alkekmakerspace

The problem with Digital Factory for our use case is that it requires an ultimaker login. This would require all students to create their own account which would just introduce more problems for us. Unless there is a workaround for that? You would think it would be that simple, but we still get a lot of patrons that just leave whatever it defaults to and hit print without thinking about it. It was defaulting to Ultimaker Blue PLA, then people would send a print job with that material, which we don't have. It doesn't make sense that it would default to a material that isn't there, that is just a bad user experience. Here's a screenshot after connecting to one of our printers. Setting the preferred material to Generic GFF CPE seems to have solved our problem. I would still like to find a more elegant solution.

We are printing over the network from a set of 5 computers to (8) Ultimaker S5s with Material Stations. Each printer has a reserved IP. Each user logs in with SSO to the computer, which will almost always be a new user since they are erased on a 14 day cycle. Almost every time they open cura it will act like a new instance. Editing the "preferred material" in the Ultimaker S5 definition file will set it to whatever is in there when you first connect to one of our networked printers. Ideally I would like this to auto select one of the configurations that is in the drop down list. It really doesn't matter which one, I just want it to be an actual config that is printable. The reason for needing this is because most of our users are first timers and forget to select a material. They then send a print job to the machine with a configuration that it does not have (even though we train them to not do that). Most of the time we have to cancel this job and have them set it up again. If it just auto-selected the 1st configuration upon connection it would really streamline this process.

No I was not aware of that setting. Where is that located? I don't see anything in the material drop down section or in the general settings in cura.

Just bumping this up to see if anyone has an insight. I have tried a "empty_material" but that does not work. Checking the cura log file shows the following: - WARNING - [MainThread] cura.Machines.VariantNode.preferredMaterial [99]: Could not find preferred material empty_material, falling back to whatever works For the time being I think I will just set this to a material that is not compatible with the print core to prompt our users to click and change it.

I have dealt with jammed and broken PVA soooo many times. The worst scenario is when a piece breaks off in the path underneath the material station. I have cleared it twice by opening up the bottom, which is not difficult, just annoying because you have to remove the printer and put it upside down. I later learned that most of these jams can be cleared by manually pushing a piece of filament through from the front. For your situation you could unplug everything, then manually push a piece of filament into bay F to push the broken piece of PVA out. When you get to the decoupler on the back, the small piece of pva can sometimes get stuck at the corner before it goes into it. Pulling that section of tubing out is nearly impossible, so you have to keep trying to get it to move through the decoupler.

I am wondering if there is a way to set the default material when connecting to an Ultimaker printer over the network. I specifically have (8) Ultimaker S5s that we connect to from 5 PCs and every time someone connects to one of the printers, it defaults to Ultimaker Blue PLA. Some of our users don't always know that they need to select a material from the drop down so that it will match what's on the printer. I have found the printer definition file. Where it is set as the "preferred_material", and I imagine that I can change this to another material name. The issue with this is that the material will always be different depending on what is loaded in the printer. Is it possible to have the "preferred_material" reference what is loaded? Is it possible to use a variable to get the first material option from the drop down? This would prevent users from sending prints that are not configured correctly. EDIT: I tried just using the following "preferred_material": "" which then set the material to be Generic GFF CPE This may work as a temporary solution since that material shows incompatibility with the print cores, but I'd still like to find a more elegant solution.

The work done to create this is amazing. I personally manage a MakerSpace at Texas State University and have been using this to rewrite our old Ultimaker Tags and put them on 3rd party filament. We have (8) Ultimaker S5s with Material Stations and send prints from 5 different PCs. Since most of the people using our printers are new users, it is super helpful for them to just be able to pick the material they want thats already loaded on the printer within Cura. We have also started to recycle our waste material back into filament using a Filabot setup. When we are busy, we typically go through 6 spools a week. Our busiest month was 26k grams of filament. I am now looking into ways write the total weight and remaining weight through the GUI. @Bunnyman21 what would it take to include that functionality in this GUI?

I'm starting to look into this now that we have multiple S5s with material stations. Since the material station reads and writes to these chips, is there a way to do that ourselves using the material station? I have tried a PUT request via the API to the material station using an empty spool that is currently loaded. I attempt to set the material remaining back to 1, but it never updates. I was hoping it would be that simple, but of course it's not. I do get a 200 response, but the number never updates.

Good to know. We are actually running 8 S5s with the ultibot logo. So it sounds like it might be possible to just swap the LEDs for my situation, but I'm not going to do that on relatively brand new machines. Does that then explain why the brightness of the lights changes when I attempt to change the H and S values via the API? Are those pins connected to different pins on the white LED strips?

So I take it that the material station is not accessible via the cluster? Will this ever be implemented in the future? EDIT: I spoke too soon. I realized that within the printers endpoint that it returns the attached material station with material attributes.

Yes that's exactly what I wanted to do. When a print finished, change to a certain color, when there was an error, change to another color, etc.

ahh I see. So all I can do on the S5 is change the brightness?

I have been attempting to change the color of the LEDs in my Ultimaker S5s using the API, but it never seems to work. When I set anything other than 0 for h or s, it just dims the lights. I get a 204 response code. I can then do a GET request and it shows me the values that I just set, so I know the printer is getting the data. Is this part of the API broken? See code below that I found on the forum and changed a little. def set_mainled(ip, h, s, v): api = initAPI(ip) # read the current LED status led = api.get("api/v1/printer/led").json() print ("current LED state: ",led) if h is None: h = led["hue"] if s is None: s = led["saturation"] if v is None: v = led["brightness"] # Change the LEDs print(api.put("api/v1/printer/led", data={"brightness": v, "saturation": s, "hue": h})) led = api.get("api/v1/printer/led").json() print("set LED state to: ",led)

Logged in on my laptop, not logged in on the other 4 windows 10 installs that I tried. Disabling the UM3network plugin seems to stop cura from using too many resources, but that also stops the ability to print over the network. We do not have octoprint. The camera streams are active, but they go in and out. I rarely connect to them.

I have the same exact issue with Cura using too many resources until the computer is unusable. I have installed Cura 4.6.1 on multiple windows 10 machines in a lab setting as well as my own laptop. All computers experience the same problem. I have to load my model, send the print job, and then exit Cura. I cannot leave cura running for more than 5-10 minutes since it will become unusable.