SLM modification custom group settings

[miNKota 0]

Greetings to everyone!

I am PhD in material science at UGA  and at this moment I am developer of a custom 3D SLM printer. I would like to modify the Cura app to create g-code adopted for SLM, but to achieve it, firstly, I need to add custom setting group in Cura GUI (like default infill for example), which would be parsed further in CuraEngine and translated to the G-codeWriter. I am not a professional coder and my back is data science so, if somebody has experience with problem such I am, it would be a pleasure to get your recommendations/ideas.

[Slashee_the_Cow 274]

It depends on how complex you need it to be, in this case you would almost certainly need to make a plugin for Cura to handle the settings. Plugins aren't too hard, they're written in Python (one of the easiest programming languages to learn for someone without much experience) for the part which actually does stuff and the interface is made in QML (which is a bit convoluted, although designing a UI in a plaintext format usually is, but it's something you should be able to pick up just by looking at files for things that are already in Cura and figure out the relationship between the markup and the display). There's an example plugin available on GitHub.

 

I have no idea how different the gcode for an SLM printer would be, but if it's different enough that you need to edit CuraEngine, then you're in for a lot of pain. CuraEngine is written in C++, which is a much less friendly language than something like Python. There are far fewer built in functions to do things and you have to worry about memory management and stuff like that.

 

But if your SLM printer gcode can be mathematically/programmatically derived from FDM code then you might be able to get away with making a post-processor script. These are written in Python and can go over the gcode produced by CuraEngine line by line and change it (or just use the code created by CuraEngine as as a base then ditching it entirely and rewriting it its own way). Doing this much with it has a little bit of a learning curve but nowhere near as bad as editing CuraEngine would be (if you have no programming knowledge to start with, it would probably take you at least a few months to be able to try and change CuraEngine and not break it in the process).

 

I hope this helps.