GregValiant

Yep. That's one of the tell-tales of a model problem. Another is disappearing sections. A third is when Cura shows a model with purple polka-dots. You can see in the image with the gap that Cura figured it needed top layers in there when it should have been all infill with walls around it.

What you are looking at here are the two gcode files read into AutoCad. One prints at the Left Front Corner which is my 0,0 origin point (that is your Origin At Center checked file). The other file prints near the middle of my bed which is likely a different size than yours to it doesn't look quite correct. What I get from this is that one of those files should have printed correctly. You can see that the Origin At Center gcode straddles the negative quadrants of the coordinate system but the other gcode is right in the +X +Y quadrant and should have been fine. When my Ender loses position because the steppers have disabled there are a blinking X Y and Z on the LCD. Those are the axis positions and normally tell me where the print head is located. It seems very odd that your LCD doesn't tell you where the print head is.

@PeterDenis57 - Good find. Forgetting that you enabled certain things ("Remove all Holes" comes immediately to mind) is a PITA.

As you know that should not have happened. Post the problem gcode file here and someone will take a look. Are you printing from the SD card, using Octoprint, or printing via USB??

You have a problem with the model itself. If you are using Windows you could try to use MS 3D Builder to repair the model. Airplane parts and boat parts are tricky though. Some are modeled just as surfaces rather than solids and attempting to fix them results in a loss of detail and/or areas getting filled in. Give it a shot though and look closely at the Cura Preview to insure nothing truly Stoopid happened. There are also different slicing modes. Under the Cura Special Modes section you can select a different "Surface Mode" and see if it makes a difference.

@odonnse welcome to the forum. Post one of your gcode files sliced with Cura and we'll see where exactly it's printing. The printer will put the origin of a gcode file at the Home Offset location stored in the printer. As I said above - some 4S printers do have their "Origin at Center" and so may need that box checked in Cura. After you Auto-Home, raise the Z a bit and use the LCD to move the print head to X0 Y0. Where is the print head? Still near the back right corner or is it over the middle of the build plate? If you have a stock gcode that came with the printer (cat or dog or something) post that as well. As a side note - The Creality Ender 5 and Ender 6 printers have their origins at the right rear while all the other Creality printers are at the left front. The E5 and E6 models just have the entire origin system rotated. It looks odd and prints seem to be facing the wrong way when compared to the Cura build plate, but everything prints fine.

It sounds like you are making progress. Every printer will be at least a little different. Ultimaker can't test these sorts of settings on every machine out there - just on their own. General "default" settings that are aimed at Ultimaker machines might not be optimized for "all those other" printers. In your case - the "3 in 1 out" nozzle is a relative new comer and so some experimenting will need to be done to dial it in. In the case of the E+10 and where exactly it's occurring in the toolpath, if you can't fix it then you should probably put up a bug report over on GitHub. Ideally it should occur away from the model. There was a similar problem with Pause at Height doing the same sort of thing. It was a question of moving a couple of lines so the prime occurred at the park position rather than over the print. A little change to a post-processor I can do. I'm not skilled enough at Python to attempt anything more ambitious. Continue to post your updates here so the next Geeetech owner can find them.

"Perhaps it too will be time consuming but educational." That is 3D printing in a nutshell. Every day I strive to learn something new (good for the mind) and do a good deed (good for the soul).

That's the stock Ending Gcode for an Ender 3 and the ends of both Gcode files are identical. I don't see any issues there (in fact it looks much like my own ending gcode for my E3Pro). At the end of the print the G91 command makes the follow-up Z0.2 and Z10 relative so those are upward moves. The M84 line is missing the Z parameter so the print head should not drift down by itself. It looks like somehow, someway the problem is coming from Octoprint. If there is an ending sequence that Octoprint is adding, make sure it has a G91 line prior to any Z moves and that the Z moves are small.

