ChrisGill

Thanks Greg I'm learning all the time so it's definitely useful to know about the printer timeouts and the write-back to the SD card. I agree, I would normally run from the SD card and run up & down stairs a lot but, being a small print, I thought I could get away with it. I have my laptop set to not sleep when powered up and I also don't have a screen saver. Ah well, lesson learned. That's a good idea about using left-over lengths of filament. I haven't quite got to the end of the first one yet so I'm bound to hit that problem before too long.

I realise this is probably my own stupid fault but ... I'm using Cura 4.8.0 on a Creality Ender 5. I was running a small print from my laptop and the battery was well charged so I didn't plug it in. I forgot all about the laptop going to sleep, which it did at 90% of the print run. I spotted it quite quickly and thought I might get away with clicking Pause and then Resume in Cura. It brought the bed and nozle back up to temperature and homed the print head so X, Y and Z were all back to zero. It then drew another lead-in line (or whatever the correct term is). I was a bit worried when it drew another skirt on top of the first one and then it crashed into the model as I was scrabbling to hit Pause again and then Abort. Cura, however, moved on from 90% to 91% during this so I presume it was still working through the code. I'm sure the answer is "don't let the laptop get sleepy" but I'd like to understand what actually happened. Is there possibly an enhancement opportunity - stop the laptop sleeping? Windows 10 in this case. I got it working quite successfully in some brewery software I worked on a few years ago. Thanks

Hi I hope someone can help me figure out what I'm doing wrong or misunderstanding ... I have a Creality Ender 5 (not pro) and I use Ultimaker Cura latest version for slicing. I'm new to this world of 3D printing so I'm still exploring the machine and trying to get it tuned, if that's the right word. I was tinkering with the problems of elephant's foot and with bulging corners on calibration cubes and then, as a final print for the day, I set up several objects to print. Most were 7mm high and one was about 20mm high. They were laid out by default with Cura and fairly close together. When I took them off the build plate, the taller one, a cylinder with a flat side, showed a distinct change at 7mm up from the bottom, corresponding to the top of the other parts. I've attached a picture of the part and a drawing (sorry about the background colour - a limitation in QCAD). Dimensions in the drawing are as measured with a micrometer. Ideally it should have been 10mm diameter. The main problem is that below 7mm, when the head is travelling between parts, there is noticeable bulging at the corners although as far as I can measure, the flat is correct. Also, the quality of the surface is relatively poor. Above 7mm, everything is fine. There is even a small circumferential bulge at 7mm up. I'd stopped playing with settings so the print speed was 80mm/s, but within that the travel speed was 200mm/s. Jerk control was on with all settings at 8mm/s. Retraction was on with it set to 5mm at 50mm/s (to reduce stringing). Acceleration control was off but the Ender 5 defaults to 500mm/s^2 for print and retract, 1000mm/s^2 for travel. First layer expansion was at -0.5mm - still fighting the elephants. I'm not sure what else to look at but most things would be at default values. I'm hoping to build a model with multiple parts on the build plate at the same time so this problem could be quite serious. Any clues would be great. Many thanks, Chris