GregValiant

That screenshot is from MS 3D Builder. This is the Cura preview with that surface up. Here I've rotated the model 90°. This is the first layer and you can see the large island is keeping the model from actually resting on the build plate. This is one of the artifacts from the ribs but now they are vertical instead of on the top. The jig-jog that the nozzle makes will definitely leave a marred surface BUT it's being sliced exactly per the model.

Open that model in Cura and set up Cura as you did to create the problem area. Then use the "File | Save Project" command and post the 3mf file here.

I sliced it and there are a couple of places where you assembled and combined the model and I think you missed it. Here you can see that the ribs continue up through the top surface leaving 3 islands. In this screenshot you can see a large island across the bottom of the model. As for the rest of it I'm right there with @ahoeben. I don't get it. More screenshots or a project file might make it clearer. When I sliced the STL it looks exactly as I would expect. This image is the first skin layer over the infill. The wall of the ribs will rest on the skins and the infill is continuous from the bottom up into the ribs. That's the way it typically slices.

The USB Printing plugin of Cura has not been updated in a long time. No Ultimaker printers use it because there were glitches that could not be overcome. You can try to use it if you want. It does work for some people. I use the SD card. It's simple and easy to understand. Bring a model into Cura, adjust the settings as you want them, slice the model, save the Gcode. I like to save it to the computer hard drive first (so there is a copy I can access) and then copy the gcode to the SD card and insert the card in the printer. You can select the file from the LCD menus and print the file. There are no interruptions when printing from the SD.

"Rules??? We don't need no stinkin' rules!!!" - Various (but may have started in "Treasure of the Sierra Madre") "They're not actually rules as such. More like guidelines" - Capt. Barbossa - "Pirates of the Caribbean" Pretty much every model has it's own needs. Saying "this is always how you do it" isn't going to work very often because there will always be an "Except when _____ _____ ______."

Cura is not a text editor. When you load a gcode file it can display it as a preview but the gcode file itself cannot be edited from within Cura. If you intend to slice a file then you must bring in a model (STL, OBJ, 3mf, etc.). After slicing the file with your settings the slice button will change to a Save button and you can save the file as a Gcode. If you need to manually edit a gcode file you can do it in a text editor (ex: MS Notepad, Notepad++ or the program of your choice). It cannot be edited in a word processor.

A pre-heat command would be the same as the command found in the gcode. M104 S200 will heat the hot end to 200. M109 S200 will heat the hot end to 200 but keep the printer from processing anymore gcode until the temperature has been met. M140 and M190 work similarly for the bed temperature. The only difference is that a pre-heat command comes from the LCD rather than from a gcode file. If your LCD tells the printer to heat the hot end but doesn't provide a set point value (the "S" parameter in the temperature codes) then there will be problems as that is by definition a thermal runaway. If you tell the printer to pre-heat to 200 then that is where it should end up. The printer should sit on that temperature forever unless it is told something different. When the gcode starts to be read by the printer one of the first few lines that come in will be temperature lines for the bed and hot end. Those lines will tell the printer to heat to the "Initial Print Temperature" and the "Initial Bed Temperature" that you have set in Cura. There is no Gcode command for "just keep on heating until you blow up". There is always the "S" parameter or the command is ignored. If your printer is continuing to heat to 270 after being told to heat to 200 then something told it to do so, or something is broken, or maybe something is in °F instead of the usual °C and the printer is headed to 392°F.

The definition is very close to the A20T. You can add an A20T and change the name on the right side of the "Add" dialog box. After adding the printer go to "Manage Printers / Machine Settings" and change the build plate size. I believe the numbers for yours are X320 Y320 Z400. The next Cura release may have the Geeetech A30T definition.

I think "Grid" is the best all purpose infill. With the "Infill Line Multiplier" at 3 you will get a noticeable increase in stiffness. I would think an Infill Density of 10% at 3 lines thick would be sufficient. Changing the Infill Line Directions to [0,90] might help as well. The "best" line directions would depend on the directions of the load that you expect the part to see. If you require the stiffness because the part will see some sort of twisting load then Wall Thickness and Layer Height will become more important. "Is there a rule of thumb as to best determine all the parameters for a given amount of filament I want to use for printing the plate?" "The amount of filament I want to use" is something I've never considered. The volume of filament is-what-it-is depending on the geometry of the part and the infill structure it requires to perform the function it was designed to.

There is another thread HERE that has some information. From the Matter Hacker site: "Currently, the Pulse is only supported with the use of our MatterControl software, since other slicers do not apply any leveling data to exported gcode. While it is possible to setup the Marlin UBL firmware leveling on this machine for use with alternate slicers, we do not have a guide for this process, nor is it officially supported. I hope this helps!" There is a How-To article HERE. I have no idea if it is relevant or if it works.

