ghostkeeper

Hi Lokster! SandervG gave me a ping about this. It's not unusual that it takes a week or so before we get around to reviewing and testing plug-in submissions. There are a lot of things for the developers to take care of nowadays! Sorry for the delay. I'll get it reviewed this afternoon and ask a colleague to test it.

I am not able to fix disconnections or the networked printer not showing up in the list. This is on the firmware side. We haven't been able to reproduce #6626. #6731 has been fixed though.

I'm not able to reproduce the problem any more though. Here's what I get when I load your latest project into Cura: Your temperature and retraction and such have been edited. Those are also the settings it actually slices with and the settings that are displayed in the main settings list. Are you sure you've selected your own material in the material manager to edit settings for, not something like Ultimaker PLA White? We might also be looking at a bug in the Material Settings plug-in here. We know of a firmware bug that causes network printer disconnections in version 5.4 of the firmware. It happens more often while the printer is printing. There is apparently an infinite loop somewhere in one of the services that keeps rebooting. This takes so much CPU power that other services, like the printer's network API, don't get processing time any more. If the printer takes too long to respond, Cura will assume the connection is broken. You'll also be unable to access the printer via a browser then (by entering the IP address in your address bar).

The time lapse post-processing script adds g-code commands that instruct the printer to take a picture. It doesn't function via any camera view via OctoPrint or anything. If your printer has a camera and supports the command you put in the settings there (by default M240) then the pictures or video would be stored in your printer somewhere. I like how you refer to Cura as "the cure" by the way.

I'm not part of any firmware team so not the best person to ask. I haven't heard of the prime blob being modified recently. I suppose they'd have to tweak things for the S3 but I think they would try to keep the prime blob exactly the same for other printers so that they wouldn't need to re-test that for all materials and nozzle sizes. The UM3 firmware hasn't had an update in almost a year anyway.

Radomir, the articles can also be seen online in the source repository: https://github.com/Ghostkeeper/SettingsGuide/tree/master/resources/articles Browse through these categories to find the article you need. For version 2.3 of the guide, I've implemented a translation system. However there is no Czech translation yet, just French and a partial Russian translation.

For Ultimaker printers this position is set to be at the switching bay, where it needs to move to perform the tool switch. Many other printers have just one nozzle rather than two (with multiple feeders feeding material in it) and to them the tool switch is completely digital or just involves a retraction and unretraction. We've made this the default for third-party printers. This is most likely why it's not making any motion for your printer, while heating the other nozzle. For yet other printers with multiple distinct nozzles, they'd need to have it configured correctly in their printer definitions. The MendelMax falls in this category. There is no way to create a correct default for all printers. We need some information about your printer to do that. In this case, the information provided by MendelMax to Cura is incorrect or incomplete.

You can adjust those settings from within the Cura interface - as well as save them to a profile - if you install the Printer Settings plug-in from the Marketplace. Otherwise, I suggest taking it up with the MendelMax support. Maybe they have experience with this issue with other users.

Cura doesn't ship with the settings guide. It will not show up unless you manually download the guide. Please follow these steps: Download the settings guide from here: https://github.com/Ghostkeeper/SettingsGuide/releases/download/v2.2.0/SettingsGuide7.0.0.curapackage Open Cura. From the downloads folder, drag that .curapackage file onto the main window of Cura. Restart Cura. Afterwards, you should be able to right-click on any setting to access the guide. I've submitted the new version of the settings guide to the Marketplace as well which should make it easier to install. The version on there currently is not compatible with Cura 4.5.

You did this! https://github.com/fieldOfView/Cura-SettingVisibilityProfileCreator/commit/0d41f8af7ba97d7a9c1d518a0a6f05226618a187 I did something similar: https://github.com/Ghostkeeper/SettingsGuide/commit/6d0b97cfa16d92438ed35a57b97c84fc92d7ee74 Thanks for helping with the testing, Smithy! I'm working on finishing up the release this weekend. This is crucial since the plug-in got broken in Cura 4.5...

@Smithy can I ask you to give it one more try on your computer? I've taken a look at how fieldOfView solved this in his plug-in and found something that was probably the solution for him. You can download it here: SettingsGuide7.0.0.zip You might have to uninstall an old version first. This one has version number 2.1.99, newer than the Marketplace version but not yet 2.2 (so you can still upgrade later). This version also completes the guide-in-setting-tooltips feature for 2.2, but that's just bonus 😉

Infill Layer Thickness and Support Infill Layer Thickness do effectively what you're asking. However these are limited to be a multiple of the layer height (so 200% or 300% or so, not 150%). It does save a lot of time. But it's also a bit hard on the flow rate changes, so you might see some underextrusion in the infill.

I see now that I've edited the wrong one. Could you re-test with this plug-in? SettingsGuide7.0.0.zip As you can imagine, without a MacOS computer I'm sort of programming in the blind, so thanks for your help! You get a free preview of version 2.2 with the troubleshooting pages ;)

If you'd like, you can try installing the package in this .zip and see if it remedies the problem: SettingsGuide7.0.0.zip

Workaround for now is to open the guide by right-clicking on a setting you'd like to learn about. I'll try to find a solution before the next release of the plug-in. Maybe it helps to replace it with the Cyrillic character "Ѕ", which looks almost the same.

Thanks. Indeed I wasn't aware. Bug reports for my plug-in are best reported here: https://github.com/Ghostkeeper/SettingsGuide/issues I get a notification then.

The feature request on Github is here: https://github.com/Ghostkeeper/SettingsGuide/issues/12 I'll continue conversation there.

