dmitche3

I just installed the latest (5.5.0) verison and I wanted to view my post print code. When I open up my machine settings the program continues to the prior window. I can still change my end G-Code without an issue.

You can setup a generic printer in Cura. When selecting a printer there isn't much that is specific to the printer that would cause issues. What is important is defining your bed size and maximum Z height, and where "Home" is located. There might be something else but it's probably a minor settings. You'll probably want to copy some pre-print and post processing scripts from other printers if there isn't any provided. These would print a priming line down the left side of the bed before printing. And the post-processing move the print head away from the item when completed. I would guess that these are added to a generic printer by Cura. Also, look at the last section in the setup panel for Printer Settings, under "Experimental". You'll see additional printer settings that you'll need to review.

Here are several reasons. 1. Your print bed is dirty. Left over dust from a print or oils from fingers can cause problems. 2. You have a heated bed but you don't allow the bed to heat up to the temperature that you set. Eventhough the readout on your printer says 60C it can take five minutes or more before a glass bed will actually get to that temperature. If you start printing and have issues that disappear after several failed print attempts think of this. 3. Your printer bed isn't quite leveled. 4. Your filament is a bit on the wet side. In your case, this is probably not your issue, yet. I strongly recommend a filament dryer. I use an older Sunlu version 1. I say that 80% of the filament I buy from Microcenter is wet. Don't be fooled by vacuum sealed bags as when the filament is made from large vats and then is rolled into very large diameters and placed on very large reels and stored. At this time the filament can get waterlogged. Factories don't use air-conditioning and such. The filament is then put extruded into the 1.75mm, 2.85mm or larger size diameters as customers need it and THEN it is sealed into their vacuum bags and a desicate package added. Too late though.

The laptop will need the proper drivers to access your printer via the USB ports. What make of print is it? Search online for "3d Printer drivers". I know for my ender 3 V2 there is one that I use that comes from China. It made me nervous to install it as everything was in a Chinese language, but as everyone else uses it and there was no alternative.. Assuming that you are running Windows you should see in the Device Manager under Ports an entry. Once the driver is installed it should indicate that a 3D printer is connected. I recommend using Ponterface to setup the printer and to use it for printing. You have to get the proper serial speed to communicate with the printer.

I have my reservations about you being able to do this and still continue to print. Eventhough in theory you should be able to pause the print, raise the print head, and change it I'm more concerned with the pressures that you would be exerting on the hotend wouldn't move it, regardless if the stepper motors remain engaged. I would like to know more of why you would want to change your nozzle during a print. Are you trying to reduce print time by using a larger one for the base and a smaller one for finer detail or what? I'm curious.

Not so dumb. Cura will "slice" your file to print, either an STL, 3MF, etc. This will generate the G-Code that the printer uses. You can use the preview (RECOMMENDED) to see what is actually going to print as sometimes you don't always get what you expect. Once you have sliced your part, you then can either use Cura to print from the software or you can save the G-Code to a file. If you choose to save the file you'll need to put it on a media that your printer supports. Typically and SSD or Micro-SSD card slot is located on the printer. From there your printer can load the file and process the files. The downside of printing from Cura or programs like Ponterface is that your Chromebook would need to be connected to the printer, via a USB or Wi-Fi and can't go to sleep. I print from my laptop using Ponterface as it gives me more control over the printing. It's a great program that lets you set up macros so that you'll never need to touch the dials on your printer again.

You are correct that STL files do not contain color and other information. This is why the industry standard is to move to 3MF files. But I only print STLs as I find that while CURA will print 3MF files there can be issues, such as just loading and aligning items on the print bed, as well as additional print times which is a bit strange.

I agree with GR5. About the only reason that you would need to setup the printer if you just want to look at how it slices would be the print bed size, that I can think of. You can use the preview view and slide the layer height up and down(on the far right of the screen) to see how each layer would print.

I have this happen to me on occasion. I won't say with 100% certainity but I fix the issue by upping my hotend temps and check my cooling to see if it is apropriate. As well as making sure that the lower layers are firmly printing and attaching to the bed. Also, I make sure to dry my filament. Combinations of those three fix the issue for me. I would guess that wet filament is the largest problem followed by the hotend temperature and cooling.

