Cura 2.1.1 Enhancement Request

[DaHai8 74]

First off, let me briefly say I really like the clean, professional look of the new Cura and the extensive control it gives over slicing and printing. It is really nice!

I would like to request one enhancement to handle those printers, like my on, who's home position is not on the print bed.

 

I have an JG Aurora A3 printer. While not a Ultimaker, it's still a very fine printer. And I have read in the Cura 2.1 beta documentation that the intent is for every 3d printer manufacturer to have their own json machine profiles.

Right now, this is not possible for the JG Aurora A3, and other printers who's home position is not on the print bed.

There needs to be, I believe, a way to set the Print Head Home Position Offset from the origin of the print bed.

As you can see from the included photo, the print head on the A3 is about -40mm X and -40 mm Y from the origin of the 0 position on the print bed. The bed itself is 200mm x 200mm with a printable area of 180x180.

I attempted to work around this by setting the printable area to 260 x 260 so that I could include a 40mm wide non-printable area all around. In this way, auto-centering the object would still work. However, as of this release, setting the print area that large causes Cura to go into a Slicing loop.

My only work around at this point is to set the print area to 220 x 220 and include a 40mm wide unprintable area (machine_disallowed_areas) on the left a front of the print bed. However, auto-centering the object no longer works and I have to manually center it for each print.

I thought machine_platform_offset was the parameter for this, but it turns out its only for display purposes and does not affect the home position.

So, again, I'd really like the ability to set the coordinates of the print head origin different from the print origin.

thank you.

[nallath 1,124]

This needs to be fixed in the firmware, not in Cura.

Have a look at the UM2Go firmware; The home position is also outside of the build volume. As the printer can't actually print there, we define that location to be negative.

[DaHai8 74]

nallath, you and 00D00B suggestions from my original post worked great!!

Thank you both VERY MUCH!!

I really hated to mess with the firmware, and so happy I don't have to now.

You can toss this enhancement request in the circular file now.

[nallath 1,124]

You can toss this enhancement request in the circular file now.

 

Huzzah!