Material settings for Ultimaker are trolling me.

[patricsgamma]

Cura Version

5.8.1

Operating System

Osx

Printer

Ultimaker 3

Reproduction steps

Material management in Cura is painful

Material management in Cura is a piece of frustration and I don't get the documentation.

Issue nr. 1, Material setup and sync:

So I have a custom ABS material that is set to print at 265°C

Your documentation states that I should sync this Material with my Ultimaker for it, to make it selectable. According following documentation: https://support.makerbot.com/s/article/1667412729968

Now the thing is, none of these workflows are available to me and I can't see where any of the screenshotted Wizzards would be located in my Cura, I can't seam to find any of those menus... Great documentation 💩

This guide shows a Sync button that I just don't have, nice and helpful again. https://support.makerbot.com/s/article/1667337567839

So issue number one is, I can't get my Material onto my Ultimaker 3 and I have no clue how to solve it. Either fix the software or the documentation...

Issue nr. 2, Print settings

Values are not even consistent within Cura

When I go to Print settings for a part I want to print, it shows following.

The print settings show now a default of 250°C when my Custom material is selected. Which makes no sense... Generic ABS is set to 230° and my Custom one to 265°, where the 250 default is coming from is beyond my comprehension. But of course I like to setup a Material, fail in sending it to my printer and then having to still configure it custom wise for every print, because why not.

As you can definitely read between the lines I'm currently not very tolerant towards anymore un-comprehensive guides and weird magic in software. So pls explain me like I'm 5 how to be able to use my material, KKTHX

Actual results

🦄 💩 Read above

Expected results

My material is available on my Ultimaker 3 and I can use it in print settings with configured values.

Add your .zip and screenshots here ⬇️

The print just fails as my nozzle gets clogged when loading my material... likely due to the to low temperatures. So there is no print file.

[GregValiant]

Thanks for the report. I'm not an Ultimaker guy but I played with this a bit. I can't get it to work either. It appears that "Default Print Temperature" never really changes it's value from whatever the "base material" is. If I "Duplicate" a material then I am stuck with Default Print Temperature of the original material. If I create a new material, then the problem seems to go away.

If you create a custom setting Profile and include the temperatures you want to use within it, then those temperatures will be used. The Cura team will take a look.

[HellAholic]

I understand that getting stuck is frustrating but you're trying to follow documentation for S line printers on an Ultimaker 3, which is not gonna work due to the differences between the products. If you contact the Ultimaker support, they can guide you to the correct documentation for the Ultimaker 3 printers. As far as I know the printer went open source completely around 7 years ago so there should be detailed documentation available.

Your second issue is coming from trying to use the 0.1 Fine quality definition on the printer with a custom material without modifying or introducing the accompanying quality definition. You can create a custom profile as Greg suggested to get around the issue. The source of what you're experiencing is the quality definitions for the printer. The profiles are tuned for ABS materials as shown below, so at 0.1mm layer height, the print temperature will be material temperature -15.

[patricsgamma]

Ok the material default behavior was a good hint, thank you 🙏 . As recommended in the documentation, I did not create a material from scratch but used the ABS default as a base, then tweeked the print and bed temperatures.

I still can't figure out why I can't export a material setting out of Cura and bring it to my Ultimaker 3. My Cura doesn't show any of the menus to export, no matter over Digital Factory and network or USB. (So I miss to see how the Ultimaker version affects this)

Where does the magic trick to solve this, anyone any knowledge on this?

[HellAholic]

The UM3 does not have the functionality to sync materials via USB or through the Digital factory. You can only sync materials via network/IP, for that you need to add the printer to Cura by IP. As soon as the printer is added, an automatic syncing starts and you can see a message pop up on the screen saying "Sending materials to the printer".

[patricsgamma]

The documentation I mentioned above is talking about syncing materials through Digital Factory. My printer is connected by network and I can access a Webpage called Digital Factory on my local network, which I assume the guide is talking about when talking about Digital Factory. So this step has happened.

