Sorry, just because you’re not capable enough to work with something that wasn’t completely fine-tuned for you at the factory doesn’t mean many of the rest of us have any problems with these machines. I do manual bed leveling and I can walk away from my printer for a year, turn it on, and pop out as good of print as the previous time it was used. How well does your “real” printer work after a year of neglect and with all the fancy gizmos turned off?

Hmm I’m out of ideas then, sorry. Still wouldn’t hurt to do a single-layer test print (there are various models that put squares all around the bed) just to see how that’s looking. If the issue had been confined to one side or one corner it might have been a mechanical issue, but random areas makes it a lot harder to figure out.

If I remember right, jerk settings should be rather small, like single-digits, but I think calibrating your e-steps will go a lot further for cleaning up the prints.

One other step (and of course I cannot remember what this is called) is related to calibrating the filament ‘pressure’ along each path. It takes a bit of work to set up but the goal is to create a profile so you get a perfectly consistent amount of filament extruded through the entire length of a path, which compensates for excess amounts at the beginning and end of each path, or too little extrusion through the middle. You might even have to compile your own firmware to enable it if there’s not an option in Marlin to turn it on from the software (I was compiling my own anyway for a DIY direct-drive extruder), but it really does make a difference and it’s a set-and-forget thing that you only really need to do once.

Creality bases are notoriously NOT flat although I’ve heard their quality has improved over the years. I have one of the 1st-gen Ender 3 Pro machines with a terrible dip in the aluminum base. One nice thing about a thicker bed material is that you can use discs of aluminum foil the shim the base. I started with a glass bed and 13 layers of foil to get the glass reasonably flat. I have since moved to 3mm G10 with a PEI sticker which is working pretty well (in case you want to try PEI again). I found some scrap G10 material on ebay and chopped it with a table saw, sanded all the edges, then got a PEI sheet that was 10mm wider than my bed to allow for some slop. Putting down the stickers is a lot easier if you have someone helping you. Then trim the overhang and you’re ready to go.

Yeah that’s a pretty tight range for the bed leveling, shouldn’t be causing any issues then. OK another possibility here… the failing prints, are they on the left side, right side, one specific corner, or does it tend to move around between prints?

E-steps varies per extruder, not per manufacturer. What they recommend will get you close but there will always be some variance. On my printer Creality recommended a setting of 93 but my measurements put me up around 98, so quite a difference. Are you still using a bowden tube style extruder or did you upgrade to a direct drive? And is your filament spool mounted on top of the printer (if so, what guides have you added for the filament path), or did you move it off to the side?

Erg sorry, jerk is probably what you’re looking for here. It’s been awhile since I did much printing so I keep confusing the terms.

Belt tension should be tight enough that you can strum it and hear a tone. It’s possible to tighten a belt TOO much, which causes extra stress on the motors. This would result in the motors being physically very hot. However if these were both printed at the same time, that wouldn’t be the issue here.

I wonder, how level is your bed? Yes yes, you have a bltouch and all that, but you still need to manually get your bed relatively level. Were these two prints next to each other or on opposite sides of the bed? How did the other prints in the same batch compare (like was there an obvious pattern of failure from one side to the other)? The bad print looks to me like the nozzle is too close, so it might be interesting to see what your first layer looks like in a test across the bed.

Even in the good print there’s some blobbing at the end of each path and the main surface should be the same height as the walls around the cutouts. Did you calibrate your E-steps? It kinda looks like you’re pushing out a little too much filament. depending on your slicer options, you may also check acceleration to slow down the head at the end of each path, which can help give the whole path a more uniform output.

One other consideration, although not as likely… Warm up the bed and check to see if all areas feel like they’re about the same temperature. If part of the heating element went bad then maybe you’re over-heating one part to compensate for a lack of heat on the rest of the bed. I only mention this because the bad print looks like it has a slant to it, but that could be an illusion of the photo.

I’ll have to check it out, thanks for the link! [Edit] oh it’s a book, not an online article.

