GregValiant

I used the "repaired" model in this project file. The bottom and top portions were "unioned" so it is a single model. It is at my preferred speed of 35 but as I say, once it gets above the base it will move at 1 layer/10seconds unless the minimum layer time is changed. GV_BangiukasBottom.3mf Those artifacts look like what I call an XY seam. They can happen when "Spiralize" doesn't really work on a model for whatever reason. When a model is successfully spiralized the "spiral" portion of the gcode will look like this with the Z constantly moving up. (This is from the gcode file of the above project file). G1 F2100 X112.667 Y162.741 E2709.01761 ;Last extrusion line of of the non-spiral base G1 X90.701 Y152.887 Z2.216 E2710.67544 G1 X90.248 Y152.693 Z2.217 E2710.70938 G1 X88.811 Y152.04 Z2.218 E2710.81807 G1 X88.359 Y151.845 E2710.85197 ;the Z doesn't move up on every line. G1 X86.922 Y151.192 Z2.219 E2710.96066

I exported the model as an STL and uploaded to https://formware.co/OnlineStlRepair. Here is the report on your model. --> 0 Naked edges (?) --> 0 Planar holes (?) --> 0 Non-planar holes (?) --> 269 Non-manifold edges (?) --> 383 Inverted faces (?) --> 0 Degenerate faces (?) --> 9 Duplicate faces (?) --> 0 Disjoint shells (?) -> Repairing: 100.00% ----- Repair completed in 48804ms ------ -> Vertex count changed from 185215 to 185571 (+356) -> Triangle count changed from 370980 to 371138 (+158) When a model is non-manifold you should get the warning that "the model may not print correctly." Cura may have made mistakes in the slice because of the errors in the model. You have "Remove all Holes" enabled. Is that because you don't need the holes in the bottom plate? Your settings look reasonable. I'd print it at 35 but that is my personal preference for PETG. I just think it looks better when printed slower. The upper part probably doesn't matter as it will bump up against "Minimum Layer Time" either way.

Load the model and set Cura up to slice and then use the "File | Save Project" command. Post the 3mf file here. That model is solid through-and-through?

Or get a new mainboard that has an SD card slot that works. I control my printer over the USB and I can ask the printer to list the files currently on the SD and then pick the one I want to print on my laptop and send M23 and M24 and the file will print from the SD. My point is that there are options besides putting it out on the front porch and hoping that some dummy will steal it.

"I’m afraid I don’t trust the equipment enough (including the smoke alarm I installed just above it!)." A Techophobe doing 3D printing? I almost had a fire in my printer when a high-resistance condition developed at the power supply connection to the mainboard. I had to replace the connector on the board. I keep an eye on it now and checking it is part of my maintenance routine.

UltiMaker does most of the maintenance of Cura with a paid staff. Since their printers don't use USB printing it would be a waste of resources for them to have their employees fix USB printing so I can use it on my Creality printer. There's just no upside for UltiMaker in working on "USB printing". Since Cura is open source anyone can work on it. I've done a fair amount of work with serial communication over the years and even if I knew the python language enough to do it...I wouldn't take it on. Foremost among a lot of reasons is all the different hardware combinations out there on both the printer and computer ends. It would be like a black hole just sucking up time and effort. From what I've read, very little has been done with the Cura USB printing plugin in the last 5 years. The folks who use Octoprint and a Rasp PI seem real happy with the setup. I'm an SD card guy myself but if I was going to go a different direction, Octoprint would be it. The USB printing plugin is installed and active by default in all Cura versions through 5.2beta. If it works, it works. If it doesn't then there are other options using Octoprint or maybe investing in a Wifi setup.

The temperature test is pretty simple. If you can hold on to it comfortably between your finger and thumb then it's fine.

Hello @Taco_Bob Try setting your "Top Surface Skin Layers" to 0 or 1. (I'm using 5.2beta.) This is Top Surface Skin Layers at "2". This is with it set to "1".

I was wondering what the fix would be as your original Gcode file worked fine on my Ender.