Now creating new materials in Cura or Importing materials from following guide does in no way give me any button or menu option to "sync material" and its also not happening automatically.

So my conclusion, as cynical it currently can be is: Nothing that is described in these guides is worth the 0.000x$ storage space they are saved on, as they just exist to confuse people that try to follow them.

[patricsgamma]

Ok it seams I have to dig into this forum thread, only skimmed it for now, but its exactly about local network update of a UM3.

So follow up question, how do I know if a material is compatible with UM3?

[HellAholic]

As mentioned, I understand your frustration the first time, but you continue to speak in a demanding tone and don't realize that you're in a issue section of github for a slicer software and not a support page for printers that are no longer supported. You seem to not understand there is a difference between a Ultimaker 3 and Ultimaker S3/S5/S7 and Factor 4 Following the wrong guides, is on you. There are documentations for connecting to the printer through API and Network, where they are, I cannot be bothered to point you towards due to your tone and responses. Your printer does not have the option to sync via USB or through Cloud (digital factory). Cura cannot help you in that regard. If you have any issues, contact the UM support for your printer and request.

[patricsgamma]

My tone is not that I want to annoy anyone, but mostly an effect of being annoyed. So Thanks for your help, as I have to admit before my first post, I didn't realize the printer generation part of the guide.

Still I miss to see the point where CURA as the software behaves interface wise differently on my printer then on others like S series printers. So while I agree that my printer is not the newest and this is not a support forum, the slicer software is not making it clear to me what options are available, which I interpret as part of UX of this software.

So it is for example for me unclear where 1) Sync over USB, 2) Sync over local network and 3) Sync over Digital Factory are handled in Cura. As I understand now, only sync over local network is available to me, as I interpret out of above mentioned forum post. Yet I have to find out anything about how this works.

[HellAholic]

After you've created the material, if it has not been synced with the printer automatically, you can trigger it by manually re-connecting to the printer, go to Preferences > Configure Cura > Printers > Select and activate your printer > Click on Connect via Network > press Refresh > And press Connect This works for All of the networked UM printers.

If you're connected to the printer, you get a message in the Cura after it detects a material is not available on the printer, and it syncs your material automatically. (means you have to wait 5-10 seconds in some cases)

You can validate the material has been uploaded using the Ultimaker API available on Ultimaker 3 https://support.makerbot.com/s/article/1667412427787 which contains basic steps to use REST API for Ultimaker 3D printers. To access this:

• Open a browser
• Type in the printer IP address on the network followed by /docs/api : http://[printer_ip_here]/docs/api -> for a printer at 192.168.1.200 it would be http://192.168.1.200/docs/api

After connecting to the printer API, you can press Expand Operations on the Materials, which allows you to access the Get /materials

If you click on Try it out, it will retrieve all the materials that you have available on the printer

Search for the name of your material and see if it is there. Here I added a material called GBL to the printer so I see it is there: And I used the method I described above to sync it with the printer.

You can follow a similar process to update your material .xml file directly using the API, but it requires more steps. The steps are described at the top of the page.

If you see the button Sync with printer in preferences/materials, then it means you have the option to sync via USB or through Digital factory. If the button is not present, it means the printer does not support this function.

Being frustrated happens but you also need to consider there is another person on the other end which is not obligated to help you but is trying to resolve your specific issue. So calling things Shit or worthless is not a welcoming sight as a response.

[patricsgamma]

The Ultimaker has OpenApi / swagger built in and I can edit materials with crud operations, now we are starting to talk my love language ❤️

I can get and send my printer materials with curl, If I'd find out what the signature part is.

@HellAholic you just turned my hero for the day, thank you!

[HellAholic]

Top of the page contains the explanation to get the authentication. Similar question here: https://community.ultimaker.com/topic/30716-ultimaker-api-add-new-material/

Not directly related but you need to use the correct curl syntax for the Digest Authentication, if you're getting an unauthorized response with the correct authentication data https://community.ultimaker.com/topic/19305-um3-api-digest-with-curl/