GregValiant

"...instead requiring a flash card type method for loading the designs." That is exactly how the firmware gets updated. When the printer is working it writes back to the SD Card and constantly updates a file named BIN. The information in the BIN file is used by the printer if it suffers a power outage. It will know where to restart a print. When you update or re-write the firmware the new version goes into a file named BIN and gets read by the printer which then over-writes the existing firmware. Same file name, two different functions, and the printer isn't smart enough to figure it out which it is. I would let the members bring their memory card in and I would copy their print file to one of your own SD cards and print with that. It's really the only way to insure what's going into the printer.

I'm here. I spend some time on Reddit as well. You can send a PM on Reddit or add "@GregValiant" to a post here and I'll get an email. Always remember that one of the reasons we bought these was they are inexpensive and that's another word for cheap. I do get excellent prints out of mine and It's pretty quiet now. I was looking to buy another printer but with the things that Creality has been doing with firmware and mainboards I think I'll look around some more.

I've been looking for a new laptop for myself and I see that this Dell Inspiron is $569. It appears that it's onboard GPU can handle OpenGL 4.6. It looks like it would be fine. More memory is always better though. At 8gb it's a bit shy of what I want. Since probably 99% of what people will want to print in the library are things they downloaded from Thingiverse or some other Maker site, then the slicer of choice would drive the performance requirements. I think I would want to lock out (somehow) the ability of some random person to putz with the firmware in the printer. You might have to look into copying a specific file from the student/maker's memory card to the printers memory card so that can't happen.

On the Ender 3 and Pro, the stock mainboard fan is wired oddly. The mainboard fan only runs if the layer cooling blower is on. It is fixed speed and the cooling blower is variable speed, but that's how it's wired up. I was printing a lot of PETG and not using the layer cooling blower so I think the mainboard may have overheated because the fan wasn't running (and I didn't know about the wiring setup). The fix was to cut the plug off the mainboard fan and wire it with the hot end fan because the hot end fan runs all the time.

Amen to the comment about SketchUp. Since you have decided on a Creality machine (I have an Ender 3 Pro) it will come with the Creality Slicer. It's Cura under the hood but it has a different interface and is a simplified version (not as many options). It's not a bad place to start.

And you'll need a slicer of course. Cura is full featured with a lot of options, which means there will be a learning curve. That will be true for Tinkercad as well. There are a lot of downloadable models on Thingiverse. They come as STL model files and would need to be sliced. As far as a laptop goes, you can get a mid-level HP or something from a big box store. Something in the range of $800 to $1000 should work quite well. You can get by for less but Cura (and probably the CAD software) are demanding of the video system. In particular the graphics system needs to support OpenGL 4.1. You can check that before you purchase. TinkerCad and Cura are both free. If your prospective makers want, they can load the software into their home computer and practice there. They only need to bring in an SD card with the Gcode file on it in order to print. They are going to want to stare at it working though. You might need some sort of time limit so you can all go home. I have a feeling that you're going to be spending some time scheduling the printer. FDM is not a fast process. I have to ask though...since you are a VERY small library, do you have to close when someone borrows the book? Good luck with your project.

Don't change the flow rate in Cura. The ideal is to have good parts and a nice finish with a flow rate in the slicer of 100%. That means dialing in your E-Steps some more. While you are printing something - use the LCD and go to the Tune menu. At the bottom is "Flow". Adjust it until you like what you see on the model. Once you get an acceptable finish, the next formula will be: NewESteps = CurrentESteps * Flow% /100. So say you ended up liking your print at 75% flow then it would be .75 * 269 = 201. There are a couple things you can check before we get into the "bad news". Use the LCD and go to Control | Filament and make sure "E = mm³" is turned OFF. Go into Cura and select your printer and then Manage Printers and Machine Settings. On the tab for Extruder 1 make sure the filament is set to 1.75. Now the bad news. After listening to my Ender whine for a month I ordered the silent 1.1.5 board from Creality. It showed up and I installed it no problem. 4 days later I noticed severe under-extrusion. I kept calibrating the E-steps and ended up around 300. But the thing kept fluctuating all over the place. It turned out that the E driver chip on the mainboard had failed. It took over a month to get them to cough up a replacement. It's been running fine for a year since that happened. Your 269 isn't that far from my 300 and is well over the standard 93. 269 would seem to indicate a problem with the chip on the board. Is that the motherboard that came with the printer?

