Anyone Happy w/ S5 ProBundle/ Material Station + Air Manager

[Deeps 0]

So I just ordered my Material Station and Air Manager the other day. Hasn't come yet. 

Was bored tonight and was reading through the forum and there's a lot of unhappy people who seem to have had nothing but trouble with the combination. 

The purpose of the post is to make me feel better about my purchase and not cancel my order before it even gets here so I don't have to deal with setting it up and shipping it back. 

IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE WHO'S HAPPY WITH THEIR PROBUNDLE? 

I'd like to hear from you and briefly about your expereince. What you're printing, how much and how hard the setup was, any hits in terms of reliability? 

I've already struggled with the random PVA S5 filament sensor errors and had plenty of failed prints on an expensive machine touted to be the pinnacle of FDM reliability and ease of use. I don't know if I have the time or patience to compound those errors with a ProBundle that the forum would suggest is not fully baked (no offense Ultimaker). 

 

Come on guys, help me rationalize my big purchase further down the rabbit hole of Ultimaker products. 

[SandervG 1,522]

Hi @Deeps, thank you for your message and congratulations on your purchase of the Material Station and Air Manager. 

Let me guarantee you that there are plenty of people who are more than happy with the Pro Bundle, or its individual components. I think it is important to see posts on our forum in the correct perspective, where it is very often someone who needs help and rarely anyone just posting how happy they are, period. 

This explains why you might feel there is such imbalance between praising and troubleshooting posts. It also means that there are people with an Ultimaker Pro Bundle who are having some kind of issue. Which is true, but I think this is similar to any product out there. And what I personally like is that there is a platform like this where you can consult with other product experts and you can hear from product experts from Ultimaker directly. No one is left in the dark. If you have a problem, we all do our utmost best to help.

 

When are you expecting to receive your Pro Bundle?  

 

 

 

 

[Deeps 0]

Thanks for the feedback. The forums can be quite polarizing at times. I think one of the issues is the ProBundle targets a very specific market and therefore there don't seem to be that many out there. I wish more happy people would take to youtube or reddit to describe their success. Perhaps Ultimaker could foster more pro-sumers to throw up some youtube videos of how they are using the Pro bundle and how it's helped them increase productivity and get them on the channel. 

 

Bundle hasn't shipped yet and with the COVID stuff effecting times it's a bit unclear. Hoping it shows up next week sometime.

 

[arthurmsarthur 0]

Just wanted to add that I did have some major failures on large prints due to misconnection between Pro Bundle components, especially compared to my regular S5 who never presented this errors. To give Ultimaker some credit, some of the material change errors I was experience in the beginning seems to be fixed after a firmware update, but new errors keeps coming, as a matter of fact, this was a failed print from this morning after almost 3 days of printing time, the printer claimed ER80 (Air Manager not found):
 

[Deeps 0]

Well I'm sure that's supremely frustrating!

Has ultimaker had any creative answers to the air manager not found error? I've seen multiple people on the forum losing big prints due to this. 

 

[arthurmsarthur 0]

1 hour ago, Deeps said:

Well I'm sure that's supremely frustrating!

Has ultimaker had any creative answers to the air manager not found error? I've seen multiple people on the forum losing big prints due to this. 

 

As this happened this morning I just ended a support chat with them. Since my printer is under warranty they will send a replacement cable to see if it fixes the problem. 
I am assuming you saw people talking about the same error through the following:

I will keep you posted as it goes.

[SandervG 1,522]

Hello, thank you for your input! 

@arthurmsarthur, that error is shown when the cable through which the S5 and Air Manager communicate gets lose during operations. When the Ultimaker loses connection to the Air Manager during a print, it doesn't know whether it is still installed or not. Because of the enclosing nature of an Air Manager it can potentially trap in sufficient heat to cause problems for some internal components in the build volume. That is why it aborts the print, for safety. So if the ER80 error message was shown to you I would recommend to check the connection to the Air Manager. 'Unfortunately', it doesn't get more creative than that. If you are 100% sure it is secure and it continues to occur please raise a support ticket in our system. Like when you suspect the cable might be defective. Happy to hear support was able to sort it out together with you! 

 

@Deeps, as I explained above it is for good reasons that the print gets aborted. Hopefully your Pro Bundle will arrive in time. Let us know if you have any further questions!  

[scottmicrochip 0]

We've had a an S5 with the Air Manager and Material station for a while now and have to say it has been great, the material station makes it really easy to do large prints that require more than one roll of filament. I've had a few errors pop up but they can usually be solved by rebooting the S5. So overall pretty happy!

[Deeps 0]

Scott, thanks for the reply. Great to hear it!