Requests for next version

[chemwhite 0]

It would be really nice to have the top view and the ability to specify the layer number I am looking at (the slider on the side isn't really very usable when you have hundreds of layers). Other than that, thank you for your excellent work on this software. You seem to be much more responsive to the users that other software developers. Thanks again :-P

 

[Daid 306]

Arrow key control has been suggested for layer switching, which makes sense and I will add soon.

 

[dojan 0]

Man, I'm out of the loop for a few months, and find everything changed. (for the better, Daid; Awesome.)

Anyway, I had a few thoughts on how to improve on the awesomeness:

I use the "Fan speed min - max" setting. My fan (not original) runs happily and very quietly at around 25 - 28 %, however it won't start at anything below 45%, and not always then. This is a problem in combination with "Fan on layer (1)" and the project planner. [edit] A simple solution would be to give the fan 1 second of full power before settling on the given percentage. [/edit, added proposed solution ]

In the project planner, I for one would like back the ability to manually place parts. I would also like the ability to override if parts are placed to close together; If printing really low parts one cm in each direction is plenty, and changing the "Machine head size" every time is tedious. I Imagine a popup saying something like

"According to the current settings, the machine head will crash into printed objects x, y, z [just pull the names of the red ones], are you sure you want to continue? Do so only if you know what you are doing."

Being able to designate a 3 dimensional machine head size comes to mind, but I don't know if that would be practical...

Also, why is the project planner in its own separate window? Couldn't we have the ordinary Cura window, and the side panel from the project planner available (collapsible?) on the right? This would be more intuitive I think, and enable a more harmonious workflow... As it is now, I find myself flipping between sometimes up to 5 Cura windows (Project planner for setting up; main window with all the settings; The progress window for slicing the next print; The currently printing window, and sometimes one of the "Expert settings" "Preferences" and "Project planner preferences" windows), which is a bit... messy. I have dedicated a computer with dual monitors, and I still have to flip back and forth a lot.

Further, is there any way of looking at the layers in the project planner? I can't seem to find any way of running gcode generated at some other time either, or getting at the printer controls (jogging, temp etc) without first slicing some model, and then printing that.

If I'm giving you a hard time it's only because I really like the stuff you're doing

 

 

[origamimavin 0]

i've been using Cura since just before 13-03 came out, and love it. best prints i've gotten form my machine have come from your software, so great job. i've got a couple improvement suggestions as well.

as stated above, it would be nice is the project planner was worked into the main screen. maybe nect to the load part button it could be something like 'add part.'

i've noticed in other software (i think Slic3r? i havent spent much time with other software) that there's an option to randomize the start location of each layer. i'm noticing great looking parts, but some degredation near the start part of each layer, even with retraction on. it would be nice if it would change this up a bit so any errors from the start point would be spread out more and fixed by the time the next layer was built.

guess that's it for now. amazing software, though, really great job, Daid.

 

[Daid 306]

I have a work-in-progress version that has the project planner in the main interface. It also figures out the printing order itself, and uses my new fast slicing-engine. It also allows you to drag&drop objects around the platform.

The load button is the "add" button in this interface, and you can just click&select objects, and then hit delete to remove them. This all feels pretty much as you think it would feel, natural.

 

[origamimavin 0]

sounds great, can't wait for the release to try it out!

 

[dojan 0]

Awesome! I figured you had something like that planned

I thought of something else

Under the "Speed" tab in the printing window there is "Outer wall", "Inner wall", "Fill" and "Support". (Obviously it would be nice to be able to define that before printing, although I like having real-time control; If I recall correctly that was a limitation of SF though.) But what about travel speed? And fan speed for that matter. Possible?

Although I have to say; Don't take time from working on your (probably) awesome slicer to do this stuff As an end user all I see is the gui after all, so don't listen to closely to what I have to say

 

[Daid 306]

Actually, the GUI is just as important as the engine. Skeinforge is a pretty decent (but slow) engine, however the GUI was total crap. KISSlicer is pretty awesome, but the GUI isn't that easy to use. Slic3r has a decent GUI and a ok engine. Which is why most UM people stick with Cura, because if it's ease of use.

The different speeds is a whole discussion on it's own...

 

[dojan 0]

Would it be possible to add an option to adjust the amount of extrusion separately for infill? I usually use the hexagonal infill pattern, and find that the walls are almost always under extruded.

 

[xeno 108]

I am doing some long hour prints, and I would really like to see, when the print is done, the total time it took to do the print, and the estimated time Cura thought it would take to print.

now, when the print is done, all that disappears from the statistics list.

 

[makingzone 2]

I think it could be easier if we params the wall thinkness and layer height top bottom by the number of wall Line and number of layer (botton and top) instead of param in mm (mm wich have to be a multiple of nozzle and layer height.

[Daid 306]

I think it could be easier if we params the wall thinkness and layer height top bottom by the number of wall Line and number of layer (botton and top) instead of param in mm (mm wich have to be a multiple of nozzle and layer height.

But they don't have to be a multiple of the nozzle size or the layer height. A 0.4mm nozzle can extrude 0.3 to 0.8mm lines. Cura figures out which line width to use. And the top/bottom gets rounded up to a multiple of the layer heights.

And the top/bottom thickness is very simple. You need about 0.6mm of layers to get a good solid infill, almost independent on the layer height. So 3 layers on 0.2mm layer heights fills it up, or 6 layers on 0.1mm layers. In that aspect the current setting makes total sense.

