0-255 scales setting idea

[Mulakulu 1]

After getting comfortable with programming moves in gcode, I wish it was possible to change percentage scales in Cura to the standard 0-255 scales. At least on scales that use 0-255 in gcode of course. This is so I don't have to write 1.563% fan speed for cooling if I want M106 S4. It can't be that hard to implement either, since going from 1.563 to 4 is surprisingly harder to do than going from 4 to 4.

[Slashee_the_Cow 276]

The feature request form is here, feel free to submit it.

 

Personally I don't think it would be adopted - most people (even those doing 3D printing) don't think in base 2 so it would be a very niche feature. Not all printers use 0-255 for their fan scale, also: some go from 0 to 1 so you have to give it the percentage as a fraction.

 

Also to the best of my knowledge there's only about four commands in Marlin that use a 0-255 scale and Cura doesn't have support for three of them:

• M42 - Set pin state (designed for connecting custom hardware which doesn't natively support Marlin so you can control it manually by setting the pin state, and PWM (pulse width modulation) pins are set on a scale of 0-255)
• M106 - Set fan speed (as mentioned above, doesn't always go from 0-255)
• M150 - Set RGB(W) colour (used for controlling the colour of case lights)
• M256 - LCD brightness (controls the brightness of the printer's screen, some will use caps like 0-100 but typically 0 is the dimmest and 255 is the brightest)

It would be possible to use a post-processing script to convert a fan speed set in Cura on a 0-255 scale to an absolute value (you'd just have to enter it as a fraction in Cura because the fan speed is capped at 100%, so your example would be to set it to 0.4 for S4 or 0.138 for S138).

 

9 minutes ago, Mulakulu said:

It can't be that hard to implement either

Software development rule #8: No matter how hard you think something will be to implement, it will be harder than that to implement. AFAIK Cura currently only has two modes for fan scale: input * 2.55 for most printers or input ÷ 100 for printers that use a 0-1 fan scale. Which one it uses is based on the printer's definition file, so it's attached to the hardware side of things, not a software setting.

[Mulakulu 1]

On 2/28/2024 at 2:50 PM, Slashee_the_Cow said:

It would be possible to use a post-processing script to convert a fan speed set in Cura on a 0-255 scale to an absolute value (you'd just have to enter it as a fraction in Cura because the fan speed is capped at 100%, so your example would be to set it to 0.4 for S4 or 0.138 for S138).

Thank you for the idea! I should really learn how to do this. I am currently using an external python program to do my post processing, and it would be nice to just have it built in. I'll look into it 🙂