Adam324

EDIT: Ignore this. I can clearly see in the layer view that the design is at fault.

Incorrect info. Info about who created the test fix is already posted correctly above.

Printing now... I am really looking forward to being able to use adaptive layers without worrying about either wasting material or compromising on thickness. I had to always bump up the top/bottom layer count to make up for the thinnest top layer and wasting plastic on the top/bottom layers that are at the max thickness. This change you made will make adaptive layers worth using to me.

Thanks! This is looking good to me. I brought back some of my old prints that I did where the top layers were too thin because of adaptive layers (causing bubbling and holes between infill lines), and the top layers are showing the correct thickness now. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2764962 The Riser.stl from that was a problem to print using the previous adaptive layers implementation with a layer height of 0.2mm and adaptive layers set to maximum variation of 0.1 and a variation step size of 0.02. The preview looks good so I will go ahead and print it.

Thanks! I didn't notice that. I will check it out.

I have printed quite a few objects where I forgot that I had pause postprocessing plugin enabled and came back later to a print that was paused waiting for me to change the filament. Yes... it is my fault for not checking that :). Is there any chance of a visual indicator or for a pause plugins to pop up anther info box (whatever makes sense) to help remind us that a pause was put into the gcode? There are a lot of ways it could be done but I am not sure what really would make sense to do. My favorite is #3 so far. Any other ideas? 1. Temporary Info box when you slice. This idea would likely be too much of a nuisance when you always have pauses in your prints so likely not the best idea. 2. A note on the slice status to say that a pause plugin is enabled. Not in your way and just helps indicate that a pause is in the print. This I kind of like. 3. When you click the button to send the print to the printer or save the gcode, a temporary info window (non blocking like the other info rectangular areas that pop up to let you know what is going on). This isn't as much as a nuisance and it would be a nice reminder. Maybe people wouldn't like the additional info box though if they do pauses all the time. Maybe it could be an option or something. 4. Other ideas?

And your plugins make Cura work better for a lot of people I bet. My favorite is the z-offset. Thank you for them.

See my post below on using 'Outer wall inset'. Horizontal expansion essentially just scales the whole design bigger or smaller. 'Outer wall inset' move the outer wall in toward the inner wall a set amount to compensate for a line width that is slightly larger than what you specify.

This is the STL file I designed last year to measure 100 mm center to center of the raised lines. The outer most marks are designed to be 100 mm center to center on X, Y, and Z. 50-100-110-calibration-ruler-minimal-v8.stl

I found something that helped with this exact problem recently and was excited about it...

