Firmware - when or even if to change.

[curious aardvark]

it's the total lack of any kind of layer control that's causing me grief.

Every other brand/make/etc 3d printer software out there gives you the ability to lay your first layer down, slower, thicker and hotter and then revert to normal printing for the rest.
But not makerbot software. And I haven't been able to even get close to using any other software.

And the annoying thing is if you use raft - it's put down, slower and thicker. So the software can do it - just not without raft.

aarrgghhhh !
:-)

Also loading and unloading filament does seem to be a bit of a lottery. I usually have to click it a couple of times before it works properly. And that's definitely a firmware issue.

But mainly it's the complete lack of layer control.

I didn't really give replicatorg a fair go. after it took 40 minutes to slice a 2cm long elephant, I decided to leave it a lone.
It did seem to have more settings than makerware desktop.

[Geoff]

it's the total lack of any kind of layer control that's causing me grief.

Every other brand/make/etc 3d printer software out there gives you the ability to lay your first layer down, slower, thicker and hotter and then revert to normal printing for the rest.
But not makerbot software. And I haven't been able to even get close to using any other software.

And the annoying thing is if you use raft - it's put down, slower and thicker. So the software can do it - just not without raft.

aarrgghhhh !
:-)

Also loading and unloading filament does seem to be a bit of a lottery. I usually have to click it a couple of times before it works properly. And that's definitely a firmware issue.

But mainly it's the complete lack of layer control.

I didn't really give replicatorg a fair go. after it took 40 minutes to slice a 2cm long elephant, I decided to leave it a lone.
It did seem to have more settings than makerware desktop.

The only thing I like about Replicator G is the Gcode editing on the fly, that is really handy. What you are trying to do can all be done in Gcode, it's just a matter of adding it before you print. Let me go through and figure it out,
I know what you are after, you basically just want the first and/or second layers to print slow like the raft yeah?

The way it works, the raft usually prints at %50 of your set feed rate, but in raftless yeah, it ignores it and makes ugly stuff. I had your pain yesterday, needed to print raftless and had about 10 failures.. everything in the book happened... bed level was off,
nozzle dragged on the print... man it felt like I'd never set the machine up and it just came out of the box.

My problem here is the temperature now. In winter it gets down to 0 or below when the wood fire goes out in the middle of the night, and everything freezes, then when we all get up the place is back to 25c, so the machine is really contracting and expanding alot, so thats most likely my cause. It's my first winter living in the bush, never realised how insulated the city is!

[basfud]

it's the total lack of any kind of layer control that's causing me grief.

You have complete control over that in makerware. You can even change raft parameters, layers, speeds and everything. Temperature settings are kinda flimsy, from my experience printer tends to stop and heat up/cool down damaging the printout.

You want to 'create profile' and 'edit profile' in Makerware, under the Advanced Settings. All the delicious gooey center is in the .json file that you edit with notepad, it pops up when you press the edit profile button.

[curious aardvark]

well actually it just crashed, never opened in notepad.

I've installed proftweak and it launches that now - but it's not exactly in english, if you know what I mean. And makerware has an annoying habit of resetting everything you've changed when you click the create customised profile button, just because it can.
User friendly, it just isn't.

simplify3d looks the business - but not many reviews and not enough to convince me that it's not just people associated with the company. And it's bloody expensive.
They probably aren't - but just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you :-)