New Matter updates

[NewMatter]

Hi Feign,

If no Wi-Fi is available, the desktop app may be used to manually upload g-code via USB to your MOD-t. Our Customer Support team will have a guide on how to configure Cura to make g-code that will work on the MOD-t very shortly. Since you are what we would consider a power user and you may want to run your printer off-line, please contact customer support so they can help you get your MOD-t up and running with the latest firmware and software.

With regard to stopping a job: Pressing the front panel button while printing will pause the print job and move the carriage up. This process can be used when a job has failed for some reason before unplugging and plugging back in.

The accelerations are handled by the firmware. We plan to quickly improve and revise the firmware to make the accelerations more consistent.

Thank you for your support and your continued patience! We sincerely appreciate it.

[curious aardvark]

good to see prompt responses.

I'm not sure that wanting to be free of a wifi signal constitutes being a 'power user'.
Could just be someone who wants to take their printer somewhere other than where they set it up.
Friends house, garage, workshop etc.

Sounds like something that ought to be optional during setup.

[JCrump]

good to see prompt responses.

I totally agree. I have heard from New Matter via this forum and email. Support has been excellent.

[Duck]

Still no user submitted videos on YouTube that I can find. Bummer, I'm really looking forward to seeing it print since New Matter haven't really released any "raw' videos just showing in detail how it looks/sounds.

[drewdsu42]

I totally agree. I have heard from New Matter via this forum and email. Support has been excellent.

it really really is awesome.
my enclosure showed up cracked and the build plate got messed up by the extrude head.
they are sending me free replacements.

im thrilled

[drewdsu42]

Still no user submitted videos on YouTube that I can find. Bummer, I'm really looking forward to seeing it print since New Matter haven't really released any "raw' videos just showing in detail how it looks/sounds.

ill try to get something up soon. even if its just a short clip

[Feign]

Well, I moved the printer into the house with reluctant agreement from the wife, and it has been printing pretty much nonstop all day Sunday (all things for her rather than for me... that free starter filament is very VERY pink.)
While I don't have the time to put up a youtube video anytime soon, a good description of the sound would be a "rumbling and grumbling" rather than the usual printer noises of "whining and whistling" with about the same amount of noise a running microwave.

EDIT: Now that I'm home from work, some other notes and first impressions:
I really wish I could take a look under the hood of their slicer, particularly the way it does infill seems counter-intuitively effective.
I didn't notice until seeing it in action that the z-axis screw doesn't ever turn. The motor for the z-axis is in the top portion of the machine and turns a nut that the head rests on. It's a really odd design decision, but considering how much the stringing (or in the case of this pink PLA, plastic cotton candy) gets on everything, I can understand the benefits of the system.
Seriously, stringing alone is reason to keep the lid on this thing. The fan in there blows like a tornado and those strings get everywhere if you run it without the cover.
The pinion x-y system does indeed make a very distinctive texture on the print, but it's so subtle that it doesn't even interfere with mechanical movement. But if you know what to look for, a MOD-t print is instantly distinguishable.
The slicer seems to default to 100 micron resolution for uploaded parts, with no option I could find to decrease resolution... For the vast majority of what I'm printing, that's an arduous slowness.

[hsus]

Pressing the front panel button while printing will pause the print job and move the carriage up.

On a side note: Can this pausing feature be used to switch filament mid-print (and thus make dual color prints, as showcased on your instagram) ?

[Doctor Heckle]

Been playing around with my MOD-t for a week now and I'm absolutely in love. It's my first foray into 3D printing and it's left a great impression; the thrill of turning .stls into tangible objects is an excellent experience. The brown-sugary smell of it printing is a welcome plus.

Mostly, I've been satisfied with the prints themselves. The test print and the duck from the store came out flawlessly. The phone stand printed well, but has a glob near one of the cosmetic holes in the back part.

Problems arose when I tried to do custom prints from things I've downloaded form Thingiverse. I tried the iPhone 6 + Watch stand combo, and while the print completed, halfway through the print translated back and to the right. It makes for cool glitch art, but sadly things like "being able to feed a charger in from beneath" and "using the speaker amplification area" are disabled. Twice when I tried to print the articulated octopus, once for the head and once for a set of the joints, the filament broke and stopped feeding into it, resulting in two bad prints. Eventually I got them to print with great detail, but sadly they don't join together. I think that's more of a PLA vs. ABS problem than it is a MOD-t problem.

The last concerns I have is that it frequently shows up as being disconnected, which results in me having to go power cycle it so it's picked up by the site when I try to print. I can't get the offline printer utility to find the printer either, despite it getting picked up by the store in my web browser. It also gives no indication of how long a print has left to complete, a feature I expected since it gave an estimate during the test print.

Overall though, I'm happy with my purchase and with the promise of continued firmware support, I'm very excited to see how my clean little cube comes along in reliability and print quality! It'd be nice to have an official announcement page to obsessively check for when firmware updates go live.

[NewMatter]

On a side note: Can this pausing feature be used to switch filament mid-print (and thus make dual color prints, as showcased on your instagram) ?

Pause and switch filaments is on the roadmap for the near future with a new firmware release. We've done that on MOD-t prototypes & previous firmware versions and they came out beautifully. See example here: https://instagram.com/p/68SpRPJOGY/ We're confident that we can get that feature implemented for our users.


Right now, the pause feature can be used to put something into the print mid-build or to just pause for some other reason.