Importing "cryptography" should work. We use the library with imports like this: https://github.com/Ultimaker/Uranium/blob/038fb7286ba9418537581ea4b36342e58ac252c8/UM/Trust.py#L9-L14

Here is another example where I'm importing a library that imports among itself: https://github.com/Ghostkeeper/SVGToolpathReader/blob/master/Parser.py#L27-L32 I don't think that different Python libraries would collide with each other. And if they do you'd see some very weird error messages like PyCapsule_GetPointer collisions and such (an old bug in SIP). Cryptography is already in the 4.4 build, so you can try it out there. We're going to use it for verifying signing keys of plug-ins installed from the Marketplace (though currently the Marketplace doesn't sign them yet).

Cura is shipped with its own Python environment (which is CPython 3.5.2). When processing the import command in a Cura plug-in, it will look in three places: Cura's own environment, which includes the "cura" and "UM" packages containing Cura's own code. Cura's dependencies, which are installed with Cura. You can't add things to this; you'd need administrator access and your users might not have that. The plug-in folder itself. So to add a dependency that's not yet shipped with Cura, you need to supply it in your plug-in folder. There are two types of libraries you can import then: Pure python libraries or compiled binary libraries. I have two examples for this. Pure python libraries are the easiest. You can just put the source code in the plug-ins folder. To see this in action, you can install the Settings Guide plug-in from the Marketplace. If you then go into Help -> Show configuration folder and browse into the plugins folder you'll find the installed plug-in with simply a folder called "Mistune" with a file "mistune.py". Then in the main plug-in code I can just go "from .Mistune import mistune" and it'll import that mistune.py file. Just like any other Python file you need to use a relative import. If your library is pre-compiled it becomes harder. If you're just using the library itself it's still easy. You put the .so file (the actual compiled library) in your plug-in's folder and you can import it similar to Mistune above. However if you want to publish the plug-in, you're going to need to import different libraries depending on whether the user is on Windows, MacOS or Linux. For an example of this, you can look at the X3GWriter plug-in that executes a binary depending on the platform. That's done here: https://github.com/Ghostkeeper/X3GWriter/blob/b55d893ca59b1b50becd372adb9a171ec9e5cf77/X3GWriter.py#L97-L105 Instead of an executable as in that plug-in, you'd be doing an "import something_something" depending on the platform. Very similar.

I see you describe two problems that can both be fixed with settings: Minimum Infill Area will close small gaps in the top skin. This way, instead of stopping just before the small gap, it'll just continue printing skin over the whole gap. It can save some time at the cost of more material. This answers your main question. It's not as brute force as your proposed solution, but only applies to small gaps in the skin where it's needed. Increase this setting to maybe something like 10mm^2 for your model. Ironing Inset is a distance that Cura will keep between the edge of the ironed area and the edge of the top surface. If you reduce that to 0, the influence of those letters will not nearly be as big. I hope those solutions are sufficient for your case. I think the first solution is a better solution in general than what you've proposed.

This issue is the reason why the Seam Corner Preference option of "Smart Hiding" was built for Cura 4.2. Smart Hiding will prefer to hide the seam in an inner corner, but if no inner corner is available it'll at least try to put it not in a flat surface. It'll put it on an outer corner then.

There is no interface element for it. We consider this to be an expert+ functionality, because people who have the skill to build their own 3D printer are also smart enough to edit a JSON file. To be able to edit this, you need to create a printer definition in Cura for your printer. This printer definition is a .def.json file just like the other printer definitions. The other printer definitions are located in the installation folder of Cura for your operating system (Windows): Usually C:\Program Files\Ultimaker Cura 4.1\resources\definitions You can place a new definition there, or if you don't have admin access you can also place them in C:\Users\<AbeFM>\AppData\cura\4.1\definitions To have an example printer definition to work with, I suggest copying a .def.json from a different printer that is most like your printer (in the number of extruders it has and its capability of switching out material profiles, nozzles, etc). You will also need to copy the extruder definitions in the \extruders folder for your printer. Then under the "overrides" header in those JSON files you can edit the nozzle_offsetting_for_disallowed_areas and such to what you need.

In my experience, Lines and Zigzag are easiest to remove, followed by tree support and concentric. The rest of the patterns are all really tough which makes them hard to remove. Overhangs that are really close to the build plate are always problematic regardless of the pattern. That is my most common use case for PVA support. The Settings Guide doesn't mention Gyroid yet because it's really new. I'm working on an update for Cura 4.2 that includes Gyroid.

Printer definitions can put disallowed areas in the scene that move along with the nozzle offset as well as disallowed areas that don't. The disallowed areas that move with the nozzle are stored in the machine_disallowed_areas setting. They indicate where the print head is not allowed to go. This is used for instance in the Ultimaker 3 for the camera in the front right corner. The disallowed areas that don't move along with the nozzle offset are stored in the nozzle_disallowed_areas setting. They indicate where the nozzle is allowed to go. This used to be used for the bed clips in the Ultimaker 3, until we found that the clips can also collide with the inactive nozzle anyway. Currently no built-in printer makes use of this one. Apart from those, Cura also generates disallowed areas to not go outside the build volume. You can configure those to either move along with the nozzle offset on both sides (as done for the Ultimaker 3) or on neither side (as done for the Ultimaker S5). This is determined by the nozzle_offsetting_for_disallowed_areas setting. So for your case you should disable nozzle_offsetting_for_disallowed_areas, then create a machine_disallowed_area on the right hand side.