Max Print speed setting in Cura 5.6.0

[nealet 0]

Hi

I have a Creality Ender 5 S1 and Im using Cura 5.6.0 to slice my files. I'm new to this and I'm busy experimenting to see the effects of changes to settings.

My printer claims to be able to print up to 250mm/s but Cura (In Custom or other mode) will not allow me to set the speed faster than 150mm/s without the field going yellow. I understand that "yellow" is supposed to mean; "you can do this but its not advisable".

However, when i use speed settings in the "yellow" zone going faster and faster but staying beneath the "red" zone, I notice that the "print times" stop decreasing when I enter the yellow zone. ON inspection of the Gcode the speed settings "F", do not increase so my yellow zone experiments are not working.

I found a settings plugin on market place and installed it (By Ahoeben of filedofview) but I cant seem to get the "side bar" it talks about.

My question is; how can i Increase my speed settings in Cura up to the max limit of my printer?

Thank you and kind regards

[Slashee_the_Cow 414]

I'll get to the how (or at least my best guess at it) in a second, but first a warning:

 

You shouldn't. Only materials which are designed to be printed that fast, like high speed PLA, should be printed that fast. Most spools of filament will have details on the side of the idea printing settings for them, and I've found your average PLA tends to say about 65mm/s. If you're printing too fast the material won't have nearly enough time to set and it'll end up being dragged behind the nozzle (or just pulled out of position in general). It almost certainly will negatively affect your print results.

 

My Ender-3 V3 SE can print at up to 250mm/s and accelerate at up to 4000mm/s². Even printing at a slower speed, with the fan on full bore, sometimes the acceleration when it finishes a move and does a travel move can pull the filament with it resulting in the model being stretched out at that point. I never have the acceleration set to over 1000mm/s² to prevent this (and sometimes it ignore the values in the gcode file so I had to lower the maximums in the control panel of the printer).

 

Good quality print > fast print.

 

Okay, now if you're really sure you want to print as fast as possible:

1. By default when you set Speed > Print Speed it will do infill at that speed and everything else at half of that. You may have to enable showing all settings to get it to show up, but you'd need to change all the values to the full speed.
2. Turn on Speed > Enable Acceleration Control and set it all to as high as your printer is capable of. You might have to look up the specs on Creality's website (although in the case of the E3V3SE it's not that simple - the website says 5000mm/s², the manual says 2500mm/s² and the printer itself reports 4000mm/s²).
3. Turn on Speed > Enable Jerk Control and set that - there isn't really a maximum figure to go by. It's how much the speed is allowed to change instantly at a corner - the higher the speed, the less it has to decelerate, but it also negatively affects adhesion (which is often at its worst at corners because it needs to set before the nozzle starts dragging it in a different direction. It also has the risk of causing vibrations which if they're bad enough can move one of the stepper motors a step or two causing layer shift (where it starts printing layers slightly off from where it had been printing all the others). For my setup the "yellow zone" is anything above 50mm/s but the default is 8mm/s and if I'm doing something which might wobble or requires high precision I'll turn it down to 4mm/s.

And a couple of things to bear in mind if it's not increasing the F values in the gcode file:

• Ignore the F values on G1 moves which only have an E value. That's just setting the extrusion rate, or retracting/unretracting.
• 250mm/s is fast enough to cross the bed in literally less than a second.
• In many cases, there's only so fast it can go because it'll reach the end of the move before it can accelerate to the maximum speed, given it'll have to slow down at the end, so there's no point setting the feed rate (the F values in moves in gcode) any higher than that.

If I may close with a screenshot from the page on Creality's website for your printer:

You're most likely doing typical printing yourself.

[GregValiant 1,344]

From the Ender 5 S1 definition file:

        "speed_print": { "value": 80.0 },

 

From the Creality Base definition file:

        "machine_max_feedrate_x": { "value": 200 },
        "machine_max_feedrate_y": { "value": 200 },
        "machine_max_feedrate_z": { "value": 35 },
        "machine_max_feedrate_e": { "value": 50 },

        "machine_max_acceleration_x": { "value": 2000 },
        "machine_max_acceleration_y": { "value": 2000 },
        "machine_max_acceleration_z": { "value": 100 },
        "machine_max_acceleration_e": { "value": 5000 },
        "machine_acceleration": { "value": 1000 },

 

None of that tells you what the actual Max Feedrates are in the printer.  You need to send an M503 and view the response.

This is a snippet from the M503 response for my Ender 3 Pro.  

echo:Maximum feedrates (units/s):
echo:  M203 X200.00 Y200.00 Z45.00 E50.00
echo:Maximum Acceleration (units/s2):
echo:  M201 X3000 Y3000 Z100 E1000

echo:Acceleration (units/s2): P<print_accel> R<retract_accel> T<travel_accel>
echo:  M204 P1000.00 R1000.00 T1000.00
echo:Advanced: S<min_feedrate> T<min_travel_feedrate> B<min_segment_time_us> X<max_xy_jerk> Z<max_z_jerk> E<max_e_jerk>
echo:  M205 S0.00 T0.00 B20000 X20.00 Y20.00 Z0.40 E5.00

 

The print speed comes into play on large models with a lot of straight lines.  If a model is small or has fine details, the nozzle spends a lot of time accelerating and decelerating so the average speed (and consequently the print time) won't vary beyond a certain point.

[Slashee_the_Cow 414]

From the Creality website:

So the definition file should have an override for the max feed rate, but doesn't.

[nealet 0]

Thank you to both Slashee_the_Cow and GregValient. I sincerely appreciate the effort you went to with your answers and support. The tinkering and testing I have been doing, is showing that the best quality is coming from speeds way below the max and that there are so many factors and variables that are involved.

Thank you Again 🙂

[GregValiant 1,344]

"...there are so many factors and variables that are involved"

You said a mouthful there!  Even something that seems simple, like changing from red to white, can require slightly different settings.

There was a poster on Reddit who attempted to build some sort of speed demon Ender.  They were printing at 300mm/sec or something and the print looked like a pile of poop.  They didn't have near enough cooling capability for what they were trying to do.

"Everything affects Everything" and "Every print needs it's own love".  Patience and getting a slice just right will save more time than attempting to print at 1000.  FDM is not a fast process.

Edited February 29 by GregValiant

[Slashee_the_Cow 414]

29 minutes ago, GregValiant said:

There was a poster on Reddit who attempted to build some sort of speed demon Ender.  They were printing at 300mm/sec or something and the print looked like a pile of poop.

Were they trying to print this? 💩

 

*brain starts ticking*

I don't have any brown filament in stock... never mind.

[GregValiant 1,344]

I DO NOT want to see what you are using for a model.