I've asked twice and you haven't answered... Have you calibrated the E-steps/mm on your printer? You are showing under-extrusion. That will make it difficult to stick to the bed, and difficult to get a decent part.

#1. Have you calibrated the E-steps/mm on your printer? You are showing under-extrusion. #2. Did you flip those parts over so the little slots are up? They need to be down or the outside edge will be printing over air and need support. There isn't any reason to go with support on those. When you print big stuff and don't care so much about finish then a large nozzle and tall layer heights can make a huge difference in print time. If your print (think mini's or those rings) has fine detail, then you will want to go with a smaller nozzle and lower layer height. I can print at 175mm/sec with a .4 nozzle. I can actually push 200 if I lower the Accel and Jerk but the hot end has trouble keeping up. Those numbers work for very specific models that have a lot of flat areas to cover. They are WAY too fast for normal things that have some detail. Silky PLA prints OK at 50-60mm/sec but setting the outer wall speed to 35mm/sec gives a great exterior finish (silver looks almost like chrome). Here is a Gcode file with your rings with a .4 nozzle and your printer. This would print fine on my Ender. CE5_RINGS111.gcode

It's kinda like working on a car or motorcycle. You learn what tool you need to grab out of the box to do the job at hand. The more experience you have with the different jobs (prints in our case), the more you know that "Well, the open end wrench won't work there so I'll need the ratchet and a long extension and a socket." which might equate to "I'm going to print this with PETG so I'll need some hairspray." In 3d printing there are just more things to think about. There is lots of troubleshooting involved. Knowing the hardware, the software, and gcode makes it easier to nail down what the heck is going on.

Did you physically change the nozzle? It depends on the version of Cura. It's with the current material you have selected. There is a drop down button next to the material/nozzle box. Clicking it will show the nozzle options.

Yes it is. When choosing "One at a Time" you will see a plane in Cura at the gantry height. There should be a popup warning "The build volume height has been reduced...". It is the Z crash height. The work-around that pm_dude is describing gets around the limitation, but ya gotta be careful. The other values in the Machine Settings / Print Head are the dimensions of the print head itself when viewed from above. The origin for the measurements is the nozzle centerline. When using "One at a Time" you'll see a gray area around a part in Cura. That's the XY crash area. When printing "One at a Time" there will be multiple instances of layer numbers as each separate part will have a Layer:0. That can cause issues with some post-processing plugins that will find the first instance of a layer number and assume that it is the only instance. The image shows the One at a Time build area. The gray squares are dis-allowed areas in the XY (my print head settings) and the max Z height is at my gantry height of 25.

Those are fairly small parts with small cross-sections. Using the .8 nozzle on them is like using a sledge hammer to pound in finish nails. At a print speed of 80, and a layer height of .32, your hot end has to deliver over 20mm³ of molten plastic per second. If that's a stock hot end, or a drop-in replacement all-metal hot end, it's no wonder it's under-extruding. The Ender's (I have a 3 Pro) were designed for flows of around 4.0mm³/sec. The .8 nozzle is fine for blasting through prints but for those particular parts I think you want to switch back to the .4 nozzle. The print time for the .4 @ 50mm/sec is 13 minutes. We've spent more time that that talking about it.

When the filament gets dragged across the center of a circle like that it's because the current layer isn't sticking to the layer below. If it's the Initial Layer then it isn't sticking to the bed. Under the File menu in Cura there is a command "Save Project". Save your project and post the 3mf file here. Somebody will take a look. Have you calibrated the Esteps on the printer? I ask because of the gaps between the loops that did stick. That's usually under-extrusion.

Coasting is the probable culprit with Combing a close second. If you are using them both it's a tie. Coasting allows the pressure in the nozzle to fall off as the head decelerates. It makes for a nice finish on skins, but causes under extrusion when it gets to the next move. If there wasn't a retraction between the end of a coast, and the start of the next move, then there is no prime and so your "Extra Prime" didn't work. You'll notice that Coasting is in the "Experimental" section. Combing is usually preceded by a retraction but long combing moves can allow enough drool that the prime isn't quite enough to get started on the next extrusion. Extra Prime can help in that case, but it does the Extra on every prime, not just those that are after long combing moves.

