I have the Snapmaker A350 and I have been using Cura 4.11 as my go-to slicer for quite a while but occasionally I will use Luban (4.8.1 at the moment). I recently upgraded to Cura 5.3 and immediately ran into problems. No matter what file I send it, if I slice it with Cura 5.3 the printer does weird things like printing in midair a foot above the bed or crashing at high speed into the build plate (fortunately when I saw that about to happen I was able to turn the machine off before the crash).
If I slice my files with Luban 4.8 or an earlier version of Cura the printer works perfectly. I have the latest firmware, 1.15.26, installed but the problem persists. I understand that Cura 5 has some new features that I would like to try but I haven’t been able to get it to work.
Anyone out there have this same problem or can guide me to what I may be doing wrong? Much thanks for any help!
I just sliced something in 5.2.1, and it printed fine on my Original. Cura doesn’t have a profile for the Original, so I’m using a custom profile. I assume you’re using the stock printer profile.
5.4.0-beta1 seems fine as well, although I haven’t actually printed anything it’s sliced.
Can you upload your model and the gcode?
Here are two files - a dog I downloaded from Thingiverse (and scaled up by about 300%) and a small object I created in Freecad - along with short videos of each showing what happens. I sliced them using Cura 5.3.1.
Valley Cap 5.3.stl (2.0 KB)
Valley Cap 5.3.gcode (213.4 KB)
Dog 5.3.gcode (2.0 MB)
Oops, turned out the Dog stl file was too large to include and the videos are REALLY short. But you can see how the Valley Cap print is making a kamikaze dive toward collision with the build plate and the Dog print is “printing” several inches above the build plate.
Thanks @clewis for your help. I’m very anxious to learn how these files work for you.
I’m relatively new at reading raw GCode, but I see
M82 ;absolute extrusion mode
...
G0 F9000 X210.282 Y179.702 Z0.2
which is telling the printer to move the Z axis to 0.2mm above the bed. Given the comments say the layer height is 0.2, that sounds right. Nothing looks wrong about that GCode to me, but I could be missing something.
I have problems with my Original getting out of sync. The controller thinks the head can go down (or up, both happen), but it’s actually at the end of the module. When I notice it, I usually have to stop the print, then jog all 3 axises to both ends. It rarely happens with X and Y, but it has happened before. Once it’ll reliably run from one end to the other and back without making weird noises at the ends, I’m ready to print.
But that doesn’t sound like your issue. Switching the slicer wouldn’t change that, and printing a file that previously succeeded would still have issues.
If 5.4.0-beta1 fixes you’re issue, I’d just upgrade and not worry about it.
[Edit to add]: I got a change to slice in Cura 5.4.0-beta1, and my GCode looks pretty much the same as yours. The only part that really differs is the start GCode that I have optimized over the stock Cura warm up. So I don’t think upgrading Cura will help. Maybe now that it has printed fine, it’s working again?
Thanks @clewis; I appreciate you looking into this problem. I downloaded 5.4.0 but it still does the same thing, i.e., “prints” six inches above the bed. I sliced the same stl file with 4.11 and it prints just fine. I also sliced the same stl file with 5.4.0 and sent it to my Sovol SV06 and it printed fine. So something is going wrong between my A350 and Cura 5.x but I have no idea what it could be. Thanks again. I’ll just have to be content to use 4.11 on the Snapmaker and 5.4 on the Sovol.
How are you sending the GCode to the Snapmaker? Using a thumbdrive might be different than printing directly from Luban. Same for printing directly from Cura.