Within the gcode file - does Cura add a call for T1 prior to your startup gcode? It should be there, but then your StartUp Gcode is explicitly calling for T0. You could try changing that "T0" line in your StartUp Gcode to "T{initial_extruder_nr}" and see if it makes a difference.

In Cura go to "Manage Printers" and then "Machine Settings". In the "Ending Gcode" window will be the end of print commands. I don't know how you have configured Octoprint but generally it's the Ending Gcode that finishes up a print. I have seen some printer definitions that include a G28 line in the Ending Gcode. That's a bad idea as it will drop the head. Post a Gcode file that shows the problem. The "drop the head" move will either be in the Ending Gcode or there may be some sort of configuration in Octoprint (which I have no experience with).

@Dana1960 I'm an amateur hack and write a bit of code. One of the things I thought Cura lacked is the ability to create a "profile" for fan speeds. Included with this little Windows app is a Cooling Profile generator. You can change fan speeds at any layer, shut it off, turn it back on...whatever. There is also an option to adjust the fan speed according to Line Type (Wall-Outer, Infill, Support Interface, etc.). Greg's SD Print Tool This is the "By Layer Number" page: This is the "By Feature Type" page: The app opens an existing Gcode file created with Cura. You set up your fan profile. The app then creates a new gcode file and writes the original into it with the fan profile inserted. You end up with the un-altered original file and a new "Cooled" file. (The M106 lines are PWM so all the percentages are translated to 0-255 scale.) If you decide to install it a shortcut will be added to your desktop and there is an un-install app. If you decide to try it and come across any issues let me know.

@pozzello I've responded in the other thread.

Within the project file you have the Extruder #1 "Nozzle Switch Extra Prime Amount" set to 40mm³. That's 16.63mm of filament on top of the 16mm regular prime amount. That will leave a mark. Your "Dual Extrusion" settings for Extruders 2 and 3 look reasonable and neither have any extra prime (much less 500mm worth of extrusion in a blob). You need to set Extruder #1 up the same as 2 and 3. There is no G1 F2400 E-16 because you set Cura up for Absolute Extrusion rather than Relative extrusion. This is what is happening every time Extruder #1 gets over the print and starts its first extrusion: G1 F1800 X120.359 Y116.04 E203.41115 --- Last extrusion of the previous tool and the filament is right at the nozzle ..... G1 F1200 E187.41115 --- Nozzle switch retraction of 16mm for the previous tool ..... G92 E0 --- Reset previous extruder to 0 T0 --- Switch to Extruder 1 G92 E0 --- Reset Extruder 1 to 0 G1 F2400 E10 --- 10 mm prime (16 minus your regular retraction distance of 6.0) The filament is 6mm behind the nozzle. .... G1 F2400 E32.63007 --- Here is the problem. For the other extruders this is E16.0 but for Extruder 1 it's adding that extra prime of 16.63mm (40mm³) that you have asked for in your settings. PS: I just had another look at the project file I posted in the alternate thread and it's fine. That "40mm³" of extra prime came from somewhere else.

Yes, you can do it that way. What you see there is the blocker infill. There are walls around that area. This is with the infill line-type turned off: This is with the infill line-type turned on. You see the infill of the bird is not exposed, just the blocker infill. There is no true hole into the interior of the bird. This bird has enough problems without adding more holes.

You have the blocker set as an "Infill Mesh". Here the left model is from your project (I altered the Infill Density to highlight it's effect). I have altered the right model so the blocker is a "Cutting Mesh". The Cutting Mesh settings are No Walls, No Tops, No Bottoms, and Infill Density = 0. You can see that the right model has walls and floors in the cut-away section. Those are settings of the model. If you wanted to do something like have no walls in that area (so the infill is exposed) that can't really be done. So your block in the phone protector project needs to be changed to a Cutting Mesh.

Thank you. Now I see. That does qualify as another instruction though. That's 3 in your last 3 posts. I had been using this piece of technology. I didn't know the scroll/ctrl thingy.

