MakerBot Industries

This has been explained before and was more likely on the Cupcake because it ran at a slower baud rate. Understand that the Arduino micro controller that runs the bot is NOT native USB and uses a USB to serial port modem chip. This means you bot really uses oldschool serial ports (think old school 14.4 modems). Just like the Internet would lag on a dial up modem-so does your bot. The bot is continually receiving movement commands in the form of Gcode coordinates. Corners and circles represent a bunch of coordinates spaced very closely together, In order to maintain constant feedrate (movement of the X-Y stages) those coordinates must be sent faster (closer together in the same time period). When you hit the hard limit of the serial connection, the X-Y stages slow down-but we calculated flowrate (the speed of the plastic out of the nozzle) to match the feedrate, and since they now don't match-too much plastic is put down in one spot.

Many people have argued over this but the facts are there, printing is always better and more stable from SD card because there is no bottleneck or sharing of the connection as in USB.

As a side note-the new interface kit makes this even more attractive-as you don't need the computer to show off your bot.

I can understand this on an older computer. I have made one print from the SD card just to see what it was all about. Other then that one print I have always printed directly from my computer and there has never been a problem. I also did not like not being able to monitor the status what line of code its at and what the temperature was at.

I am almost always doing something in either Maya, Solidworks, or any number of other programs while my printer is printing. Heck right now as I type this I have a bottle opener printing for a friend, and I'm working on a part in Solidworks.

I think this heavily depends on the power of your computer, and what you may or may not be doing on it. I can only speak from my own experiences tho and all the computers I have are at the very least dual cores with the majority of them quad cores. With the exception of one computer pretty much all the parts are things that have been on the market for at most 5 years.

To the OP I would definitely consider ditching the ABP switching to the HBP, and either picking up the aluminum plate that MBI offers or make one yourself. You really will notice a world of different in print quality.

I really wanted to make the ABP work as well (and at some point I will sit down and try a few ideas out) but it ended up consuming more time then I wanted to give it right now. I really just wanted to print. The idea is fantastic and I'm sure it will get there but that belt can never be 100% flush with the heating plate, because it loves to warp, crinkle and bend. This ultimately gets translated to your prints and effects the print quality.

Regarding settings something that helped me get started was this site
http://makerblock.com/profilemaker/

I have recently also been playing with the RC of RepG 25 which has the new built in Print-O-Matic. Its been working great as well. The only drawback with Print-O-Matic is that you can't actually save the profile. This isn't the worst thing in the world because its only having you tweak certain key values that don't change between every single print.

Profilemaker on the other hand has the ability to send you an email that has the entire profile in a zip file for you to conveniently drop in your profiles folder of RepG.

Another thing that greatly helped me was you can actually read what each plugin within Skeinforge does, as well as its individual options. If you navigate to

replicatorg-0025\skein_engines\skeinforge-35\skeinforge_application\skeinforge_plugins\craft_plugins

(this is assuming your using skeinforge-35)

you can open up any of the .pyc files in notepad and they contain an explanation of what each pluggin, and its options do. This helped me quite a bit to get a better understanding of things.

very detailed

If I remove my belt for this tall print is it possible to print on the aluminum tape directly would would I need to coat with kapton/blue tape to get it to stick? I really would like to get this printed but I don't want to transition away from my ABP completely as I really enjoy the convenience (10 mustache rings anyone?).

Yes, just lay down Kapton or blue painters tape. Very important to wipe down the surface with alcohol or acetone to remove your fingerprints. The same is true for the belt when you used it.

Great thanks for the tips, finger crossed on my next long print.