General EKOCYCLE 3D Printer Thread

[Jacob9869]

I've been working with the EKOCYCLE printer quite a bit lately. I've basically been the troubleshooter for our team and I thought it might be a good idea to see if I can help anyone else out with their printer. Is anyone else having any problems with their printer?

[FIRST5459]

Hey,
Team 5459 here. We have gotten a T22 temperature error that loops when we try to continue with printing. After much research, there are still no results as to how to fix such a problem. Has anyone else experienced/ fixed this problem and how because until then, or prints are backed up. I asked the same thing on another thread, but it has seemed to get no attention so far. Any light on the subject would be great, thanks,
Team 5459

[FIRST5459]

Good Advice-
When in doubt, call the customer service line. He fixed it in a couple of seconds because the printing tip wasn't lined up correctly. And he did that over the phone. great service there, I do suggest it for you if you ever have any absurd problems.

[amesmich]

We have two problems.

1. It wontauto level and I have cycled through it 10 times finaly I just gave up with leveling it.

2. Now it wont feed the materal. It goes through the print process but its like the nozel is jamed. It looks clean but nothign will come out. Cant figure out how to purge it, clean it or even take the current roll of material out of the print nozel.

[Jacob9869]

Originally Posted by amesmich

We have two problems.

1. It wontauto level and I have cycled through it 10 times finaly I just gave up with leveling it.

2. Now it wont feed the materal. It goes through the print process but its like the nozel is jamed. It looks clean but nothign will come out. Cant figure out how to purge it, clean it or even take the current roll of material out of the print nozel.

For your number 2 problem, I'm thinking that the filament is probably stripped. We fixed that by taking the top plastic casing off of the cartridge and putting the side with the coil in the printer and loading the print jet. Then begin to print the test print so that the jet heats up, then, right after it starts to print, cancel the print and pull the filament from the middle part. (Pulling the filament out of the jet) continue to pull the filament until it's completely out of the gears. Once you're done with that, looking down the length of the filament, you'll see a part where the filament was stripped (It will be thinner). Cut that piece off so you have a fresh filament. Create (In CAD) a 3D model that has a really really large perimeter. Start to print that and wait for the printer to start trying to feed plastic. Feed the filament into the gears and it should start to go down the plastic tube.

[amesmich]

That sounds great thanks for that info. Ill try that tomorrow.

[Jalerre]

I know very little about 3D printers but one of our CAD members was trying to print a part for our robot. He created the part in SolidWorks, saved it as an stl file, and loaded it on to the flash drive that came with the printer. When he plugged the flash drive into the printer the file does not show up. Does anyone know the procedure for actually printing the stl file?

[Pretzel]

Originally Posted by Jalerre

I know very little about 3D printers but one of our CAD members was trying to print a part for our robot. He created the part in SolidWorks, saved it as an stl file, and loaded it on to the flash drive that came with the printer. When he plugged the flash drive into the printer the file does not show up. Does anyone know the procedure for actually printing the stl file?

Our team has found more success by connecting wirelessly to the printers wifi network and sending it to the printer via Cubify's software. We're not certain that the printer can print from USB sticks since we had the same problem at first. Our guess is that the USB port might be for a connection cable between the printer and a computer, but no such cable appeared to be included with our printer.

[Sperkowsky]

We have had a few quirks but overall it's really not bad. We have printed 5 bearing blocks 4 cables magics and 2 axis camera mounts with one cartridge. The issue is we couldn't get the second cartridge to work and have to send it back. Overall it's not awful especially when you take into account its extremely propietery

[Kdsds11]

Originally Posted by Jalerre

I know very little about 3D printers but one of our CAD members was trying to print a part for our robot. He created the part in SolidWorks, saved it as an stl file, and loaded it on to the flash drive that came with the printer. When he plugged the flash drive into the printer the file does not show up. Does anyone know the procedure for actually printing the stl file?

