Cura 14,04, Anet A8 infill or file loading

[thuffner3 0]

Hello All,

Noob here,

I just bought an Anet A8, with it was Cura 14.04.

Ok, because I'm running and old Dell D620 laptop.

Anyway the images attached should show the issue.

no top or bottom tool paths.

TIA

Neil

[ahoeben 1,948]

That’s a 5 year old vrrsion of Cura you have there. It is no longer supported here. If it is still distributed by a printer manufacturer, please ask them for support.

 

For future reference, if you want people to help you then try making it easy for them. Don’t make people hunt for problems in bad photos of your screen; Your pictures are NOT self-explanatory. 

[thuffner3 0]

Good morning Mr Ambassador,

What a truly warm welcome.

Had you read much further than the title of my post, you'd have found that the last line indicated the problem I was having.

"no top or bottom tool path"

 

No thanks to you. I may or may not be back to this Forum.

I certainly hope your not a Moderator. Because If I owned the board you would not enjoy another second in your position.

Again thanks for the warm welcome and enjoy your day sir.

 

Neil

[Smithy 1,144]

I don't understand why you're complaining, it was just a hint that your Cura version is 5 years old and no longer supported. 

 

Unfortunately, there are always people who buy a Chinese printer, get a very old software there and then expect an excellent support here in the forum, because they don't get it in China from the manufacturer.

 

But even if you won't believe it, we give this support here gladly and often, no matter which printer. But as so often in life it depends on the way you behave.

 

30 minutes ago, thuffner3 said:

I may or may not be back to this Forum.

It's up to you, but I think we'll live with your decision.

 

Have a nice day!

[nallath 1,120]

42 minutes ago, thuffner3 said:

Because If I owned the board you would not enjoy another second in your position.

Good thing you're not the owner I guess 😉

 

Anyway, the information you provided is not nearly enough to actually debug the issue. The pictures are just to vague to make anything out of it and it's from a version of Cura that is not provided by Ultimaker and even if it was, it stopped being supported for 4 years or so. So as frustrating as the message is, you will need to contact Anet if you want help with your issue.

 

[ahoeben 1,948]

1 hour ago, thuffner3 said:

"no top or bottom tool path"

 

That is not what is shown in the images though. The yellow top shown in the first and second image - small as they both are - show that there is a top. I cannot see the bottom in the provided images.

[thuffner3 0]

1st image, no red toolpath

2nd image, you can see thru red toolpath. no actual model bottom or red toolpath.

3rd image, Actual model without toolpaths.

 

 

[gr5 2,167]

1) Please check your model in xray view.  cura 14.X should have had an xray view.  Make sure there are no read areas - only blue/white.

 

2) There is a vertical slider somewhere in the layer view photos you posted.  You can use ctrl+up arrow  (and down arrow) to scroll through them or use the mouse.  If you scroll do the bottom layer it would show us a lot more.

 

If you have to use a cell phone to image your computer screen, at least get closer - it's really hard to see what's going on.

 

Better to use a screen shot tool.  what operating system do you have? There should be built in screen shot utilities in your operating system.

 

Anyway I suspect there is a problem with your model.  Did you design this cube?  Did you design it hollow on purpose (in other words if you add up all the square surfaces, is it exactly 6 (a solid cube) or is it exactly 12 (a cube inside a cube )?

 

If you designed the cube hollow on purpose - it's easier to design it solid and make it hollow using settings in cura.  And you will get more accurate and perfect results this second way.

 

 

[thuffner3 0]

I used Rhino 3D 3.0 another out dated piece.

The cube was selected from the solids as a 25.4 mm insert, then exported out as an stl file.

 

Sorry guys I'm 56, and everything up till now has and usually does exactly what I want.

Darn it I don't to upgrade any more.

I don't do hardcore gaming anymore so a top notch state of the art rig I don't need

Rhino 3D, Auotcad 11, and some older version of Solidworks along with any number of other softwares and internet windows all open at once do just fine.

Anyway

[johnse 31]

The last version of Cura in the same generation as the version you got from ANet is 15.04.06. I’ll link to another post at the end that has a link to it.

 

I can understand your reluctance to upgrade stuff that is working for you, but considering you just installed Cura, you might want to give the later version a try. After the 15.X generation, they started with new versioning that began with 2.X and is now at 4.3 with 4.4 in beta.

 

As for your “no top” issue, I don’t see that. The red lines indicate “shell” and only apply to the horizontal edges. The top surface is always yellow.

Doing a google search for “ANet A8 with Cura 4” will bring up lots of info on using your printer with the later versions of Cura.

 

 

[thuffner3 0]

Hey guys I appreciate your efforts.

My current laptop is running XP and it doesn't seem to like Cura 4.4

It does run Cura 14.xx AND cURA 15.xx

As far as completed toolpaths.

So far everything that was to have a finished top showed the red toolpath.

I'll have to log in from my laptop to recreate the scene.

 

[gr5 2,167]

Oh!  So maybe you are misinterpreting the colors!

 

So red, yellow, green in cura indicate areas of the toolpath that will be printed.  Those are "extruding moves".  The blue lines are non-extruding moves.

 

So I think your cube will print just fine as is.

 

Cura 14.X and 15.X are excellent and I think you will find they do a good job.  I do recommend that absolute latest as posted above but that's not critical.  I also recommend not uninstalling any existing versions as with 14.X and 15.X you can install as many as you want side-by-side and they don't interfere with each other.

 

More about the coloring:

 

To understand the coloring and to understand some of the features of cura, it's important to understand that cura slices your model into many slices (yes you know that) and then it looks at each slice *by itself* ignoring what's above and below (mostly - there's some flags added to a slice telling it if there is something above or below the current slice and other things).

 

Then it thinks of the slice as printing a bunch of islands.  Your cube has only one island: a square.  The outer most path is very important as it's visible.  Some people want to print that first or last.  That's one color.  The next few paths inward are also important - those get a second color.  Infill gets yellow.  Then if a layer is a "top" or "bottom" layer (there can be more than one "top" layer if you specify the top is such and such layers thick) also gets yellow.

 

You haven't gotten to support layers yet.  That's another color I believe.

 

Non extruding moves get blue and if it includes a retraction at the start it shows a short vertical line at the start of the move to indicate where it retracts - this will be important to you as you are debugging stringing some day.

 

[gr5 2,167]

By the way - you really really need to learn about the vertical slider I mentioned in an earlier post.  If you had spotted that then this entire topic would have been moot.

[gr5 2,167]

Oh also - you can zoom in with scroll wheel or if you don't have one there is a keyboard method (I forget, it's been a while) and you can hold down I think both left and right mouse buttons and drag to scroll.

 

Right click drag orbits around.  Shift+right click pans.

 

Doing that lets you see clearly that your cube has a top and with the slider you can see it has a bottom as well.