Dual Extrusion With Single Head and Cura Dual Extruder Firmware

[michelide 4]

Hi All,

 

I've been working on getting my Ultimaker 2 to work with dual extruders on a single print head and have been running into some issues. I have the dual olsen blocks on the print head and am eager to try them out. I did some research and some trial and error to get where I am but was wondering if anyone could save me some time because it seems that the next step would take a lot of trial and error without knowing the possibility of getting it to work.

 

1.) I have Cura 3.4.1 and realized that I could not auto update the firmware to the newest firmware from 15.04ish. I had to download several versions of cura to incrementally auto update the firmware. When I tried to skip from 15.04ish to 3.4.1 cura would freeze and not update the firmware. Incrementally I was able to go from 15.04 to 2.7 to 3.4.1

 

2.) From 1.) I have deduced that somewhere along the way Cura stopped updating the Dual Extrusion *.hex flie marlinultimaker2-dual.hex even though it still comes with cura 3.4.1 and this appears to be why when I try to update the firmware with the hex file it will not (it gets stuck and the updater progress freezes but does not freeze the program).

 

3.) I have done some additional searching and cannot find anywhere that notes the last version of cura that is able to update the firmware with the marlinultimaker2-dual.hex

 

4.) Everything else with cura seems to be good to go as I setup a custom printer with dual extruders and as soon as I can get the firmware uploaded to the machine I should be able to finalize the alignment measurements that I made between the extruders.

 

Could anyone give me some advice with the firmware uploading and cura version I need to update the printer or a link to an alternate hex that I can try to install?

 

Best Regards,

Dean

Edited September 6, 2018 by michelide

[tinkergnome 926]

2 hours ago, michelide said:

seems to be good to go as I setup a custom printer with dual extruders and as soon as I can get the firmware uploaded to the machine

 

You can still use legacy Cura (15.04) to upload the firmware. Choose "Install custom firmware..." and select a *.hex file from wherever you want. You could even use "avrdude" from the command line, the Arduino (and Marlin firmware) doesn't depend on Cura.

[michelide 4]

15.04.6 was able to upload the firmware that 3.4.1 could not. Thanks tinkergnome! I wonder if adopters of the UM3,4,5 have the same issue when they go to Dual Extruders.

[ahoeben 1,886]

UM3 and UM S5 printers have dual extrusion out of the box, so they don’t need to be modified. 

[michelide 4]

tinkergnome did you ever resolve the feeder motor direction between the old feeder and new feeders? I found a previous post that you made that has the difference in feedrate between the two feeders.

 

 

[michelide 4]

I may have resolved my own issue with feeder direction if this post is correct and I can toggle the direction of each feeder individually. This post was tough to find.

 

 

[michelide 4]

Fixed

Edited September 7, 2018 by michelide

[michelide 4]

Fixed

[michelide 4]

The issue that I now have is that in between using different extruders the printer moves towards the front left to the wall. I have to try the other version of the firmware "2"+ instead of "dual".

[tinkergnome 926]

5 hours ago, michelide said:

The issue that I now have is that in between using different extruders the printer moves towards the front left to the wall. I have to try the other version of the firmware "2"+ instead of "dual".

 

That's more likely related to the gcode than to the firmware. Have you checked the gcode file for moves to x/y = 0?

Which slicer do you use?

[michelide 4]

Hi tinkergnome,

 

I am using Cura 3.4.1 with custom FDM printer with Marlin G Code (I also tried ultimaker 2 gcode with same result).

 

I did not previously check the file but just did by find *X0*, then find *Y0* in notepad. It doesn't appear to have any. The file is also attached here (Block Alignment 4.gcode) and an image of the file.

 

The start and end GCode that was placed in the file was default in cura 3.4.1. It wasn't something that I placed there.

Block Alignment 4.gcode