Estimated print time is wrong.

You_N_Me · September 1, 2021

Hey, i was wondering if there's a way to get the estimated time to more accurately represent what the print will be.

I've had cura show me 18 hours on a print which took 22+

Even small prints, ones which say 20 minutes in cura take an hour or more. It's extremely frustrating that I can't plan print times.

I'm using an anycubic mega x.

nallath · September 1, 2021

Often it's because the acceleration / jerk is not setup correctly in Cura. It's an issue that people run into more often. See https://3dprinting.stackexchange.com/questions/4066/estimating-printing-time-from-cura

We don't make the profiles for third party printers (they are contributed to us by community members) so we can't guarantee that the numbers they contain are actually correct.

GregValiant · September 1, 2021

This is not the same as seeing the "correct" time in the Cura window, but maybe it's something you can use.

I made a request for a plugin about a year ago and one of the contributors to Cura adapted an existing one and came up with "ShowProgress.py" that I'll attach as a zip file. I like it because it has a "speed factor" in it for the print time. If Cura tells you a print will take 1 hr and you know from experience that it will take 1.25 hours then the fudge factor would be 1/1.25 = 0.8.

If your firmware supports M117 then "1/240 | ET 4H03M" will appear on the LCD at layer changes. The Cura "TIME:" line is not affected and will always show the print time that Cura calculated in total seconds.

(I run Windows so adjust accordingly for Linux or Mac) Unzip the file and copy it to:

"...\Ultimaker Cura 4.x.x\plugins\PostProcessingPlugin\scripts. It will show up as a Post Processing Script the next time you start Cura. I found that for my printer a Fudge Factor of 1.1 works well. I don't see it when I slice, but it shows up on the LCD during a print and counts down to the finish while the layers count up.