"I have had some prints that stop about halfway through the print - several hours into it. I have been using CURA 5.1 since it was available..." "Well the older CURA (4.12) failed as well " After a close analysis of the gcode I said "This pretty much lets Cura and the gcode off the hook and I'm back at the printer itself." That was because my analysis of the gcode shows that it's fine. There is nothing in there that would cause a printer's E-motor to stop. There are no settings you could adjust that would stop the printer in mid-print. It is possible to have retractions that are too long and that pull plastic up into the hot end where it can cool and cause a partial clog, but the extruder keeps turning and either skips steps, or grinds away the filament. For the extruder to simply stop turning in mid-print?? After that discusion, I did get off on a tangent regarding settings and how to keep track of them. In my defense, I thought you were asking about that. Getting back to why the printer stopped extruding, it appears to be a problem at the printer end. The hot end fan stops, a clog at the hot end, the nozzle clog, over-heating E driver chip on the mainboard, the E stepper is over-heating and quitting, etc.. Those aren't things that changing settings (other than retraction length) are going to fix. It was running fine and then it wasn't. From what I've understood - the X Y Z motors were running fine but the E motor quit. "Because you recently changed the E stepper motor and hot end they are the likeliest suspects."

"...it looks bent which im guessing isnt good." Good call. I have to believe that they rarely put extra parts in just for giggles. I've never had one apart so I don't what function it could have performed. It looks like you might possibly have a bit more than a firmware issue.

What you are aiming for is consistently good prints with nice finishes. There will be times when a built-in profile isn't quite right for you what you want to do with a model. A simple example is when you choose between Normal and Tree supports or you decide that the outer walls will look better if printed at a lower speed. Those sorts of things require that you go into the custom settings and make changes. It's part of the learning curve of Cura. With experience you will learn to set Cura up so it plays to the strength of your particular printer. That's when you will graduate to using the Custom settings all the time. I have 5 Custom profiles. I pick one based on how close it will be to giving me what I want. I know I can't print TPU at 15mm/sec. My custom profile has the print speed at 10 which I know will work for my printer. If I'm printing a model with fine lettering? I'm going slower with lower Jerk and Accel settings. If I have a model with a large round horizontal hole that I know will want to curl up? I will enable Z-hops so the model doesn't get whacked by the nozzle and maybe break loose from the bed. Those sorts of things require customization.

When you select a stock profile like "Standard" you can make changes to the settings but you cannot save them to the Standard profile. It will always start with it's default settings. In the middle of a Cura session you could decide that you've made a mess of the settings. Re-selecting "Standard" would bring up a dialog and you have the option of either Keeping or Discarding the changes you made. Another feature of that dialog is to inform you of what the differences are between the profile you are using, and the changes you have made. For this print I was using my 75mm/sec profile. I changed a couple of things. When I click on the profile this dialog comes up. And it is telling me that I changed the retraction distance and the Outer Wall speed. The same thing will come up with a regular profile. Clicking on it will bring up the list of what's different.

The extrusion didn't seem to be the problem. It was the movement out of the part. If the print head starts running from X=0 to X= Max Width then it isn't interpreting the gcode correctly. It just occurred to me that you'd need to be watching it. Sorry about that. I was thinking why throw a bunch of filament at a print that was actually designed to fail?

Here's a dummy gcode. It's an exercise program for overweight printers. The speed for everything is 75 and it came out to 16 hours by Cura time. By the way, do you have a fan in the mainboard compartment? My Ender had it's mainboard cooling fan wired to the layer cooling fan. It isn't adjustable speed, but if the layer cooling fan is off, the mainboard fan is off. That can be an issue when printing PETG because I didn't use the fan and so the mainboard wasn't being cooled. I hot wired the mainboard fan to the hot end fan which runs all the time. GV_CalibrationShape.gcode

No. Cura creates a text file in the Gcode language and that's what the printer reads. There is a section at the end of a Cura Gcode file that has comments that contain the name of the profile and any overrides you used. Since the lines they are on start with a semi-colon (that indicates they are comments and not commands), the printer ignores them. The Marlin Gcodes (and related Mcodes) are listed HERE. You don't need to know them all but you should get familiar with the ones that come up a lot (G0, G1, M106, G28, etc). You can open a gcode file in any text editor and find out what the printer is being told to do.

The max speed is determined by your printer definition file. Those are submitted by a member of the community, or by the printer manufacturer, to UltiMaker for inclusion in Cura. I have no idea what printer you have or what the max might be. It's possible that even if you could enter 500mm/sec as a print speed that it would get to the printer and the printer would enforce it's speed limit as contained in M203. In the MarketPlace is a plugin called Printer Settings. Load it and restart Cura. Look through the settings and you will find the Max feedrate for each axis. You can change them but they only effect the "allowed numbers" in the speed boxes. The printer still won't care and will impose it's own limit unless you adjust M203.