@vahakn let me introduce you to @Torgeir. It is rumored that he knows a bit about the UM2's.

From the OP's gcode file: M104 S200 ; standby temperature M117 Insert Connectors M0 ; Do the actual pause M109 S210 ; resume temperature The temperature should be 200 while the machine is paused. At restart it should heat to 210 before continuing. Is this the error?

Hopefully you'll get it to work as it should. Let me know how you make out. There have been others that come to this forum looking to get their multi-extruders working. The multi-in-1-out hot ends are getting to be more mainstream and from what I've heard they can be made to work with Cura. It just takes some putzing around as each one seems to be a bit different. If you can set it up with a 4th extruder in Cura, you can use those M163 and M164 commands to set up combination colors on extruder 4. It's really a virtual extruder but the commands will be spread across 2 or 3 extruders to mix colors. At least that's what it looks like should happen. More learning curve I guess.

I see you haven't read my rant regarding single and double wall calibration cubes. In the Marketplace you will find a plugin called Printer Settings. Load it and restart Cura. One of the settings in there is Diameter. Measure your filament diameter with a decent caliper and enter the number into Cura in that box. (My filament from Matter Hacker is a very consistent 1.72 diameter and not 1.75). Calibrate the E-steps of the printer and you are all done. The prints will show you if you are over or under extruding. Ya just gotta look. Walls are not a particularly good check of over-under extruding. Infill and skins give a much better visual. Flow is the ratio of: Volume of Filament to Volume of Extrusion. When that ratio is 1:1 the flow is 100%. The thickness of a wall that consists of extrusions that are unconstrained on both sides just doesn't come into it.

Cura will add the temperatures BEFORE the StartUp Gcode when it doesn't see temperatures called out WITHIN the StartUp Gcode. If you have an ABL then you probably want to call out the temperatures within the StartUp gcode as warming up the hot end to around 150° during bed leveling, and then heating it to the Print Temperature after leveling is done, will keep drooling to a minimum. Something like this: ;M105 ;Report Temperatures M140 S{material_bed_temperature_layer_0} ;Start to heat the bed M109 S150 ;Warm up the Hot end to 150 M190 S{material_bed_temperature_layer_0} ;Finish heating the bedG28 ;home all axesG29 ;auto bed leveling M109 S{material_print_temperature_layer_0} ;Finish heating the hot end G1 Z30 F300 ;move extruder up 30mm at 5mm/s I'm not familiar with that hot end. It looks like it has a single thermistor and three heating circuits. If the separate heat circuits aren't being monitored for temperature then it would appear to be a "shared" heater. Looking at a Geeetech replacement video it appears that the circuit board those heat wires are connected to has three control connectors. I would assume that one is the single thermistor, one is the cooling fan, and the third controls the actual heaters. That would again imply that it is a shared heater. I could be mistaken on that and experimenting can't hurt. Another thing you could try is creating a custom material (based on a built-in material) and set the Standby Temperature the same as the Print Temperature. Cura will still add a line to adjust the temperature, but unless you make a huge change in the Print temperature in the regular Cura settings, the new standby temperature should be close to the print temperature and not cause the problem.

This seems to be a popular problem with the DaVinci printers. Most searches come back with answers regarding Windows issues, but the same thing may be going on with Linux. One fix that worked occasionally was plugging the printer in to different USB ports in the computer and then all of a sudden things came to life. That would seem to indicate that the port driver only installed on one port rather than being available on all of them. The "cache" size seems important as well. Connections have been made with the DaVinci at a baud rate of 250k. That is one of the rates that Cura checks. FYI - it looks like Repetier Host has the same problem with the DaVinci's. Since no Ultimaker printers use USB printing anymore, it is unmaintained unless someone from the community wants to take a shot at updating it. The Octoprint/RaspPI combination seems to work well.