As AHoeben says, attaching a 3mf project file will allow someone to take a look.

"Am I really the only one confused here?" No you are not. My personal fix was to not bother with Material Settings. I'm just a hobby guy so for me, it's overly complicated. I have one Settings Profile for PLA and a second for PETG. The only differences between the two are print speed, temperatures, and cooling. When I start Cura, the first thing I do is check that ALL settings are visible. Then I go over each and every setting, for every model, since geometry plays a big part in my slicing settings and every model is different. It's what works for me. And then I get sidetracked and forget to move the Zseam. Such is life.

I'm glad you got it sorted out. Time to start printing stuff.

I understand what you mean. I don't know if it's a different model or what was going on. The preview shot with the three extraneous surfaces was really weird. In that last ISO image I put up the error is definitely below that line you have highlighted. In other images there is an error up there. It's also odd that IdeaMaker came up with "14 non-manifold edges" in the STL but Cura didn't find any. And it sliced fine for me as well. I haven't had any luck finding a piece of software that will actually tell me where an error is.

Did you re-slice that and make a new Gcode file? The MinX and MinY show as positive numbers in the file heading but that isn't true. There are negative values throughout the gcode file. MinX is listed as 34.8 but in the lines of gcode it is -34.8. MinY is shown as 18.8 but it's really -18.8 These are some lines I picked out of the gcode. All these points are negative numbers and are off the build plate. G1 X-34.6 Y-3.986 E5.6557 G1 X-34.564 Y-4.992 E5.73605 G1 X-34.554 Y-5.127 E5.74686 G1 X-34.452 Y-6.044 E5.82051 That is what would be expected if "Origin At Center" was ticked in the Machine Settings. It's wrong. You can open the Gcode file in Cura and look at it in the preview (but you cannot change it). The center of the model is in the left front corner and 3/4 of it is in negative areas. If you have definitely UN-CHECKED "Origin At Center" when you sliced that model and generated the Gcode then you may need to re-install Cura. What is happening is incorrect.

Not as far as I know. Horizontal Expansion works on the X and Y together. What brand of printer are we talking about? My Creality machine can be calibrated by adjusting the steps/mm of the various axes. I don't know about the Ultimaker's but I think calibration is handled differently. The formula for an adjustment would be Anticipated Measurement / Actual Measurement * Current Steps/mm = New Steps/mm. The new number gets entered and saved in the printer. FYI - Unlike the Esteps/mm adjusting the XYZ steps/mm isn't something that is usually needed.

In Marlin "Configuration_adv.h": // G2/G3 Arc Support // #define ARC_SUPPORT // Disable this feature to save ~3226 bytes #if ENABLED(ARC_SUPPORT) #define MM_PER_ARC_SEGMENT 1 // (mm) Length (or minimum length) of each arc segment Now I know why they didn't enable them. 3226 bytes is a lot of overhead.

Then the firmware of your printer doesn't have G2/G3 (arc_support) enabled. The printer doesn't understand the commands and ignores them. You won't be able to use Arc Welder unless you alter the firmware.

In the first image you show the part before Arc Welder did it's thing (it is a "Post-Processing" script). The circles in that image are actually a lot of short line segments and show correctly. They are G1 moves. But when you open a gcode file in Cura that was post-processed by Arc Welder, Cura doesn't understand the G2/G3 commands and so it ignores them when it renders the preview of a gcode file. The G2/G3 moves disappear and you are left with the G1 moves. It will print fine. It just doesn't look good in Cura.

When you slice something and you have the SD card stuck in the computer - the "Slice" button changes text (and function) to "Save to Removeable Drive" and there should be an "expand" arrow on the right end of the button. If you click the Expand Arrow the "Save to Disc" option can be picked. That option brings up the "Save As" dialog and allows you so save the gcode to your computer hard drive. If you slice something and the SD card is NOT in the computer (and there aren't any other removeable drives available), then only the "Save to Disc" option is available and there is no Expand Arrow. What tontze is saying is to use the "Save to Disc" option and save the gcode file to the hard drive, then open that folder and manually copy the file and paste it onto the SD card.