Hello,
I recently purchased a Matterhackers Pulse XE. It's an upgrade from my previous Monoprice. It was nice that there was a Monoprice definition included in Cura, but there isn't for the Pulse XE. So I wrote one.
It's probably still overly complicated and I'm still working out the kinks. I still have to do some more testing. But I'll happily share once its tested.
You can get the Pulse XE with an E3D lite extruder or an E3D V6 extruder. I wrote (started to write) definitions for both. The problem is that the definitions are essentially the same, I don't see a place to capture that the V6 can handle hotter temperatures than the lite.
Question 1: Shouldn't that temperature capability be in the extruder definition? Where is it located?
Question 2: I wrote definitions for both extruders, but I don't know how to define a way to allow a selection of which extruder is attached. It seems to mostly be how many extruders are attached. How do I fix that?
This one seems less likely to be captured and something I'm not as worried about, but; the extruders can have different nozzles on them (regular culprits) - brass, hardened steel, ruby - which really changes the durability for some filaments. If there is a place that should be captured, I'll add it, but I didn't see anything like that. I did understand that I could do material exclusion lists. (I doubt I will write 6 extruder definitions (v6 & lite vs brass, steel, and ruby) and then build exclusion lists from that.)
Question 3: Is there a way to handle different nozzles other than material exclusion lists?
Question 4: The printhead silhouette - should I be looking at the print head from the X-axis or the Y-axis? Those are different silhouettes.
Question 5: If in the printhead silhouette the nozzle is the origin, what is the positive/negative X and positive/negative Y directions?
While I still prefer Cura as a tool, the mattercontrol print manager does autoleveling during the print; rewriting some of the g-code commands and breaking them into different Z heights while printing. That produces a better print than cura currently does without printing through mattercontrol. The Pulse XE doesn't really have a way to level the bed other than with software. I've added in the
M420
into the initialization code with a valid matrix in the firmware but that doesn't work nearly as well as the mattercontrol tweaking the g-code as it prints. I assume that cura isn't going to adopt something crazy like this?