Plug-in: Bridging Settings

[eli-auger 0]

Howdy folks, I'm hoping this post can serve as a sort of "jumping off point" to start a discussion about bridging in Cura.

I'm pretty new to the whole 3D printing world; have had my UM2 since Monday. Overall, I'm greatly impressed. I am surely jumping into the deep end, but after many lengthy discussions with my 3D printing mentor, we both agree that the bridging capability of the UM2 (with default Cura settings) leaves something to be desired:

Now, many of you may know that Cura 13.04 included a menu wherein users were able to adjust the speed at which the printhead moves while attempting to bridge:

I've been poking around a bit in the github source code for the 13.04 and 14.01 releases, and theoretically, I see no reason this functionality couldn't be brought over to the newer release, at least as a plugin, if not part of the native functionality.

So I'll leave this post with a couple of questions:

1. What was the reason this functionality was removed from recent releases of Cura?

2. Anyone with more coding knowledge than me want to chime in on what something like this would take to accomplish?

 

[illuminarti 18]

13.04 used a totally different back end slicing engine (SkeinForge); that engine had logic for handling bridges differently. The new engine that Daid developed is far faster and better in lots of ways, but is less mature and feature rich than Skeinforge was.

I saw Daid comment on something very recently that improved bridging behavior is on his list of things to do.

Meanwhile, I don't think a plugin would be very suitable, as those are just textual post-processors with very little contextual info; you wouldn't easily be able to identify the bridging part to adjust. If you knew the z-height of the bridge, then you could use something like the 'tweak at z' plugin to change the settings for those layers as a whole, but that would be a rather crude solution.

 

[Dim3nsioneer 558]

[...]

Meanwhile, I don't think a plugin would be very suitable, as those are just textual post-processors with very little contextual info; you wouldn't easily be able to identify the bridging part to adjust. If you knew the z-height of the bridge, then you could use something like the 'tweak at z' plugin to change the settings for those layers as a whole, but that would be a rather crude solution.

 

Crude yes, but it works...

@Eli: Successful bridging depends on more than just the speed. You e.g. want to have the print temperature as low as possible and the fans on full throttle. Acceleration and flow also play their part...

But I agree that bridging is something Cura might become better in. Maybe one day... but not too soon, I guess, as Daid and Nallath are currently working on a complete redesign of the GUI. I don't know if any improvements of the slicing engine are planned for Cura 14.x (x>3).