We had this issue as well at first, but you need to load the stl file into their software, which can be downloaded under your account on the cubify website. Your file must be saved as an .cube3 to be printed, which can be exported from their software. Also, as stated earlier, the customer service they supply is fantastic. Replaced our cartridges with no hassle after their support way to fix it did not work. After following the procedure, the replacement cartridge has had no problems printing out the parts we've needed.

[mr_yes]

Our students have been slow to adopt CAD, despite two engineering mentors' urgings, so we are thinking of using the following system to encourage them: The printer's primary use is for team projects and those will have highest priority on the printer. Team members are welcome to print items for personal projects. Items which they design will be charged the team's cost for filament and other consumables. Items which have been designed by others will be charged at a rate that is 25-50% higher.

Has any team tried something similar? How did it go?

Has anyone put together a cost-per-print analysis?

[BeardyMentor]

Originally Posted by mr_yes

Our students have been slow to adopt CAD, despite two engineering mentors' urgings, so we are thinking of using the following system to encourage them: The printer's primary use is for team projects and those will have highest priority on the printer. Team members are welcome to print items for personal projects. Items which they design will be charged the team's cost for filament and other consumables. Items which have been designed by others will be charged at a rate that is 25-50% higher.

Has any team tried something similar? How did it go?

Has anyone put together a cost-per-print analysis?

Cost per print analysis, is pretty easy with FDM style printers. You should work out some depreciation rate. I would suggest something around 2500 hrs and split the cost of a replacement printer out over this. Then you can estimate cost of parts produced as material cost + electricity + depreciation. Electricity is going to be hard to estimate accurately. Fortunately, it is rather small. For hobbyist grade printers, I just count it as the sum of the wattage of the heating elements. This works out to around 200-300W for printers with a heated bed or around 4 cents per hour for most of the US. Things start to get murky when you start printing more than one persons parts at the same time. Calculating exactly how much time of the total each part would take is hard to do as the complexity and geometry plays a large part in print time.

This of course is working on the assumption that the labor in setting up and running the printer is free. If you are trying to calculate those costs, things start to get interesting.

[Underdog_19]

Originally Posted by Pretzel

Our team has found more success by connecting wirelessly to the printers wifi network and sending it to the printer via Cubify's software. We're not certain that the printer can print from USB sticks since we had the same problem at first. Our guess is that the USB port might be for a connection cable between the printer and a computer, but no such cable appeared to be included with our printer.

You do need to load the STL file into Cubify and "convert" it into a .cube3 file. You can then save the .cube3 file to the flash drive and put it into the printer. It should read it OK.

We had an issue with the printer reading the flash drive. It would see the file but would give an error about not being able to read the file. I ended up formatting the flash drive into FAT32 and everything worked OK after that.

[Jacob9869]

Originally Posted by Sperkowsky

We have had a few quirks but overall it's really not bad. We have printed 5 bearing blocks 4 cables magics and 2 axis camera mounts with one cartridge. The issue is we couldn't get the second cartridge to work and have to send it back. Overall it's not awful especially when you take into account its extremely propietery

Something that may be a problem is that one of the sides on your printer may not be heating up enough. Ours seems to break cartridges on the right side. If your working cartridge is on one side, keep it on that side whatever you do!

[Ghost_Pack]

Our team has been working with 3D printers for about 3 seasons now, and in all honesty, I think the Cube printers had given us the most trouble out of any printer we've ever used. We've worked with MakerBot Replicator 2 and Generation 5 printers, as well as RepRap and a few custom built printers. So far we've spent about 6 hours actualy printing with the Cube Ekocycles and about 30 hours troubleshooting problems.

The icing on the cake it the cost of the 3D Systems "proprietary" filament, which is approximately eight times the going price per kg of high quality printing filament. This combined with the large and consistent downtime of both printers (we have two Ekocycles) make 3D Systems a VERY hard recommendation for those in the market for 3D printers.