I have had a few failures while printing caused by my filament reels being tangled from the manufacturer. In two cases I caught it shortly after it caused the problem and I simply wanted to lower the hotend and continue printing as the vertical dimension wasn't critical for what I was prototyping at that stage. Yet, I couldn't simply lower the hotend to the printed material as the positioning generated by CURA uses absolute positioning. Once I would lower the hotend and unpause the print the nozzle would return to the original height. Is there, or wouldn't it be nice to be able to generate the G-Code in relative positioning as well as absolute? I admit that I don't see any advantage of absolute but perhaps there is a case out there, which I'd like to hear from people about. Perhaps a checkbox to allow one or the other? I may be wrong but after 40+ years as a lead systems analyst I don't see this as a major change. The slicer already knows the positions when slicing. This would save a lot of headaches caused by removing the printing item from the print bed, modifying an STL and regenerating the G-Code. I didn't have problems doing this but I'm thinking that it may not always be so easy to do. I can't say one way or the other on that. Thanks for comments and suggestions.

Sorry for not following up on this as i was in the hospital for along time. i try avoiding all supports any more so I can't reproduce this. I've also guessed that some supports aren't created because the distance from the object to the plate is less than 2 layers, and of course there are the other settings which impact support.

I'm updating this as really nothing has changed. If you have an X drive that disappears, from a removable drive or network and the software was installed while the drive was connected the software no longer runs. This looks like a programmer put some default code in for testing, or referencing code on their X: drive and forgot to remove the references. Given the fact that there are so many ways to hack software i wouldn't be surprised to know that this could be used a hack, even so lame that it would be.

For several releases of the Cura splicer I've noticed, and tried to remember and avoid using that feature as the clone feature is buggy. Most of the time it appears to be fine and I get sucked into a false sense that things are working and then I get a bad clone. The example below is 3 cloned items from the slicer software and the original. From the picture you can see the lines through the piece on the three cloned items. The layers are missing and the item is not usable. Not the first time on my prints and surely not the last. Ignore the support mess around the screws. I just didn't clean them up yet. I don't think that I need to say which of the four screws is the original.

Solved. But not fixed. This IS a bug. If you have an X: drive mapped but not connected the software will not run! Period!! I have a network drive X: that was not connected and failure. I unmapped it and the software runs. I than remapped the X: drive as I need it to work and that software bombed again. This appears to be a hardcoded internal error in the software and nothing more. If you need an X: drive your screwed. So, if you want to run Cura your X: Drive must be available 100% of the time. Need I say anything more?

I've got the same problem. I thought it was because I installed from a network drive. Did you? I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling multiple times, removing the left over trash on the drive as well as the registry without any help. The program is looking for a file on the X: drive that isn't available. I'm thinking that it needs any old X: drive to possibly work. Trying that now.

Hi all, I installed Cura 4.8 from a network drive. I recently upgraded to 4.9 which is probably a mute point. I believe that my problem is that I ran the executable installation from a network drive and Cura can't understand that. It installed to my local machine but it won't run without having access to my netowrk drive. I get the message of " Error in sys.excepthook Exception [WinError 53] the network path is not found x:\\4.9\\build\\inst\\bin\\cura_app.py ..." I have uninstalled cura multiple times with and without configuration files while being disconnected from the network to no avail. The uninstall is extremely poor as it doesn't remove local and roaming data files and leaves the registry full of unused entries as well. As eluded to there, I did a RegEdit to clean up what was left but I couldn't find anything that would refer to the network drive. I'm currently running a complete scan of the hard drive looking for references to this python program. Any help please.

Thanks. Will do so tomorrow.

There are two similar issues when using supports. I use tree supports on both of them. The first issue is that tree supports are being created but stop a good 1mm before they would be needed. But they aren't needed. I have a 6 inch "Y" shaped tree the other day attached to nothing. The second is that I can print one part with supports turned on but not needed and it prints fine without any supports. BUT, add a second copy of the item and for reasons unknown Cura wants to add supports to both items? Are these known bugs?