Managing GCode vs 3mf

jaysenodell · February 11

Not about print qualtiy exactly, but ensuring prints are always what you thing they are...

I'm apparently turning into to nozzel swapper since I'm too cheap to buy 6 printers (0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 2x1.0 would be ideal). Right now I push everything through octoprint which cura handels beautifully. The one thing that I keep doing is "losing" the nozzel size based gcode. Mostly because I'm using a file structure that is project based and all the gcode for a part lands in the same folder. Cura just uses an STL name for the file which overwrites the last gcode I put there. This isn't much of a problem as I still have the 3mf files and can just make the adjustments. This gets a bit annoying when I need to make more advanced "nozzle diamater" adjustments for temp, speed, but that's on me to manage the nozzle size profiles better (I think).

I was thinking that I need to adopt some type of naming/folder structure that has nozzel/material/etc included to help me manage the aparently larger number of variations I'm going to have for my parts. I'm pretty sure this is a "Jaysen is stupid" problem, but I would welcome some insight from more experianced people making "small scale production" runs.

Thanks in advance.

Slashee_the_Cow · February 12

I save my gcode files to my computer and then upload them to OctoPrint manually, so I save them with whatever filename I want.

Something that might be a bit easier is a a plugin called Printjob Naming (you don't need to sign in if you just get it from the Marketplace inside Cura). Then you can just go to Extensions > Custom Printjob Naming > Set name options and include a {machine_nozzle_size} field in either the prefix or postfix.