[How to stop USB plugin grabbing printer?]

Thanks for the reply.

OK, bit of a pain though as I have to remove it every time I update Cura. Would be somewhat nicer to have a preference that simply disables the plugin.

[How to stop USB plugin grabbing printer?]

So, I want to use Cura to slice but I want to use another application (e.g. S3D, pronterface, etc.) to actually print. How do I stop Cura grabbing the printer it sees on /dev/ACM0? Thanks.

[Why does Cura 2.5's layer view want OpenGL 4.1 when S3D works great with 2.1?]

Thanks for the reply. I think I understand what you're saying.

[Why does Cura 2.5's layer view want OpenGL 4.1 when S3D works great with 2.1?]

It's nice that Cura 2.5 has a new layer view but why does it require OpenGL version 4.1?

I am stuck with OpenGL 2.1 and S3D's layer view still looks really nice. If S3D can do it, why not Cura?

[Beta testing Cura 2.5 | Closed.]

Hello beta testers,

I have contributed some new features that are in 2.5 and thought it would be a good idea if I say a few words about what those features are and how they are used.

Expand Skins Into Infill

This new infill setting gives you the ability to specify that skin layers are expanded so that they extend further into areas of infill. This is particularly useful when you have a horizontal surface with other features (walls, etc.) on top and sparse infill below.

Up till now you were forced to have very dense infill to avoid the holes that often appeared where a horizontal surface and a wall (above) met. There are settings to specify how much the skins should be expanded and also how much they should be shrunk before expanding. This avoids expanding narrow areas of skin that lie next to walls that are not vertical.

Minimum Infill Area

Another infill setting that allows you to specify that areas of infill smaller than the given area are replaced with skin.

Top/Bottom Line Directions & Infill Line Directions

This settings let you specify a list of integer directions (angles) that are used cyclically as the layers progress for those patterns that make sense (i.e. line, zig zag). The list syntax is numbers separated by commas and surrounded by square brackets. Empty lists mean just use the default values which are 45 and 135 degrees. When to use them? Well, for example, I have a part that I want the zigzag infill to be as strong as possible in one direction so I use [45, 0, 135, 0] which makes every other infill layer be in a N direction and the other layers alternate between NE and SE.

Retract Before Outer Wall

In the travel section, enabling this option will force travel moves that are going to an outer wall to use retraction. This reduces the chance of the nozzle dragging plastic to the wall when combing.

Improved Spiralize Mode

The spiralize mode has been rewritten. It now works harder to produce a smooth spiral which (given a suitable model) will produce a watertight end result (good for vases!)

If you have any problems using these features, please open a thread and if you find bugs, please open an issue on github.

[[Cura 2.4] "Initial Layer Speed" independent of "Wall Speed" ?]

Hi,

In the speed settings, set the number of slower layers to be > 0. It will speed up over the first N layers.

[curaengine.exe has stopped working]

Hi, I think you're going to need to provide more info about your problem. Can you please look in the log file and see if there are any relevant messages?

Have you tried using different settings? maybe there is a particular setting or combination of settings that triggers the failure.

Does this occur with all models or just some models? If the latter, what's the difference between the models that succeed and those that fail?

[Cura 2.4 spiralize bug]

Known bug, set the outer wall wipe distance to 0 to stop it doing that.

[2.4 Beta - what happens to the spiralize feature?]

You made me curious, what is it you changed to improve it ?

The two main differences are:

1 - it now ensures (or at least tries to!) that the start point of each layer follows on from the end of the last layer in the direction of the spiral. Should be no more gaps between where one layer ends and the next starts.

2 - to avoid a kink where one layer ends and the other starts, it now smoothly blends the x/y coordinates of each layer with the coordinates of the previous layer.

As I said before, I am hoping this will get some good testing and I will receive feedback (both +ve and -ve).

Cheers,

Mark

PS - I don't actually have a big interest in the spiralization function but it's always nice to fix problems and make improvements. I have some other contributions that have been accepted into 2.5 that I am far keener to use. That's another story...

[2.4 Beta - what happens to the spiralize feature?]

Hi,

Yes, you can expect the spiralize to work quite a lot better in 2.5. As a test, I have just printed out a randomvase_2 in PETG and it looks stunning. Furthermore, it's completely watertight (you can actually use it as a vase!)

I would be grateful if when the 2.5 betas appear (or if you can build from the git repo) that you try out whatever models you wish to spiralize and if there any problems post here or better still open an issue at https://github.com/Ultimaker/CuraEngine

Cheers,

Mark

[feature add: angle for top/bottom internal layer generation]

If I understand your issue correctly, there could be a solution arriving soon. We're currently working on a feature that expands skin layers when they lie under perimeters because that makes a better job when you have walls above low density infill. The feature also includes the ability to shrink narrow areas of skin such as you have in the image above.

[OS Causing Significant Print Quality Difference?]

I had that in the past with Octoprint running on a Raspberry Pi Model B (first generation). It worked fine for most prints, but the hardware could not keep up with the load for detailed prints.

Yes, I have found the same. Octoprint on a Pi 2 definitely reduces print quality because it can't ship the gcodes out fast enough (that was to a Kossel Mini using Marlin). Printing the same gcode direct from S3D on a Linux laptop gave noticeably better results.

[Z-axis not working with Duet Wifi Firmware]

Hi, your M566 is setting the Z jerk to 24mm/min, is that right? Seems very low to me but I am not familiar with that machine.

[Printing small letters]

Hello Folks, I am new to Cura (and this forum) but I just thought I would mention a new Cura feature that can improve the surface quality when you have raised letters. The Cura master branch now has a setting called "Minimum Infill Area" which specifies a lower limit of the size of an area of infill (in mm^2). Areas of infill smaller than this will be replaced with skin.

The rational behind this feature is to reduce the likelyhood of the skin being segmented when small features (like letters, lines, etc.) are raised above the skin surface. So if the skin can be printed in one segment that extends under the raised features rather than a bunch of segments that surround the infill below the raised features then the visual quality of the surface is improved. YMMV.

[different layer thickness in one print ...]

Yes, I know that S3D can because I have S3D and already do that using their multiple processes scheme but for various reasons I have come to hate S3D and so I am moving to Cura instead. I'm getting good results for all of my parts but I have one part that benefits from being sliced with thicker layers on the bottom and thinner layers at the top.

So Cura devs, is there any chance that layer height can be made mesh specific in the future or is there some fundamental reason why it cannot be done? Perhaps I need to look into what that would entail. That's one of the major advantages of Cura over S3D, it's open source and so can be tweaked by anyone.

[different layer thickness in one print ...]

I tried doing what is suggested above but in Cura master branch the layer thickness setting cannot be set per mesh. It is a global used for all meshes. So is this actually possible?

Thanks.