Ultra One Bed Leveling Procedure
Posted: Tue May 26, 2020 5:35 pm
I have discussed much of this with MakerGear support, but I have been using the Ultra One for some time now at my office, and I wanted to provide some feedback regarding the Ultra One user workflow, and also see if there are any other Ultra One user's who echo this sentiment.
Makergear provides an interactive maintenance utility for bed leveling and z-height adjustment. It seems the intent is to make it easier for newer users to perform this process. However, there is some overhead associated with this. There are options for hot or cold z-height adjustment procedures. MakerGear provides 2 options for plastic, and no way to adjust the temperature. We have a problem with this because we don't want to swap in PLA every time we want to adjust the z-height. Also, the ABS option sets the hotend to 265 C, which is wayyy to hot for our ABS, which recommends 210-240C. What if I want to hot calibrate with Polycarbonate? I would prefer the simplicity of a temperature setting, rather than plastic selection. Also, I have tested this many times, the hot offset process does not actually seem to make any adjustment. Makergear provides an "advanced" option, which lets the user select .01, .02, or .04, so I know what results I should expect. If instead you choose to use the cold offset process it is much simpler. Unfortunately, if you select the cold offset process, the machine forces you to wait until the machine has cooled as a safety feature. It's a big heavy machine, so of course this takes a long time. Imagine you start a print, it fails, you go to z-height adjust, wait 20 minutes to cool, print again, it fails... this can wind up taking a very long time.
Now the mesh leveling. The mesh leveling process runs with every print (is it G28?). If you are troubleshooting the printer, or slicer, and you have to stop and start the printer a bunch of times, waiting for the machine to do mesh leveling every time can be very time consuming. I would prefer to have mesh leveling be a maintenance step, where periodically, a user runs mesh leveling alone, rather than run every print.
I'd like to know what MakerGear thinks about either of these suggestions. We've had a lot of employees get frustrated with the amount of time it takes to set up the printer, and I had to go through all of these processes myself in order to understand the major pain points.
Makergear provides an interactive maintenance utility for bed leveling and z-height adjustment. It seems the intent is to make it easier for newer users to perform this process. However, there is some overhead associated with this. There are options for hot or cold z-height adjustment procedures. MakerGear provides 2 options for plastic, and no way to adjust the temperature. We have a problem with this because we don't want to swap in PLA every time we want to adjust the z-height. Also, the ABS option sets the hotend to 265 C, which is wayyy to hot for our ABS, which recommends 210-240C. What if I want to hot calibrate with Polycarbonate? I would prefer the simplicity of a temperature setting, rather than plastic selection. Also, I have tested this many times, the hot offset process does not actually seem to make any adjustment. Makergear provides an "advanced" option, which lets the user select .01, .02, or .04, so I know what results I should expect. If instead you choose to use the cold offset process it is much simpler. Unfortunately, if you select the cold offset process, the machine forces you to wait until the machine has cooled as a safety feature. It's a big heavy machine, so of course this takes a long time. Imagine you start a print, it fails, you go to z-height adjust, wait 20 minutes to cool, print again, it fails... this can wind up taking a very long time.
Now the mesh leveling. The mesh leveling process runs with every print (is it G28?). If you are troubleshooting the printer, or slicer, and you have to stop and start the printer a bunch of times, waiting for the machine to do mesh leveling every time can be very time consuming. I would prefer to have mesh leveling be a maintenance step, where periodically, a user runs mesh leveling alone, rather than run every print.
I'd like to know what MakerGear thinks about either of these suggestions. We've had a lot of employees get frustrated with the amount of time it takes to set up the printer, and I had to go through all of these processes myself in order to understand the major pain points.