on.) then consistent flow rate is something you might think about. For the upper part - your layer cooling may be better than mine as I can't do a 3 second layer time without some consequences. If the layer below hasn't hardened and I squish more hot plastic down on it then it can leave (barely) noticeable differences in the layers. In the image - the one with the brim is a slice of your 3mf file. The only change I made was the infill density down to 10%. The other print is also at .15 layer height but is with the outer wall at 35mm/sec, everything else at 50mm/sec, 3 outer walls, and minimum layer time at 10 seconds (resulting in the top "chimney" portion being much slower). With your settings I can see some bouncing at the start of the outer wall extrusion that results in a more noticeable Z seam. The extrusion does appear to take a few mm's to settle down. By the time it gets back to the start point it's fine. The bottom line here may be that the print I set up took 37 minutes and the print you set up (with infill at 10%) took 20 minutes. There are advantages to slowing down. Using PLA I typically print small things at 50 with 35 outer wall. For large prints I may go to 100mm/sec with the outer walls at 50. There is a definite trade-off of quality vs speed. The attached gcode file is with my printer (Ender 3 Pro) and my settings. I have adjusted the temps to match your preferences. It should print fine on your Tarantula (if you want to give it a shot). GV_ResMed10Adapter.gcode

I'm not a UM guy but I thought maybe something might jump out of your settings - but nothing did. @Smithy, @gr5, or @Torgeir may have takes on this. (In three of the 4 images that portion of the right model that is adjacent to the support almost looks like it is also going down at 2X layer height.)

This might be what you are looking for. If you load the Mesh Tools plugin from the MarketPlace, and then restart Cura you will get this added Menu option: Which will lead to this dialog. Under "Unit for files that don't specify a unit" there are options: If you typically design in cm then the model will be scaled by 1000%. The XYZ of the model will reflect that size in mm. The "scale" of the model will then be altered to consider this new size as "100%". In this example, the model was actually designed in mm (22 x 1 x 16) but I have set the Mesh Tool to cm. You can see that the model has been auto-sized and the XYZ "scale" boxes reflect the new size (220 x 10 x 160). This new size is now "100%" rather than 1000%.

Is it a UM printer(?) or another manufacturer? If you use the File / Save Project command and post the 3mf file someone should take a look.

The vertical line on the rear is likely the Z seam. It's where the outer wall extrusion starts and stops. You can't really hide it on round parts. There are settings to move it around and one of the settings is "Random". To me that just looks like zits all over. If you changed the thermistor along with the hot end - did you run Auto-Tune to adjust the PID settings? The new thermistor is likely different than the one you replaced. To pass your settings and the model over: With the model loaded and Cura set up and ready to slice, use the "File | Save Project" command and post the 3mf project file here.

Ah. Perfection... So all 5703 bug reports have been resolved? Impressive.

The advantage to single wall (or double wall) calibration cubes is that you can really dial in your printer to produce spot-on single wall (or double wall) calibration cubes. The disadvantage is that when printing anything else, it doesn't really work. If you have your E-steps dialed in then you are done. No further Flow calibration is necessary or required. It's easy to calculate the volume of an extrusion. L x W x H. If the extrusion is 30.06 long x .4 wide x .2 high then that is 2.405mm³. It is also easy to calculate the volume of 1mm of 1.75 filament. PI x r² = 2.405mm³. When the ratio of VolumeOfExtrusion to VolumeOfFilament is 1:1 then Flow is at 100%. In essence "It needs this much plastic so that's how much I'm going to give it." If you decide that the extrusion should only be 85% of what is actually required - then you are building in an under-extrusion of 15%. There is no difference between calling for 85% Flow, adjusting the E-steps to 85%, or telling Cura "I want the line width at .40 but I only want enough plastic for an extrusion width of .34". The top skin is a good indicator of Flow. The best tool to check it with is a microscope but a magnifying glass will tell you a lot as well. At 85% Flow the extrusions of a top skin will not be welded together and you will see the cross-hatch of the layer below through the gaps in the top layer. That will severely impact the strength of the print. But your single wall calibration cube prints will be perfect.

In this case it appears to be something in the Settings Profile but I'm unable to find it. Simply opening your 3mf file and slicing it I get a print time of 4:47. Just switching to the Standard Settings profile (with infill adjusted to be the same as your settings) the print time drops to 3:09. Switching the infill to Grid results in a print time of 1:54. So maybe something is going on with that settings profile, or maybe with the Creality Ender 6 definition or the Creality Quality files? As an experiment - try using a stock profile like Standard/Draft with 20% Grid infill and see if it makes a difference. The Grid infill results in a few lines of gcode. The Gyroid infill results in a bazillion lines of gcode because of all the curves. Part of what is going on may be a cumulative error when Cura attempts to add up the print times for all those short line segments. I have no idea if that may be true or not but in this case we can see that Grid v Gyroid makes a big difference. This topic comes up a lot. For myself, the Cura estimated time versus the real print time is consistently within 12% of each other and Cura always over-estimates.

It looks like it can be done using the Search and Replace plugin. One for each model on the build plate. Part of the replace string could be M109 with the R parameter or M104 S. If the printer had to wait for the temperature check then the nozzle my be in contact with the part. That probably wouldn't be good. Playing with it a bit and using M109 R it comes out like this... ;MESH:Indicator Brkt.stl M109 R210 and then ;MESH:Indicator Brkt.stl(1) M109 R200 So the temperature would alternate when the model changed. I didn't play with "one at a time" but it may be something similar. BTW has Simplify3D released a new version? 4.1 was released something like 4 years ago?

I'm sorry I really can't help with the Octoprint part. As I say, Cura pings the printer with M105 every once in a while in order to maintain the connection so neither the computer nor the printer go dormant and kill the com port. Doing that has it's own problems though. If it worked with the line commented-out then it's an option.