I have been racking my brain for months trying to deal my prints always being about 0.2 mm outside to outside or so bigger and hole diameters around the same smaller than what the CAD/STL dimensions are. This doesn't always matter but for designs that need to fit real world dimensions it can be an issue. Ideally all parts printed would be the correct dimension for holes and outside dimensions as designed in fusion 360 and allowing the design to be used for 3d printing and other real world uses without needing to compensate for slight printing over-extrusion on the outer walls and skewing your design sizes. Most people seem to calibrate a 100 mm by 100 mm outside to outside dimension object. That is not ideal though as hole dimensions will be smaller when printed as the outside to outside measurement assumes that a line is exactly 0.4 mm when printed on the outside wall which is not correct in my testing and experience. To calibrate the X and Y dimensions, I print a 90 degree L shaped design that is 4 mm wide by 110 mm in X and 110 mm in Y length. I designed some lines on top of the surface that are exactly 100 mm apart in both X and Y dimensions. For a perfectly calibrated FDM printer, If you were to measure from outside to outside of those raised bumps, you would be measuring slightly over 100 mm because the measurement should be 100 mm to 100 mm center to center. I don't expect a 100 mm by 100 mm cube to be 100 mm to 100 mm outside to outside because that assumes that wall lines are exactly 0.4 mm when printed which isn't the case with FDM printing. The outside wall line doesn't have any filament to push up against on the outer side so it expands more than 0.4 mm. You could try and adjust the line width to be exactly 0.4 mm but that would not work well at all. You wouldn't fill the voids between filament lines enough to have good adhesion and the lines would be more visible. From everything I read, It seems that it is normal to have a single 0.4 mm line width to be bigger than that. Because of this I calibrate to be 100 mm center to center of the lines on a 110 mm length print. I have tried to compensate using a few methods for the line width on the outside of the outer wall being slightly bigger but none of them work for all scenarios or they require extra design adjustments to make up for it. 1. Designing all my stuff with a around 0.2 mm larger holes and 0.2 mm outside to outside (0.1 mm per side) smaller size for non hole outside faces. 2. For already designed STL files that don't have FDM tolerances built in, scale the part size bigger if the holes are smaller than actual dimensions. For outside dimensions that need to be the correct precise size, I scale the part smaller or do a lot of sanding which sometimes is not possible if the design is very complex. If you need both holes and outside dimensions to be accurate you are in trouble as you have to pick on or the other and do sanding if you scale it bigger or drilling out the holes. Cura's Horizontal Expansion can do the same thing as scaling the size of it in the slicer but either of those do one of 2 things... either fix holes and expand the outside dimensions or... fix the outside dimensions and make holes smaller. I finally found the setting in Cura that does exactly what I need. It moves the outside wall (realize that the inside of a circle is also an outside wall) toward the inside wall by a certain amount. This allows me to have an exactly calibrated 100 mm to 100 mm line (center to center) and adjust for the line being a little over 0.4 mm causing the outside wall to be over-extruded by somewhere around 0.6 to 0.1 mm per side (Depending on your printer and filament size setting accuracy and flow settings). The setting is called 'Outer wall inset'. You give it a positive value to move the wall inward toward the inner wall by this amount. I set it to around 0.1 mm on my prints to get the outside dimensions and hole dimensions to be exactly how I designed them in Fusion 360. For most prints from thingiverse I leave that feature disabled because most designers have tolerance built into prints to make them fit together. There are some that are not though like some sockets I found on thingiverse. For my own future designs, I am designing them to the actual real world dimensions that I want and then use the 'Outer wall inset' to adjust for line width being slightly bigger on the outside wall's outside facing surface. Hopefully this makes sense to someone as I am not the best at trying to explain things... I was very excited to find this setting though because I have searched on this issue for a long time and never found anything mentioning using this setting for this purpose. The only thing I found on 'Outer wall inset' seemed to indicate it is used to make up for setting a line width smaller than the nozzle size (which Cura automatically adjusts) to get the outer wall to overlap the inner wall more. Then again... I am relatively new to 3d printing (about a year or so)... I have certainly been wrong many times in my life and been in many situations thinking I understand something when I really don't :).

I ended up just changing my line width from 0.4 mm to 0.34 mm to give more room for a 4th line to go down and that solved the problem as well as I think my underextrusion issue. I wanted to find a solution for 1.2 mm object thickness and not have to redesign objects to work around Cura behavior. I will find out soon. The path with 0.34 mm line width looks good and has a good flow even for the 4th pass (2nd inner wall) to fill the voids.

I went down to 1.22 mm object thickness and that still looked good. Going to 1.21 object thickness looked pretty good but it obviously was still having some issues as retractions went from 20 minutes (1.22) to 1 hour (1.21).

Thanks again for the reasoning for it. I guess we need a variable line width for printing inside walls feature (maybe a min and max) :). I made the object thickness 1.26 mm to make sure 0.4mm would fit for the inside wall and that helped.

Thanks for that info. I will test it that way. That is interesting. I tried going thinner on the object thickness to 1.1 mm but that didn’t help much. It might have been filled a little more but it was still missing a lot of inner wall and still erratic. I do have fill gaps between walls enabled. Do you think I will lose any precision using a 0.5 mm line for a 0.4 mm nozzle? The twist container needs to fit pretty precisely so that it isn’t too tight or too loose. I can just reprint some test pieces to check the infill as long as the 0.5mm is consistent. I use 0.5 mm for the infill (when that applies) to give objects more strength. I am ok with that as I don’t really care about precision of the infill as much. I am still puzzled though why the wall was not filled up. It should be close to 0.4mm between the walls. I will experiment going to a thicker object (1.3 mm+) and see how Cura handles that with 0.4 mm lines. Further testing has to wait a bit though as I got a stomach bug from the younglings and I am now stuck in bed. This conversation is a nice distraction though :).