Yeah this article is really long, and a lot of it is over my head (especially the math), but they have brought up several interesting points and provided a much easier-to-understand model of the holographic universe. I mentioned this theory in another post here a few months ago and was basically shut down with claims that this wasn’t even possible and the theory had been long-discounted, and yet here we are with modern work still plugging away at the concept. It makes me appreciate just how much hell all scientists go through when they posit theories that contradict other people’s personal beliefs.

I think I missed something in your description, but what are you running on your local server? I think most people set up postfix to relay the emails over to gmail or whoever, and there are options in postfix for backwards compatibility with Outlook or even Microsoft Mail so your wife could use whatever client she wants. If you don’t have a local mail server set up then this is probably what you want to do. This method allow a local or remote connection from any client so you could run K9 on your phone instead of a VPN.

For opening such a setup to the internet (and allowing access from anywhere), make sure you have strong passwords on your accounts, require SASL authentication, and set up fail2ban to block repeated attempts to hack your mailboxes. Don’t run anything else on the same server (or use virtual machines or strong containers) to reduce the chance of your mail server getting compromised other ways, and you should be good to go.

Now that’s some hard-core science! Can’t wait to see where this research leads in the future.

If you already have a router tying these two networks together then you should NOT also have two NICs in one machine tied to both networks. Pick one or the other, you can’t have both. If you think you need both then you haven’t correctly considered your network topology.

This sounds familiar. Can you verify if you’ve enabled net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 in /etc/sysctl.conf? If you have to make a change, then issue sysctl --system to reload the updates.

Definitely worth it. Sometimes I make little things, like I got a new tool that has a difficult adjustment, but printing a knob made it comfortable to use. I got a new phone last week and couldn’t find a rubberized case I liked, so I designed and printed one this weekend which fits snugly and provides a much better grip. I’ve made cases for other projects, even built a weather station. The biggest project I’ve done is a star tracker (OpenAstroTech) which holds my camera, most recently used during the eclipse in April. Sometimes my printer may sit idle for almost a year, sometimes it prints constantly for several weeks, but it is a very useful tool worthy of a permanent location on my workbench.

“We don’t know what it is, so let’s kill it and see what happens.”

At that capacity, I’ll cast another vote for SSD if at all possible, but you can certainly get small HDDs pretty cheap now.

If you want the easiest and cheapest way to add more drives, do a search for “sata port multiplier”. These cards go for around $25US on Amazon or Ebay. They are NOT fast! It uses a single SATA port to run up to five drives, so all the drives split the bandwidth, but long ago I ran some of them for a few years without any problems. You simply run a sata and power cable from your motherboard to the card, then plug in your drives, it doesn’t even require a slot on your motherboard.

The second one with the blue arm is the style I was talking about. It changes the angle so the filament doesn’t get pulled into the extruder at a right-angle. It will help for now, but there are other models that use a ball bearing for a spinning wheel that the filament rolls over. And if you really want to make it smooth, there are ball bearing rollers so the whole spool spins more freely. That’s one of the things I love about this printer, there is such a range of mods you can print to make the whole machine better.

That works, just keep testing changes until you figure it out.

May be a stupid question, but are you hearing any clicking from the extruder while printing? If the brass gear gets clogged up it can start slipping. Or if there’s not enough tension on the spring it might not push the filament through reliably. For that matter have you printed an arm to change the angle the filament feeds into the extruder (if you still have the spool in the stock position on top of the printer)? There are many better ways to handle that issue, but original setup causes a lot of friction and you’ll actually see the filament cutting a groove into the extruder, and the arm is the easiest print to solve it. You pretty much want to check everything that might be causing the filament to drag or not allow it to feed smoothly into the head.

You should only need to see a few layers to tell if there’s still a problem. No need to waste filament printing a complete failed piece.

Oh I should have mentioned in the previous post… if a cold-pull doesn’t make any difference, have you checked the nozzle itself? It’s a very tiny hole, easily damaged, so if the head smacked into anything it might have slightly crushed the tip (not something you would see by eye). You could also try clearing the nozzle with the long needle that came with the printer – if it doesn’t fit into the nozzle tip then it’s almost certainly suffered some damage. Always keep a bag of spare nozzles on hand!

