I mentioned in a thread that my wife wants another pair of the umbrella brackets, to mount a 2nd umbrella to our deck railing. I ran into some issues: [LIST=1]
The 1st issue is the most bizarre. It was about 12 hours into the print of all 6 pieces (rear bracket, front bracket, 4 bolts) when, overnight, it suddenly stopped on top of one of the bolts. Everything was running (the printer is on a UPS), but nothing was happening. "Great", I thought, that's a bunch of wasted filament. The only difference between my normal printing and this one was that I copied the g-code file to the SD card and was printing from it, but I've printed from the SD card before without issue, so who knows.
I decided to go back to printing via USB from my old Microsoft Surface Pro, as I have been since early on in my testing/troubleshooting/calibrating phase.
I ran into a bit of an adhesion issue: not terrible, but annoying. One corner of the rear bracket, and 2 of the bolts, didn't adhere to the UHU stick as they do normally. I abandoned the print very early on. I applied a fresh layer of UHU and started again, but not until after I made some adjustments to Cura.
I have been concerned about the speed at which the bolts are printed, at least the initial layer. The heads of the bolts are knurled, which causes the hotend to be jerked back & forth pretty vigorously. I had also been curious about the "individual settings" button in the Cura Prepare window. I clicked on 1 of the bolts and then the button for the individual settings. In the search box I typed "initial" and was presented with a bunch of settings, all of them deselected. I put checkmarks into the [I]initial layer speed[/I] and [I]initial print speed[/I] right under it, then clicked Close. The window beside the initial settings button changed to show me the [I]initial layer[/I] and [I]print speeds[/I]. I changed the setting from the 15mm/sec I had been using, to 5mm/sec. I know, pretty slow, but I wanted to see what it would do.
I also changed the overall [I]initial layer speed[/I] from 15mm/sec to 10.
I started a new print. I was very pleased to see how much smoother the initial layer of the bolt heads went: 5mm/sec seems really good for them.
In addition to the [I]initial layer speed[/I] changes, I also modified the [I]infill[/I] settings, changing the rear & front brackets to 30% and the bolts to 90%.
[/LIST] I made another change as well. Since I'm using a tablet to control the print job, I decided I could also have it give me remote video access, to monitor the print job.
I tried using the built in camera as the video source but it was too awkward trying to place the tablet in a position where it could get a decent shot of the printbed. So I grabbed my little 720p Microsoft Lifecam and plugged it into the USB hub I have connected to the Surface. The default Windows camera app didn't want to find the Lifecam, so I installed Open Broadcaster Studio. It was able to find the Lifecam, which is now mounted comfortably to the front 2020 rail of the printer:
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We’ll see how this print goes.