These Replacement words have been deprecated. ;M104 S{print_temperature} ;Set extruder temperature;M190 S{print_bed_temperature} ;Set bed temperatureM109 S{print_temperature} ;Set extruder temperature and wait If you change them to this: M104 S{material_print_temperature_layer_0} ;Set extruder temperatureM190 S{material_bed_temperature_layer_0} ;Set bed temperatureM109 S{material_print_temperature_layer_0} ;Set extruder temperature and wait Un-comment the two lines and part of the problem may be resolved. You must have the Printer Settings plugin from the Marketplace installed. Then these options be come available: In the gcode you linked line appears in the extruder startup gcodes: G1 F{travel_speed} But travel speed in Cura is in mm/sec and in gcode it is mm/minute. As a consequence the line comes out as G1 F150 instead of G1 S9000. Big difference there. You need to hard code the S9000 as there are currently no Replacement words in mm/minute. There are other instances in your post where "travel_speed" is used and will no doubt result in very slow movement. In a typical multi-extruder setup, Cura will note that an extruder change is coming up. An M104 line will appear in the gcode several lines above the extruder switch line. It's timed to have the second extruder temperature up to print temperature just as it is needed. When the switch from (for example) T0 to T1 occurs then T0 is set to the standby temperature for the material. If you have a single heater then your one-and-only heater cools off. The "cold extrusion" safety in M302 is hit and the extruder motor quits trying to turn. That's why Cura needs to know if "Extruders Share Heater".

Sorry. I don't know Macs. @nallath - the STL in question is the "platform" file.

Nice eye @Zerspaner_gerd. The Z is moving to LayerHeight + ZHopHeight before moving to the start of the first extrusion. Unfortunately the line causing the problem "G1 F600 Z0.6" appears throughout Layer:0. The Search and Replace post-processor could be used to get rid of it, but it would get rid of all the first layer Z-Hops. That might be preferable to turning it off. Search = G1 F600 Z0.6 Replace = ;G1 F600 Z0.6 The replacement with the semi-colon in front turns it into a comment instead of a command. An alternative would be to hand edit the file and get rid of the one line.

If you go to Settings | Printer |(your printer) | Manage Printers | Machine Settings and check the StartUp GCode does it look like this: G28 G1 Z15 F300 M107 G90 M82 M104 S215 M140 S55 G92 E0 M109 S215 M107 M163 S0 P0.33 M163 S1 P0.33 M163 S2 P0.33 M164 S4 G0 X10 Y20 F6000 G1 Z0.8 G1 F300 X180 E40 G1 F1200 Z2 G92 E0 G28 You can see that the temps for the "active extruder" are hard coded at 215 and the bed is at 55. This is the standard StartUp Gcode for an A10T. What you can do with this part of the problem is to change those lines to Cura replacement words. M104 S{material_print_temperature_layer_0} M109 S{material_print_temperature_layer_0} and M140 S{material_bed_temperature_layer_0} That will change the temperature for the skirt extruder to whatever you have set for it in Cura. The M163 lines are setting up a mixing extruder which would be the M164 line and is extruder 4. You could call extruder 4 and each extruder motor would deliver 33% ("P0.33") of the filament for any extrusion. There is more on that on the Marlin site.

We need a project file so this can be investigated. Verbiage and photos are all very well, but a project file can contain real clues.

I am electronically handicapped but I'm intrigued. Searching around I see this has been addressed with generic add-on boards from TH3D and other suppliers. I think I'll bite and get one for the bed and one for the hot end and then do a couple of tests. Ordering the boards has brought up a rhetorical question...How come it costs $0.20 to ship something from China but $15.00 to ship something from California? The Chinese package has to go through/over/around California to get to my house. FTL travel? The shortest distance between two places is not a straight line? Einstinian space is a myth?

That is odd. The box bottom in your images doesn't match either your slice preview, or my slice preview. I tried to force the issue by playing with different settings, but I couldn't get the problem to show up (in the preview). Maybe @gr5 has a take on this?

The Creality slicer itself is an early version of Cura with some cosmetic changes to make it look different. The Creality definition files within this version (the official Ultimaker version up to 4.13.1) are essentially all the same except for the build plate size. All those definition files were submitted to Ultimaker for inclusion into Cura by either Creality or by the author of the files (who is noted as "Trouch.com"). Neither the Creality version nor the Ultimaker version ever tell a printer to go below "Initial Layer Height". If the bed is properly leveled and is at Z=0 then the nozzle should never hit it. (That should be true for any slicer.) But if you have an ABL then things may be different. The ABL command in the StartUp Gcode that calls the firmware routine to check the bed may need some parameters adjusted (like the Z-Offset). If you slice a calibration cube with both slicers and then post both of the gcode files here then a comparison may give a clue as to what is going on. Also let us know what ABL setup (BLTouch, CRTouch, whatever) might be on the printer. My printer is an Ender 3Pro that I manually level with my trusty piece of parchment paper. I've never had a problem with it hitting the bed and I've never seen a Cura gcode file (either Creality or Ultimaker) with negative Z values.

With the models loaded in Cura and the settings the way you want - use the "File | Save Project" command and post the 3mf file here. It's tough trying to figure things out from photos only.