Use custom Materials on Material-Station with Ultimaker S5

[flyinggorilla 8]

Hi all! while the material station is great, the S5 firmware 5.4.27.20191212 is seriously flawed to not allow selection of the color for a 3rd party material that doesnt have the NFC based color info. Not even the official partner material that is available on Ultimaker marketplace like FormFutura ApolloX can be used out-of-the box with material-station due to this lack of color selection problem.

 

The Problem: firmware does not show color variants of materials, despite providing a unique GUID

   <name>

      <brand>FormFutura</brand>

      <material>ApolloX</material>

      <color>black</color>

      <label>ApolloX BLACK</label>

    </name>

    <GUID>c99377f5-fbb4-4c3b-8f91-7a1d2c32e44f</GUID>

 

   <name>

      <brand>FormFutura</brand>

      <material>ApolloX</material>

      <color>red</color>

      <label>ApolloX RED</label>

    </name>

    <GUID>1403a419-2a22-4d6c-ad80-3ea3252d2496</GUID>

 

so the above leads in the S5 printer display to only showing one line of "ApolloX black" and the red AppolloX cannot be selected. But selection is mandatory to allow assigning same materials with different colors to different bays of the material station.

 

The Workaround: postfix material with color information

 

   <name>

      <brand>FormFutura</brand>

      <material>ApolloX BLACK</material>

      <color>black</color>

      <label>ApolloX BLACK</label>

    </name>

    <GUID>c99377f5-fbb4-4c3b-8f91-7a1d2c32e44f</GUID>

 

    <name>

      <brand>FormFutura</brand>

      <material>ApolloX RED</material>

      <color>red</color>

      <label>ApolloX RED</label>

    </name>

    <GUID>1403a419-2a22-4d6c-ad80-3ea3252d2496</GUID>

 

while this this workaround at least allows to use the material-station with by hand edited materials (curas 4.4.1 duplicate function leaves a mess, truncates data, ...) it provides suboptimal material management. But this reveals another annoying item, that the color is not shown duplicated!! 

 

 

The Request: display color variants for same material types with unique guids

so if for multiple materials <material> is the same, but <color> and <guid> are unique, then display the color variants in the S5 display so it can be assigned to the material stations bay.

 

 

 

 

Thanks,

FG

 

p.s. i have my material profiles up here https://github.com/flyinggorilla/ultimaker-s5 

[kennybuntinx 2]

I bought it today and I am quite disappointed with the selection of materials . All is well when you use Ultimaker material with nfc chip .. I think it is crap that you cannot select and upload your own profiles .

 

Now I tried the above procedure but my profiles  don't show up 

 

Any tips or advise . I change the guid and everything ... can't seem to end up on my material station..

 

Kenny

[flyinggorilla 8]

2 hours ago, kennybuntinx said:

I bought it today and I am quite disappointed with the selection of materials . All is well when you use Ultimaker material with nfc chip .. I think it is crap that you cannot select and upload your own profiles .

 

Now I tried the above procedure but my profiles  don't show up 

 

Any tips or advise . I change the guid and everything ... can't seem to end up on my material station..

 

Kenny

Hi Kenny,

 

I bought an S3 in addition to my S5 Bundle and wondered why my profiles wouldnt show up on the S3. Reason was that i forgot to update the machine data for S3 compatibility. So as a first idea for you, i would check the machine settings of your profile and see whether it properly states identification for S5.

 

  <machine_identifier manufacturer="Ultimaker B.V." product="Ultimaker S5" />

 

If that doesnt work, then first try my Apollo X i have on github, upload and see whether that shows up. From there you can update your custom material using a working profile.

 

Did you import the profile into cura properly? Cura "should" upload the imported profile to Ultimaker S5 when connected. However, as i never know for sure, I also use my python tool (also in github folder) to upload the material directly to the printer. that makes it also much easer to update the material definition that resides on the printer. 

 

hope that helps a bit.

fg

[kennybuntinx 2]

Hi @flyinggorilla 

 

Thx for the tips. I finally figured it out and guess what - I am an IT person , imagine that someone tries to do this with no programming background .

 

I personally think after spending 7.5K on a printer , this should have been much simpler and come with the UI of Cura.

 

/Kenny 

[Vaomec 1]

It would be interesting to be able to load custom materials from Cura for a good optimization of the equipment. Will it be possible in the future?

[tabiznet 3]

🤷‍♂️ you people are lucky the prints come out so good because holy hell every time I need to do something that's easy with literally any other vendor its a fight with this machine. Please fix this!