What is supposed to happen at end of print

[JasonT 2]

setup:-  latest version of Cura 3.2.1, win 7 64 bit OS, Marlin Firmware home built printer.

 

When a print completes Cura tells me its printing and still shows the option to abort.

why does it not go away and free up the application to start another print or do a reprint the only way to get back to preparing a print is to abort the completed print.

forgive me if i'm wrong but abort usually is an option to get you out the poop when things go wrong not to return to an application after a successful print.

 

on another note,

 

I'm finding some idiosyncrasies in Cura which would be nice to see addressed in the next version release.

1. no option to manually control extruder temperature

2. no override for extruder and bed temperature whilst printing, just means we have to abort and screw up a print to adjust temperature before reprinting

we need to be careful about plastic waste and saving the planet, western governments have already got their eye on the perceived waste we will create.

districts in China have already started to make printer owners licence them so they can prevent the manufacture of illicit parts ie. guns etc.

They will end up going down the road of the drones.

3. print order, Cura's slicer will never be able to understand why you would prefer to print at certain areas of the bed and not use its quickest route algorithm.

I would set large pieces at the front of the bed and as the Y travel increases the large pieces end up away from the print-head and leave the rear of the table clear for further printing.

 

You have to appreciate that many of us started to build machines before Ultimaker was born, we are talking the early reprap using printrun, pronterface etc.  the old applications used to make the settings much more accessible, i'm in a bit of a dilemma as I actually like the simplicity of Cura, i'm getting old and really like to moan.

 

I do take the hump when programmers dictate how mechanical machines should be operated, take the Airbus A320 for example - they insist they know more about the operation of an aircraft than a pilot.  it all went horribly wrong when a heavily iced aircraft required more thrust on takeoff to clear the runway only to have the aircraft's computer decide it was not appropriate and throttled back every time the flight crew demanded more thrust.  You guys at Ultimaker are always going to come up against old gits who cant use settings they used to have and love.

 

 

[nallath 1,124]

Well, in this case we just put most (eg; 95-99%) of our time into optimising Cura to work with Ultimaker machines. As printing over USB is a fickle beast at best, our latest generations of machines don't really support it (only the UMO really supports it, and even there i'd recommend getting the ulticontroller). So as a result, we just don't put any time into building features like that, as none of "our" users will benefit from it (okay, maybe a few, but you get the point. We've got other stuff to fix too)

But not all is lost; Cura is open source. There are people working on getting a few of your issues (manual control extruder temp) up and running. But the stuff that people do in their own time won't be as fast as having >5 full-time software engineers churning out features. So if you want changes, pull requests are always welcome.

 

As for the travel paths; We've looked at optimising those. Turns out that in almost all cases it costs you tons and tons of extra slicing time at a marginal improvement of the actual printing. Optimising these is only worth it if you expect to print the same g-code multiple times, which isn't a fairly common usecase.

 

Your example of the airbus does fall a bit short, as in this case the engineers are also frequently flying the plane (granted; we do "fly" Ultimaker machines, so other machines might not get the same experience). But it's not really weird that you get a different experience if you use Airbus control software on a Cessna plane. It's just impossible to make something that's perfect (or even okay-ish) for everyone.

[JasonT 2]

Thanks nallath,

i knew i was holding a rag to a bull, i am actually really impressed with cura and the fact it simply worked with a clone machine straight out of the box.

My preference would be to have you guys write software for Airbus at least it would be something bizarre like the toilet lights dimmed when you sat down as apposed to the major flight controls being sabotaged.

 

my main question was regarding the end of print procedure, is the software supposed to sit in printing mode forever.  The gcode end command surely indicates the job is done and should free up the application to allow the user to setup another job without having to abort the completed job first.

cheers

Jason

ps. thanks to all you guys for all your hard work.

[nallath 1,124]

In this case it's kinda like the flight controls that we don't use anymore. But there are people working on it, so it might be fixed. As far as staying in print mode, that's probably also because we really don't put time into fixing the USB printing (or even testing / looking into it). So it's a bug, but don't expect it to get fixed by us (eg; Ultimaker).