Only one gcode at a time. They really can't be merged.

I start my prints from a console on my PC by sending M23 and M24. That allows me to use M25 to pause a print. Doing that leaves the nozzle in contact with the print and will always leave a scar. So I necessarily send a script to Pause the current print, move the Z up, and park the print head. The previous XYZE locations must be figured out so they can be passed along when the print is resumed so they are correct when the gcode starts flowing again. You might be able to send "M0" or "M1" (they are both Emergency Stop) to force a pause. Depending on your firmware there may be other commands that can be used. Most pauses will result in the nozzle simply stopping right where it happens to be.

I seem to recall a bug report on Github regarding Cura wanting to open each file in a separate instance of Cura. The setting "Use a Single Instance of Cura" exists in the preferences. Either I don't understand it's function, or it's wonky. This is how it works on my Windows computer: In an instance of Cura I can use the File | Open command and open one after another, or, I can select multiple files and open them together where they will auto-arrange within that instance of Cura. I can also drag multiple files into the Cura workspace. If Cura is not running, and I select multiple files in File Explorer and select "Open" then I will get multiple instances of Cura and each will have one model in it. That may well be because at that point it is completely a Windows operation and Cura isn't involved yet.

It appears that a company has patented the "non-planar" slicing/printing idea. They could do it but they haven't. For anyone else there are probably lawyers waiting in the bushes.

As far as I know the cooling fans are configured to each extruder. When an extruder switch is called for then the cooling fan switches. If there is no second extruder then the second fan (Fan1) won't be controlled. The speed of the second fan wouldn't be accessible without a second extruder. You could do it with Search and Replace. If you know what layer you want the second fan to turn on then: Search = ;LAYER:30 Replace = ;LAYER:30\nM106 S255 P1 then another Search and Replace to shut it off Search = ;LAYER:35 Replace = ;LAYER:35\nM106 S0 P1 Search and Replace accepts multi-line strings with the commands separated by "\n" (backslash + lower case n)

I wrote a routine into my Greg's Toolbox app that will start a print from any location in a file. It works well using the "byte location" to return to a specific line or layer. Homing remains an issue when restarting a print unless it can be done quickly. When I start a print with M24 I always send M18 S14400 to max out the Stepper Disarm Time on my Ender. I get 4 hours to fix my screwup. I can even take a nap before I bother to get to it. The app has a lot of real estate dedicated to restarting a print.

I don't think it's "printing the model at a much larger scale". The printer mainboard isn't capable of that. It reads a line of Gcode and follows the instructions on where to go. If it says X115 Y115 then it should go to that point in space. It looks to be either the stepper driver on the mainboard, or a stepper motor is going. I think the problem is in the X system. Replacing the mainboard without KNOWING what's wrong could be just throwing money away. Better trouble-shooting needs to be done. One thing you could try is to swap the X and Y stepper motors. If the problem moves then it's the stepper. If the problem stays in the X then it's the board. Mainboards fail at a much higher rate than steppers. I'll put together a print with no extrusions. It will just run around and pretend like it's printing. I have a model that is suitable. It's a simple Search and Replace in Cura. I'll use the speed settings in that gcode you posted. I busy for the next couple of hours but I'll get to it this evening.

@DivingDuck's code will work. There is a typo in there (because the printer will only understand uppercase in a command or parameter): "G1 X5.00 y295.00 ;then go to back of print bed (you need to set a value that match with your ;bed dimensions and where the print head do not crash into the model)" What you want is doable. Understand that the end stop switches aren't terribly accurate and you could well get a layer shift because after homing, the X0 Y0 Z0 may not be the exact same point in space that it was at the start of the print. The layer shift can be up to 0.50mm in the XY. @obewan's solution is also an option. Doing it his way means there would be no layer shift, just the location of the person setting the two parts together for gluing. I'd go with Diving Duck's method. It's the one I use when I have to stop a print for some reason. Right now the partial print is scrap and trying to save it is a good idea and I have done it...but my success rate is about 50%. Obewan's solution would have a better chance of success so long as you can properly locate the top and bottom when you bond them. It would also be more forgiving of a height error.