I have been dual booting with Windows 8.1 & 10 and Ubuntu for a couple of years now. For much of that time I mostly used windows for day to day tasks and used Ubuntu to play with git, node and ruby applications which generally work much more easily on linux. I have a MSI Nightblade gaming pc with an I5 a NVIDIA 980 Graphics card and 16GB of ram. I am currently running Ubuntu 15.10 desktop.

When I started with Ubuntu most but not all of my hardware worked. Since I was still dual booting with windows I didn’t spend a ton of time trying to find solutions but over time updates to Ubuntu fixed some printer annoyances with my Canon WiFi printer and NVIDIA improved the drivers for my graphics card. Dual monitor support is now great and I am pretty happy with the ambiance theme I have been using.

I use Libre Office when I need to open an office file, and Remmina Remote Desktop Client to connect to my office computer running windows via RDP. Both of these are built into ubuntu. There are also nice built in utilities for tasks like CD/DVD burning, making bootable USB keys, unzipping files and viewing PDF’s as well as a host of other things. Often searching the dash surfaces a program already installed for doing what I need. I installed the gimp for image editing and it works pretty nicely despite requiring you to “export” everything to save it in a useful format.

I have a 3D printer and have found the USB Serial connection that 3D slicing software to print parts when connected to a computer seems to generally be more stable on linux. Once power management settings that could affect a print are off it just works. The two slicing programs I use Cura and Simplify3D are both cross platform and have linux versions available that work equally well as their windows counterparts.

For software development I have been using git in the command line and either Github Atom or Visual Studio Code as my editor. I enjoy Terminator for my terminal. Node jekyll ruby and python all work really well on ubuntu without all the tedious setup required on windows.

For a web browser I use google chrome as it can be set up to work with sites like netflix and amazon prime video. Once WebGL is working I was also able to use Onshape and Tinkercad in Chrome as well.

In November of 2015 a Windows update destroyed the network drivers for my desktop in Windows, I tried a number of things to get it fixed but could never get it connected to the internet again.

I kept the windows partition on and used it occasionally for the few remaining things that I could not do on linux. Over time I found linux based solutions for all of these issues. I have a small brother label maker that has a windows exe file embedded in the printer that you use to print the labels, I found a small linux program Blabel that does the same thing, and is easier to use than the brother software. The last piece of hardware I had not found a solution for was my USB microscope. My 6 year old daughter uses it to look a things, and I found a nice program called Guvcview that supports my microscope. I use Angry IP Scanner to find newly configured devices on the network.

Recently I found a good deal on two mSATA hard drives that I can configure as a primary and recovery disc on my Nightblade desktop. I backed up both my windows and ubuntu files and then did a fresh single boot install of ubuntu on the new hard drives. I thought about dual booting with windows again, but the install is so long I decided I just didn’t need it anymore.

I even wound up being able to keep both Windows 7 and Windows 10 available to me via VM’s in VirtualBox. I have 3 Windows 7 Ultimate keys that allow for virtualization so I made two Windows 7 VM’s and then upgraded one of them to 10. I used the windows 7 vm to upgrade the firmware on my router since only windows software was available.

Windows is gone from my home and my PC has never ran faster, Ubuntu may be a pretty heavyweight linux distro, but it is much slimmer than windows and I am very pleased with my new setup.

I love my Printerbot Simple, but I have had a limited amount of success printing plates full of parts since I installed my X axis upgrade. Despite having more bed space I continued to have issues with printing batches. When printing all parts at the same time issues with one print seem to multiply themselves to all the prints sometimes wreaking the entire plate of parts. There are also sometimes imperfections and stringing on parts caused by the extruder traveling between parts.

I had seen the print one at a time setting in Cura before, but stopped before trying it because I didn’t have accurate print head measurements. I googled around some more and found this thread about using the print one at a time feature with a Printrbot Simple.

There were settings on the thread for the simple’s print head, so I entered those values and gave it a try.

I loaded up medium sized part I needed six of in Cura and let Cura do the object placement automatically. Each part was printed one at a time over the next 5 hours. The print head had enough space to print all six parts even with the fan on my UBIS 13S.

Using the print one at a time feature was easier to setup than I expected and has made printing batches of parts more predictable. For smaller parts I have been saving smaller batches as a single STL file and then using the print one at a time feature to print a number of smaller batches one at a time.

So far I have only successfully used the automatic object placement, when I tried to position objects myself the print order Cura decided to use seemed risky with my blower fan attached.

In my ongoing effort to buy every upgrade for the Simple Printrbot offers I bought the new X axis upgrade on Black Friday.

The upgrade was pretty simple, I bought the X upgrade without the heat plate since I already have one with my current heated bed. I did have to extend the wires on the heat plate as they were shorter than the thermistor wires. I am not sure if the heat plate came this way or if I had trimmed them when doing the installation.

I used some kapton tape to hold the wires to the bed and zip tied them through the oval shaped belt hole on the back left corner of the bed. I have previously printed a cable chain for the extruder wires so I use the extruder loom for the heated bed wires. The screws that connect the arms to the bed and that connect the heat plate to the bed are auto threading screws, so make sure and put them in straight.

You need to have the latest Printrboard firmware in order to take advantage of your new bed space. I already had this version installed from my recent Simple Super Z Upgrade.

The upgraded bed is a flat piece of aluminum with cutouts on either end of the bed in the non printable area. Without offsetting the Z probe sensor position it will dive through the cutout and gouge the bed when doing the auto bed leveling procedure. I used the following G code command in the OctoPrint terminal to update my sensor offset.

// Set Bed Level Sensor Offset
M212 X25
// Save Settings
M500
// Verify saved settings
M501

Then I used OctoPrint to test out the X area and to set the build area dimensions. I already have an upgraded Z axis so the settings for my printer are as follows:

// Set Build Dimensions
M211 X250 Y152.4 Z240
// Save Settings
M500
// Verify saved settings
M501

My small printer table, the Z and X upgrades and my printed spool holder all combined to make the printer a bit more unstable than before, specifically in the home position so I printed some screw down feet.

The bed takes about 15 minutes to get up to 55-60C a bit longer to heat up then my old one, but I also followed Brook’s advice from the installation video on youtube and this time I put the thermistor to the side of the heat plate for a more accurate reading.

I bought a bunch of 6”x6” kapton sheets so I installed two of those with one cut down to 4”. I have not seen any kapton sheets for sale in 6”x10” size yet, so I will probably just wait until I run out of what I have before doing anything.