civileng

Thank you for posting this! I was using Horizontal Expansion compensation until now (nearly 4 years) but that would make my thin walls disappear, even with the 'Print Thin Walls' checked. Now I can have the best of both worlds.

Hello, I want to make a draft shield to reduce some warping I've noticed on my part that happens after around the first 5mm of layer height and upwards. For whatever reason, my slicer is stuck making the shield out of PVA instead of my main material, black PETG. I've made ooze shields before but now they are also defaulting to my Extruder 2 nozzle. Can anyone help me sort this out? My guess is I inadvertently toggled some other setting which is causing this.

I love the Ultimaker S5. When I purchased the Material Station addon I was picturing something simple and valuable: a humidity-controlled chamber that would increase the longevity of my PVA (or BVOH) and, best of all, automatically switch spools when I request it. I was attracted by the idea of not having to go around to the back of the machine anymore. Pretty sure most individual readers have wanted that too. As of firmware 7.0.3 there is still no way to toggle off the MS from automatically retracting the filament at the end of a print job, which means at the start of every print you have to wait 5~10 minutes extra for the machine to decide there are no air pockets or other colors inside the nozzle. For a tiny 5-minute part that I quickly want to verify - and I make a lot of tiny mechanisms - repeating this a few times gets really tiring so I'm back to using the default backrack for now and the Material Station serves me as storage only. I recall Ultimaker saying that the prime/deprime was intended for large organizations, where a team of designers working remotely may queue up their individual projects of varying plastics through one machine. But even then, wouldn't there be less time and plastic wasted on average if you only performed the deprime at the start of a new job that specifically called for a different plastic than the one currently in the nozzle? If the next job asked for the same plastic you could just get going right away. I would love to hear Ultimaker's take on this, maybe I am missing out on a key detail. If the deprime could be a user's choice I feel like the MS would cater to the needs of a much wider audience. Here's some workarounds I tried exploring: When printing, immediately queue up another part of the same plastic type, maybe the machine will recognize this and decide not to deprime. When your original part finishes, never press the checkmark that confirms you cleared the build plate. Unfortunately, I can confirm that the MS does a partial retract immediately after print and a full retract after 2h regardless of whatever's queued next. UltiTuner - A nifty tool that you can use to skip the mandatory cooldown if your printer happens to have a bed leveling error, and beyond. Made by Smithy (https://community.ultimaker.com/topic/39188-ultituner-a-tool-to-tweak-your-printer/). Alas, he has no MS of his own so cannot help find a tweak to disable the automatic deprime. How about pausing a print indefinitely so the plastic won't retract? This is my latest idea, but there are a few issues to address. The nozzle would have to idle at room temperature and all the fans should be off to avoid unnecessary wear. The motors would also need to hang limp instead of holding the print head in the front-centre of the enclosure. Does anybody have any clever ideas? I am desperate to get some proper use out of my Material Station.

Hello Smithy! I was browsing the Ultimaker forums and came across your UltiTuner github page. Thank you for making this! If you are still looking for ideas for upcoming features, it would be extremely helpful to have a way to disable the Material Station's auto retract feature. This is one of those frustrating parts of Ultimaker firmware on the same level as not being able to skip cooldown due to a print core mismatch failure.

Hello Ultimaker: is there any update on the priming issue? We could really use a firmware update that gives users the option to disable material retraction at the end of a print. I think anyone who uses a single main plastic will agree that the constant depriming process is frustrating because the machine thinks it needs to be ready to switch to any kind of material when there is only one. Also the support PVA filament keeps cracking from all the wear and tear of being dragged back and forth. I unplugged my material station from the S5. I can only use it as a filament storage box because all of the errors (and time taken to cool down and reattempt) have a huge detrimental impact on produtivity.

I am experiencing this same issue. I have to wait for the build plate to completely cool down before the Ultimaker lets me do a reattempt. I've followed all the suggested steps on the website with no success.

Recently bought the Ultimaker bundle with the material station and this happened to me too. Very frustrating.

Dear Ultimaker: I recently bought the pro bundle and I noticed that before every single print, the MS will feed filament all the way through the tubes into the print head and extrude a bunch of plastic to clear the nozzle before making the part. After the print completes, the MS will extrude even more filament (pushing and pulling back and forth) in order to shape the tips of the filament into knobs for easier retraction because apparently thin strings will jam up the mechanisms. Then, after a delay. it fully retracts material 1 completely back into itself and leaves the PVA support spool partially retracted, a few inches above the print head. Why can't we leave both filaments in the print cores after a print so the next job can be started immediately? I am forced to pack more parts into a single job at once because the start and end delays waste too much time and plastic. If anything, the prime/deprime procedure should occur only when the user requests a change in filament; if you intend on sticking to one main variety like PETG there's so much overhead. When reloading filament the material station doesn't ask: "Let me know when the plastic is extruding correctly" like the vanilla S5 does; instead it pushes out plastic on a set timer. I understand that a lot of the design choices were made assuming automation and remote operation, and the machine needs to extrude extra plastic than normal just to be absolutely sure. But a user still needs to be around to swap the glass plate between print jobs anyway so what does it matter? All in all, I think the material station has a serious lack of manual control or customization to fit the user's needs. It acts like an uncontrollable black box that needs to be worked around. I would like to request a new feature at your earliest convenience: 1. Ability to manually change filaments with the MS (where the user can confirm the plastic is extruding correctly) 2. Option to prevent automatic filament retraction at the end of a print I feel as though these two changes would make the material station absolutely perfect for a user like me; a true asset instead of an obstacle to productivity. And it doesn't seem so hard to implement, since it involves skipping an existing process instead of creating something brand new. At the time of this writing (Sept 18), I'm on the latest firmware: 6.5.1. Are any other users having this problem?