You’ll want to google the exact steps for calibrating e-steps, but basically this is the setting that determines how many steps of the stepper motor are required to move the filament a given amount. You disconnect the bowden tube from the head, then push the filament through so a bit is exposed past the end of the tubing and mark exactly where the end of the tubing is on the filament. Now from your slicer you instruct the printer to extrude 100mm of filament, and very carefully measure how much actually comes out. If you have exactly 100mm then great, but typically you will find it off by a few mm (and in your case it’s probably less than 100mm). It doesn’t take much to cause a big problem. Any how-to page will show how you can read the current setting (I think it’s 92 steps by default), and there are formulas which will calculate the new number you need to change that to.

So the idea here is that if the slicer thinks it should be outputting 100mm of filament, but it only pushes 95mm instead, you won’t have enough filament to fill in the gaps. Setting the correct value on the printer will fix this, and then you can adjust more minor issues by changing the flow rate in the slicer. You will also note that different types or brands of filament extrude at slightly different rates, which is why your slicer may allow different profiles for the filament itself.

I’m not familiar with PrusaSlicer. Cura has always worked well for me, it’s free, and it provides quite a lot of options for fine-tuning your prints. If you find that Prusa doesn’t let you adjust the filament rate, give Cura a try.

The bottom two which are supposed to be completely solid aren’t even filling in the caps themselves. You’re not getting enough filament flowing through the nozzle. Are you using a 100% flow rate in your slicer? You might try printing at 110% with a one- or two-layer solid test to see how well it fills in.

If you have never calibrated your e-steps, you’ve probably been under-extruding and just never noticed the problem on previous prints. Always a good idea to check this if you haven’t before. This might be solved by adjusting the flow rate, but it’s better to properly calibrate your printer or you will still see problems in some areas.

Alternatively, you might have a partial clog in the nozzle. Try doing a cold-pull to remove anything that’s in there and see if it clears up the problem. No changes in the slicer will resolve this, it’s a mechanical problem.

It’s probably also worthwhile to measure the filament with calipers to see how close to 1.75mm it actually is. If you previously had a spool that was slightly over, it might have been covering up the defects that would be more obvious when using a spool that is slightly under. This problem can be solved just by adjusting the flow rate in the slicer.

You said you have made changes to the temp and speed, but didn’t say what settings you are using or have tried. Please post that info (along with anything that may have worked in the past) for reference. Also are you sure you got pure PLA, or is it a variant like PLA+?

I’ve always relied on multiple aspects for my used drives (currently ZFS raidz2 which itself provides multiple checks, but I also do backups of the really important stuff). It doesn’t matter though, all drives new or old are going to fail and you just have to be ready for it. The worst case is multiple drives failing at once, and I had that happen several times when using a weak power supply.

So far I’ve been really happy with the refurbs from Amazon though, plus the NAS is nothing to sneeze at. I upgraded the server to a newer machine, then realized that allowed me to step up in families for my SAS cards. Basically went from a machine that could push data at 70MB/s (and was constantly behind) to a new machine pushing 450MB/s or more with almost no lag. I run a lot of stuff on my home network so it’s been nice having the new speed, and the zfs pools are providing around 92TB on one set and 22TB on another set so I have room to go crazy. If I had to buy new drives I’d have maybe half that amount of space.

Check the SMART info on the drives you receive, if they already show signs of failure then return them immediately.

For “reputable” sellers, I typically go with ones who are selling drives in bulk and have a history of more than five minutes with lots of recent good reviews. I took a chance on a good deal for a “new” drive once and received an obviously used drive where the previous person had cut out the SAS bridge (these pins are required to power on some SAS models like what I bought, so the drive was a paperweight). You’ll get some lemons, but I’ve been running mostly used drives on my fileserver for the past twenty years and had reasonably good luck from bulk sellers (and easy replacements when I got a bad drive from one of them).

Oh, you might also check refurbs from Amazon. My current fileserver is running a set of eight 18TB refurbs which were significantly cheaper at the time, but the drive model itself was only a year old so I knew there couldn’t be much wear on what I received. And Amazon has a good return policy.