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Ok I misread your response. I’ll reply tomorrow.

So I'm a 4th year computer science PhD specialising in making assistive technology for the blind using computer vision so when I say it's trivial, it's trivial. (Note I got these pictures from google, we have eduroam so connecting to them locally isn't something I'm willing to spend time doing. So i cant confirm they're from the s5 camera but the consistent position makes me think they are). So you'd do edge+contour detection on the nozzle (area marked in red) or even template matching (you can use basic cv really doubt you need a neural net for something this basic, if you do roboflow is very easy and fast to prototype on). Adjust the cropping area as the print head moves using the g-code. Check for blur on the camera (as in second image). You can detect if the nozzle is jammed, generating spagetti or extruding into the case as above. You can also confirm that the print bed is cleaned and previous prints removed (again using some basic cv) before starting a new one (another reason we dont allow jobs to be sent to the printer remotely). You could perform input shaping to ensure faster and better quality prints by tracking the movement of the print head depending on the max fps of the camera. All that is very light weight and could comfortably be run on device or through cura. As long as you have access to the video stream I feel very confident a second/third year CS undergrad could write and debug that code in hours if not a day. If they couldn't I'd start asking questions. There are also endless open source and even github repos which implement something no doubt far more robust. That's what i mean by trivial (for a coder or anyone with any background in cv). I am genuinely disappointed that this has devolved into some bizarre youtube style argument. I hope you start taking feedback on board and catch up to the rest of the field again.

thank you, honestly this is a normal response from customer support. The responses I got before took a day or two to come and made me feel like I was in the youtube comments section. I mean the responses I got for this post ( ). I was trying to be constructive and basically got told, 'yeah they're noisy deal with it'. Just say: "I'm sorry that that is an issue for you. Printing speed and accuracy was found to be more of a concern for our customers so we choose the drivers and motors to optimise that. However we'll certainly take your comments on board and look at including in future updates or models." I'm a tech as well so PR isn't my strong suit but these are pretty fundamental skills or ways you treat and interact with customers. In terms of our problems, we've semi solved two by turning the bed temp up to 70 and putting new print cores in, the third one is still having problems but we'll work it out. Overall, just very disappointed at the lack of modern features like fast printing and service, I honestly hope you improve but I doubt I'll ever recommend an Ultimaker again.

The bed camera on most printers would normally do that (check the model looks like it should at ever stage of the build and do 'spagetti detection'). It's trivial to write a computer vision script to detect that (an undergrad could write one in a day or two) and the s5 has a bed camera but ultimaker haven't implemented it for some reason (unlike pretty much every other manufacturer). One of many aspects about ultimakers that I've found frustrating..

I had a similar problem hope you got a response in the end.

Hi no you can only print support materials like pva through the bb print core type as far as I understand. You can buy a replacement as 0.4mm print core for £300 at rs.com

If you do a keyword search and sort by time then you’ll find it. Makerbot support have contacted me anyway now (with a healthy week long delay). So I’ll debug it through them.

Here's the post I made about the printing problems. We've ordered a bambu x1 carbon to try out, it prints the same model in a quarter of the time has as good or better quality and only costs 1500 instead of 10-11k. Also you can talk to support. If we like it we'll just swap the um's for them. To fix the current s5's we'll get support through the reseller.

thank you that's very kind of you to offer but we paid 22k for these two printers. I've sent in a ticket and emails with photos and printer logs. For the cost we paid we're going to get a response. The fact that ultimaker have a marketting, pre-sales and sales department but no support department just says it all. Unless you're about to give them money they literally couldn't care less.. And it shows.. Worse printers for 5 times the price with no support..

We've always had good experiences with Ultimakers but we recently got three s5 pro bundles and within 3 months of using them two of them have malfunctioned and are now unusable. Since the second printer malfunctioned almost a week ago I've called, sent multiple emails, posted on the forums and submitted a support ticket. All I've gotten in response are some brief responses (offering no solutions) on the forums but no response or even acknowledgement of the emails, or support ticket. Other hardware and printer companies will at least send you an email saying they've received a ticket, email or call but we haven't even received that. How do we know that they've been received and are being looked at?.. We chose Ultimaker as it was marketed as a reliable and supported system. We have almost 200 MSc students, PhD's and researchers wanting to use the printers but we've had to tell that 2 of the 3 Ultimaker's are malfunctioning and Ultimaker hasn't been able to provide support. I understand Ultimaker's trying to capture more professional users but cutting costs and expecting customers to help each other through forums, youtube videos or word of mouth is not the experience you expect from that level of product. Instituting a more conventional customer service department with complaints, product feedback/improvement and a dedicated tech support team with a set number of hours for each purchase seems like the least you can do to protect and support your brand and promote confidence among your users. Hardware breaks, that's fine. But we chose Ultimaker because they seemed more likely to help us fix those problems and have less downtime then newer untested companies. If you cant provide that why why wouldn't we just choose a newer more innovative company. Note: I would normally send this to the complaints department along with most of my posts to product feedback but because you dont have those these posts are mixed in with all the other queries people have.

So you're saying if we want a printer which is quiet enough to work around then we should buy basically any other modern 3d printer. What about reliability (having printers that dont malfunction without error codes within 3 months of using them), how about having any sort of support that's focused on fixings the users problems (It's almost been a week and I haven't even received a message, email or call not even offering a solution but just acknowledging that someone is looking into the logs we've sent). I might sound angry and that's because I am. I really liked ultimakers when using the 2+ and 3 and even 5 r1. But over the last two months the lag, unreliability and incredible lack of any competent/professional support has completely removed that feeling. If you were proud of what you built you'd want to fix it or at least take the feedback on board instead of arguing that we should read the fine print to check you haven't cut corners to save £20 on new drivers.

Hi Dustin, ok thanks, I forgot this account was registered with a different email. I've updated it to match the support ticket.

They're marketed as high quality prosumer printers. If an s5 costs 8 times as much as a prusia you expect it to have at least all the basic features that a prusia does (including modern motor drivers and larger motors if needed). I have an £150 ender clone that is quieter overall than the ultimakers at work. I dont think being on par with an ender clone is too much to ask.

I still dont understand why a £11000 printer uses thumbscrews and a sprung bed. Or why they send out card and not levelling shims? I understood maybe 5-6 years ago but manually levelling a bed now is slow, is another variable to control with bed movement and leaves you looking through boxes looking for bits of card. I really expect more, if the capacitive sensor needs a redundant mechanism is needed (which it appears it does) then maybe having an additional mechanical or optical sensor is appropriate. But relying on you to eyeball distance then shove bits of card under the nozzle is something I'd expect from a £150 ender not a serious printer.

Argh ok so the tried calling them and they told me that they couldn't give me support over the phone and that I should email info@ultimaker.com. So I emailed them a few times with log files, photos and all the machine identifiers etc. and got no response. I'd be surprised if someone else hasn't had this problem before. If you add "if you're looking for support please follow this link to submit a ticket", or something similar as one of the options on the contact page then that'd save others from making the same mistake. Depending how the website is managed it should take a few minutes at most to add one more paragraph and a link.