Octolapse - Ultimaker 2+

[marrincia 0]

Hello everyone,

 

I have recently started to use Octoprint on my ultimaker 2+ and I really love it.

 

I have also like a lot the timelapse that is possible to create with the Octolapse plugin specially yhe famous one without head movement!

Unfortunately I haven't found anyone sharing setting for the Ultimaker 2+ (open firmware) I was wondering if anyone had experience yet!

 

Many thanks in advance!

 

Emaunuele

[orgol 0]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm in the same state. 

Many thanks in advance!

[Julian2801 1]

Could you give me some more information about what Octolapse does? Is it slicing the STL and in the GCode the head moves to the top left position after every finished layer and then the camera takes a picture? Or do you have to give Octolapse the sliced GCode and then it is being processed?

[conny_g 251]

4 hours ago, Julian2801 said:

Could you give me some more information about what Octolapse does? Is it slicing the STL and in the GCode the head moves to the top left position after every finished layer and then the camera takes a picture? Or do you have to give Octolapse the sliced GCode and then it is being processed?

 

Octolapse is a Octoprint plugin that hooks into the „gcode stream“ of octoprint and modifies it slightly to move the head to a certain position between layers to take the picture.

 

[conny_g 251]

After reading this post and what OctoLapse does I liked it so much that I had put it on the „want to try some day“ project list.

Bought a nice HD webcam for that and gave it a try yesterday.

Now printing an Eiffel Tower that I don’t need, but it just looks good in time lapse ?

 

To get Octolapse to run was not much effort, most importantly it needs some settings for the printer profile. I simply renamed one for Marlin into UM2 and gave it parameters to the best of my knowledge.

 

Now there is some „position tracking“ error from Octolapse int the beginning, but it seems to work anyway as far as I can tell from a video created from a 20mins test piece.

 

And in the serial connection log I find error messages about „avoided cold extrusion“ or something. It seems Octolapse wants to do retractions when it places the head for the shot, but uses the wrong command for this. For now it seems to work ok without retraction, but I haven’t looked at the print yet, maybe it’s full of ugly blobs.

 

So that’s the two issues to resolve for now, the position thing and the retraction. Will look into that the next days.

 

[conny_g 251]

First try:

 

A few issues:

• The print didn't work out really well, but I didn't care about the parameters too much...
• And the camera resolution is set to 640x480 by OctoPrint resp. OctoPi by default I disovered, though the camera is a full HD one. You set it in /boot/octoprint.txt, took me a while to find that place.
• And then at some point the extrusion stopped and the nozzle cooled down, that I need to research. I think that's an issue of the Octolapse G-Code mods and side-effects if not parameterized correctly.

Edited September 30, 2018 by conny_g

[conny_g 251]

I think I found the reason for the extrusion stopping.

Rarely the image capture seems to take 5 seconds, which - according to some research - could actually be a timeout value of the image capturing.

And if that happens it seems that the printer is stopping the extruder heating as there are no new commands coming.

Analyzing the Octolapse log file revealed that there seems to be a coincidence of this timeout and the target temperature of the extruder going to zero, which later results in these „cold extrusion prevented“ messages by the printer, once the actual temperature of the printer gets below 170 C.

 

Now I need to find out why the image capture rarely produces a timeout...

 

[conny_g 251]

That seems to be the core of the issue:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=35689

 

The video capture runs into a bandwidth issue resulting in a timeout.
Will try these settings and report.

Update:
When running these command I get "device busy", now trying the .conf variant:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25619309/how-do-i-enable-the-uvc-quirk-fix-bandwidth-quirk-in-linux-uvc-driver

Update 2:
That parameter did not help, timeout still happening.

Update 3:
It seems the uvcvideo driver is dying. Even if I just open the camera stream in a browser it dies / blacks out after a few minutes. That's surely the issue. Now to be found out why that happens. The sys log shows:
 

Quote

kernel: [ 5384.075294] uvcvideo: Non-zero status (-5) in status completion handler.

Update 4:
Finding discussions that point towards the problem disappearing in newer kernels. I am working on upgrading the Raspbian version now.

 

Update 5:
Upgrade Raspbian to the latest (Stretch) and it still happens.

Edited October 2, 2018 by conny_g

[morenu 0]

Conny_g

 

I am working on this now, any chance you have any updates or suggestions?

[conny_g 251]

2 hours ago, morenu said:

Conny_g

 

I am working on this now, any chance you have any updates or suggestions?

 

No suggestions needed. The first setup for UM2 is not special in any way.

And the camera issue (capture timing out) is not related to Octolapse, it’s something between camera driver and the image capturing (kernel?) framework.

 

[Nickschwartz11 0]

Hi after a while of researching and testing values I was able to get very successful prints and octolapses with this configuration. I am using a Ultimaker 2+. Please let me know if there is anything wrong about my configuration.

 

[gr5 2,266]

print speeds of 1 to 6mm per second seem much too slow for a UM2+.  I would never recommend going below 20mm/sec except for maybe ninjaflex.  Most people consider 20mm/sec slow but it's a good speed that has very high quality results.  Also having 6 different speeds for infill, shell, etc is a bad idea as you get over/underextrusion on speed changes.  So make all those printing speeds 30mm/sec or so.

 

[Nickschwartz11 0]

17 hours ago, gr5 said:

print speeds of 1 to 6mm per second seem much too slow for a UM2+.  I would never recommend going below 20mm/sec except for maybe ninjaflex.  Most people consider 20mm/sec slow but it's a good speed that has very high quality results.  Also having 6 different speeds for infill, shell, etc is a bad idea as you get over/underextrusion on speed changes.  So make all those printing speeds 30mm/sec or so.

 

Hello, I may be wrong but I think the speed is only for the octolapse and it does not effect the actual print speed because i just upload the gcode from cura. Also when printing everything seemed normal and the right speed. I am going to change it just in case but so far I have had no problems. Also I had it like that because it was the default for some reason. Everything I adjusted changed the octolapse added gcode and not the print like the retraction. Anyways thank you so much for the advice.

[gr5 2,266]

oh.  Okay.  I've never used octolapse so I'm not sure how it works.  Maybe it overwrites the speeds.  I don't know.

[jpledger13 0]

Conny, what camera are you using? The picture is excellent!