You can if you want. As you noted - the problem was fixed without changing anything in the program so is it a bug?

@Cuq ---- are you telling me that I have to start reading instructions? I've avoided that like the plague and I'm not likely to start going into my 8th decade. For one thing, the fonts are too small.

I think the problem is that the model has such small "landing zones" for the bridge ends. When I set Horizontal Expansion to 0.4 everything looks a lot better. The author of the Calibration Shapes plugin is here. @Cuq if you could take a look at this - it does appear that the inside strings of the bridge come up short of the walls. In this view the left end appears to be air printing. Are there other adjustments that can be made besides Horizontal Expansion or scaling the model? Here I've cheated and altered the model to give it some more bridge abutment on the inside.

Hi @2go. A project file is attached. I didn't spend as much time on this one. The rollout of 5.0 was kind of bumpy as the Arachne engine was integrated into Cura at the same time that all the dialogs were re-written to work with QT6 controls. It was ambitious. 5.1 was much better and 5.2.1 continued to evolve and is certainly less buggy. There is still a slicing bug on Windows systems but moving and/or rotating the model on the Cura build plate usually fools the bug. You didn't mention which operating system but I've run all Cura versions on an older Windows 10 system with no problem. If the video subsystem doesn't support OpenGL 4.1 then Cura falls back to "compatibility" mode which is a flat line preview rather than the 3d looking preview. GV_test.3mf

Maybe. You would need to fool Cura. Let's say your line width is 0.4. You could try setting the "Horizontal Expansion" to a single line width (0.4) and then set the "Hole Horizontal Expansion" to double line width (0.8). "Hole Horizontal Expansion" generally works by the radius but in your case you would want to increase the overall "diameter". It might work although you have that random sort of shape. The best thing to do would be to alter the model in CAD. Cura is much better when the model is what you actually want rather than being "Somewhat close except for....". Cura's a fine slicer but not much of a CAD program.

Maybe it's just a "Setting Visibility" thing. Next to the "Search Settings" box is an icon with three lines on it (you can see it in your screenshot). That is the Setting Visibility tool. Click on it and set the visibility to "All" and see if the rest of the settings show up.

Load the model and set Cura up to slice and use the "File | Save Project" command. Post the 3mf file here. With just the CuraProfile file, and using a model of my own, I can't duplicate the problem. (You might try changing what looks like "Concentric" bottom to "Lines" and see if it makes a difference.)

Yes. The "Auto-Home" location is just where the switches happen to be located. It is only used by the printer so the printer knows where the print head actually is in space. The printer sets the "Stepper Locations" of the X, Y, and Z to 0 when you Auto-Home. The "Home Offset" 0,0,0 is the actual Origin point of the printer. It is where the printer will put the "Origin" of a gcode file. There is of course a relation between the "Home Offset" position and the "Auto-Home" location, but it is the "Home Offset" location that is important for actually positioning a gcode file on your printer's build plate. I'll use my Ender 3 Pro as an example. My glass build plate physically measures 235 x 235. It has a 1mm beveled edge all around the periphery that can't be printed on. My preference is to put another 1.5mm safety area all around the periphery. So my total "non-printable" area is a 2.5mm border all the way around the glass. That leaves me with a "Printable Area" 230 x 230 and that is what I enter into Cura as my build plate size. After Auto-Homing the printer - my nozzle happens to be aligned with the left edge of the glass and is 2.5mm in front of the front edge of the glass. That is a non-printable location. I move the nozzle so it is 2.5mm in from the left edge, and 2.5mm in from the front edge, and at a Z=0 and then I use the LCD control to set the Home Offset location at that point in space and then use the LCD "Save Settings" command. That is the normal situation. If I then tell the printer to move to X=115 and Y=115 the nozzle will be smack dab at the mid-point of the glass. That will align it perfectly with the Cura build plate. For specialty situations the Home Offset location can be altered using an M206 command in the gcode. G92 could also be used to change where the printer "thinks" the nozzle is.