I am designing a helix twist container with 0.8 wall thickness, It comes out great and the nozzle movement is very optimized. I wanted to increase the wall thickness to make it a bit thicker for strength and I am seeing some really weird behavior in the wall. I have infill set to 15% Gyroid but that doesn't take affect in the middle part as the objects thickness is 1.2mm and my wall thickness setting is 0.8mm. The travel path for the nozzle to create this broken up inner layer of the wall is very erratic too increasing print time. Does anyone know why the wall would not be filled up on the inside and also why the really erratic pattern to fill the wall? The 0.8 mm thickness object prints quickly and cleanly. The 1.2 mm is problematic. I am using Cura 4.0. I also tried 3.4.1 and it had the same behavior. I downloaded another brand slicer to test and it generated a nice continuous inner wall so it doesn't appear to be an object issue. HelixContainerBase30x184_026tolerance_12shell.stl HelixContainerCover30x184_026tolerance_12shell.stl

I probably shouldn't have posted this as I need to retest all of this again anyway. I don't recall this being as big of an issue lately since going to newer versions. I thought the scalable-extra prime was still working but I found out the plugin hasn't been installed when I looked earlier today after reading this thread. Going to back to other versions showed that it wasn't installed there either. Maybe I was having temp issues or something when I discovered this before.

I am relatively new to 3d printing (only a year) so I don't claim to be an expert. That is only what I have observed with my Duplicator 9. I tested all of it with a print that does 4 - ~30mm cubes (whole thing only 1 layer thick) at each corner of the bed and with a line that goes along the outside edge of the bed connecting them and an X pattern connecting them to a 40mm cube in the center. I would get some of the outside lines not connecting because it would start printing but nothing would come out until about 10mm or so. Shorte travels around 30mm or so was fine. I had to tweak the scalable extra prime to get the lines all connected. Cura was doing long travels quite a few times. I am trying to find that STL that I used. EDIT: Thanks btw...I will check those settings and try them.

I think so. But that changes depending on how far (or how much time more specifically) is taken before it starts again. If it only travels 10mm, there won't be much oozing. If it were traveling 200mm, there would be a lot lost. I used the scalable extra prime plugin in Cura which allows a variable amount depending on distance. You set a minimum travel and and a maximum travel, and a then give it a length for the maximum distance. It then scales that maximum length from the minimum and maximum travel. It works well but I don't see it in the 4.0 beta and don't recall it in later 3.x versions either. It would be great if you could give some kind of ooze number and then cura calculates all of it based on that one number. Right now with newer Curas, you have to use a static amount with Retraction Extra Prime which is only optimal around one travel distance. I hope the plugin author of scalable extra prime gets his plugins in Cura again.

Yea. I stopped using the feature because of it. It was causing too many issues with top layers being thinner than they should be which caused them to not look as good. It sounds like it is a big change to fix it though based on previous comments by people familiar with the Cura code. On the bright side though... Gyroid infil is working really well... especially if you increase the infill line width to 0.5mm for a 0.4mm nozzle to give the infill a little extra thickness.

I only knew enough to modify an already existing script. I don't know if the feature you are asking is possible or not. I do get notified when the pause is issued through Telegram. That works for me. I usually get to it within a minute or two.

I did disable the video stream in 3.6 and the leak still happens. It doesn’t appear to be the displaying of the video.

I still get the memory leak also in 3.5 and 3.6 with updated plugin (Windows 10 64bit, latest Microsoft updates). I just close Cura after I start a print so it doesn’t crash out or cause other apps to crash or not work when they starved for memory. With octolapse uninstalled, I don’t get the memory leak. 4.0 without octolapse has proven stable in memory too but I have a feeling once the plugin is released for that, the memory issues will come back. i submitted info on this thread or the other one and posted that I had a crash dump (forced through task manager) when memory was at an extreme, but I didn’t see a reply in the thread that anyone wanted to see it. I can do that again if needed. There should be a tool to view the crashdump and see what is taking up all the memory. I recall a utility like that a long time ago when I was doing dev work where I worked but it has been a long time ago and don’t remember any of it.

You rock! Thanks. I needed the Z-Offset. Excited to test 4.0.

That worked. Thanks for taking the time to explain that. Google searching didn't turn up anything. It would be beneficial that if you set an abject to be a modifier of settings for that modifier object to then not snap to the build plate when you move it. I like the default for objects to snap to the build plate (Automatically drop models to the build plate) so that I don't forget to do that but it really doesn't make sense for modifiers to snap to the build plate in my experience so far. Right now ever time I move the modifier block it resnaps to the build plate unless I disable that setting. I have to disable the snap to buildplate when I use a modifier like this so that I can position it where I need and then remember to go back in and re-enable the snap to buildplate.