I also like that these settings are measurable, and independent of each other. They also say something about the end result and not about the process. They are a well thought out idea.

 

[lars86 42]

I would love to see separate velocity and acceleration overrides for perimeter vs infill moves.

Also, an extrusion rate multiplier for infill would be awesome.

The ability to chose the order of the perimeter/loops (ie inside to out, vice versa)

On the more "out there" side of things, I had an idea last night to try to mitigate the staircase effect on very shallow part angles. During slicing, you could assign a slope to each perimeter layer (based off the XY shift from the previous). If that slope was below a threshold, Cura could micro step the Z height for each perimeter pass. Example: layer height = 0.15; printing with 3 perimeter passes; Cura bumps the Z up 0.15 / 3 = 0.05 for the outer pass, 0.10 for the second, and finally hits the 0.15 layer height on the third. This would be for the supported case, as opposed to an overhang.

 

[greengecko 8]

Another request

It would be great to have a possibility to start t a higher layer ( for interrupted prints)

[maxtex 0]

Hi, it would be awesome if you could tune the "joris" funktion to work not only on 1-2 wall models. I always get an ugly scar if I print with 4 wall llines (1,2mm).

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/600/img1324r.jpg/

(cant get the picture to work :S)

thanks for your great work!

 

[madoverlord 0]

Two things:

1) The XZ and YZ swap feature seems to have disappeared in the latest Cura release. This was REALLY REALLY handy, especially when I was doing complex models that I had to cut into individual segments to print.

I reverted to 12.12 simply because this feature had been removed.

2) Ability to individually set top and bottom thickness. Often when I am printing multiple parts of an object to be glued together, I don't want the bottom at all, I want a hollow shell. Depending on the part, I often have to set a thick wall in order to ensure the top of the part fills in.

 

[phanc60844 0]

Is it possible to use the jog function without actually loading a model first? If not, can you add that to the list. Also would it be possible to integrate Cura with the arduino programing software so that I can monitor inputs/outputs to aid in fault finding? Not sure if it is possible already as I've not even tried it but it would be very useful

Paul

 

[glodocus 0]

Multi threading for my core i7 please !! It could speed up the GCode generation

 

[Daid 306]

Multi threading for my core i7 please !! It could speed up the GCode generation

 

Do I once again have to explain how completely idiotic this request is? Multithreading is not some magic powder that you can throw on something to make it faster. Also, if you followed anything on Cura development you would have know that the new version I've been working on is 30 to 100x faster, without multithreading.

 

[fhu 0]

Hi,

I'm somewhat new to the whole 3D printing topic so I feel I'm not really qualified yet to ask for fancy features.

However, there is one feature that I couldn't find in either kisslicer or cura that I would find most useful for certain tasks. That is the ability to print single walled features.

I imagine single walled features could either be auto detected by anaylysing the loops directly or specified in the model with single walled polygons?

This could give us even more control, printing maybe fine text, or even custom support stuctures.

I came across this while i was designing a rubber band powered plane and wanted to print the conrol surfaces from a single line profile. I couldn't find a way to do this short of writing my own gcode.

Cheers,

fhu

P.s. I really enjoy Cura. The slicer is slow but robust. Especially, it handles the not quite perfect stl files most CAD packages export much better then most. Keep up the good work

[Daid 306]

The thin wall issue is also something I handled in the new update. It was pretty high on the priority list as it's the nr2 reported problem (after speed and memory issues, which are also handled with this update)

I need to make some final tweaks, write some manual texts, and make a nice list of changes. I hope to do so before the end of next week.

 

[thomass 0]

The thin wall issue is also something I handled in the new update. It was pretty high on the priority list as it's the nr2 reported problem (after speed and memory issues, which are also handled with this update)

I need to make some final tweaks, write some manual texts, and make a nice list of changes. I hope to do so before the end of next week.

 

That sounds very good.

I look forward to the new version.

 

[rbc1225 0]

Daid, you might have seen my request in another thread but if not I thought I might post it again. I think it would be nice to have a button to push in the event you need to change filament or running out. This button would stop the printing at the current location, save it, raise the head or move the head (determined by user given input) allow the user to swap out filament, feed the filament or jog it. Then when the button is pressed again, go back to the place where the printing was left off. I hope that makes sense.

Thanks for all your hard work

 

[fhu 0]

The thin wall issue is also something I handled in the new update. It was pretty high on the priority list as it's the nr2 reported problem (after speed and memory issues, which are also handled with this update)

 

I need to make some final tweaks, write some manual texts, and make a nice list of changes. I hope to do so before the end of next week.

 

Very cool! Can't wait to try it.

Cheers,

-f

[phanc60844 0]

would it be possible to automatically reduce the print speed on tall thin objects? If I try to print something tall then invariably I have to gradually reduce the speed as the height increases otherwise the print either wobbles and falls over or is knocked off the table by the nozzle. Reducing the speed part way through means I cant leave the machine alone or to start it off on a very slow speed and leave it at that. You could have a box where you could either input a minimum base size or a % ratio of base to height. Then another box for the % reduction in speed that you would want the print to finish at, then the software could reduce the speed from the original setting over the course of the print to the final reduced speed therefore negating any manual intervention and babysitting of the machine.

paul