material inheritence and settings changes

[jaysenodell 18]

I'm sure I'm doing something incorrectly and would like to understand how to "do it right".

 

I have create definitions for my "chinese manufacturer that starts with C" filament. These are based off of the "generic" class of materials. Using the material settings plugin I've been overridding setting for speed, temp, etc to get better prints for each variation of the filament. I seem to be running into an issue with "base settings" based on how I'm making these changes.

• The move to 5.7 seems to have made it so the material overrides are not consistently applying when I switch materials. This may be because...
• I did not make a "master class" for maufacturer/pla|abs|petg in which to set my globals. This means I do not have consistency in my individual definitions. 

 

So my simple quesiton: refresh my understading on the best way to manage custom profiles based on material that are CONSISTENTLY applied when you select the material for printing? The key elements that I'm trying to ensure for the material are:

• Temps for printing and build plate(general and initial layers with count for initial layers)
• Flow rates for intial, outer wall, infill.
• Cooling ... fans speen with initial speed and regular speed at height/layer
• All the print speed settings becuase slashee has converted me to a slow, contoled jerk (you'd be surprised how much different blue, white and red behave with "c word" PLA and speed is the answer)(and I bet she's giggling at the way I said that)

 

My instinct is that I need a "c-word generic PLA" that drives red, blue, white, black, etc and make global changes there. Then tweak for color specific "things". But does the inheritance work if I update the generic to a new print speed later? 

 

Hope this makes sense. Probably not. If not let me know and I'll try again. 

[Slashee_the_Cow 493]

I think it makes vague sense. I also know I'm not the one to answer this.

@ahoeben, you're up.

[jaysenodell 18]

If vague let me illistrate with my actual throught process

 

material jaysen_pla inherits generic_pla {
	temp 195;
	initial temp 200;
	buid plate temp 50;
	initial build plate temp 60;
	speed 80;
	initial speed 20;
	
}

material c-word_pla_red inherits jaysen_pla {
	initial speed 15;
	enable jerk control true;
	jerk accel 5;
}

material c-word_pla_blue inherits jaysen_pla {
	speed 55;
	initial flow 110;
}

 

The idea being that if I change a setting in jaysen_pla, c-word_pla_red and c-word_pla_blue get that setting updated unless they explicitly override it.

 

Realisticaly, I need to have something that is jaysen_start that is infront of the jaysen_pla to limit the printer stupid defaults. Maybe that is a rewrite of the printer definition to limit the speeds*?

 

*Dang you @Slashee_the_Cow! here I am trying to slow this thing down when everyone else is trying to go faster! See what you've done? See!?! 

[Slashee_the_Cow 493]

19 hours ago, jaysenodell said:

*Dang you @Slashee_the_Cow! here I am trying to slow this thing down when everyone else is trying to go faster! See what you've done? See!?! 

Hey, I keep telling people to slow down. So in my book, you're a victory story.

 

19 hours ago, jaysenodell said:

Realisticaly, I need to have something that is jaysen_start that is infront of the jaysen_pla to limit the printer stupid defaults. Maybe that is a rewrite of the printer definition to limit the speeds*?

Printer definition files have both a maximum speed (defined as machine_max_feedrate_x, machine_max_feedrate_y, machine_max_feedrate_z - and machine_max_feedrate_e if you wanna go nuts telling your extruder what it can do) and a default speed - speed_print mainly but you can set it for pretty much every specific feature type (infill, walls, outer walls and inner walls separately... I highly recommend you check @ahoeben's convenient list if you want to get that neurotic).

 

Probably not the S1 Pro but have seen reports of the E3V3SE ignoring speed/acceleration set in the gcode and just going fast on its own. The solution there is to manually turn down the limits on the printer's control panel.

 

However the default speed can be overridden by a speed specified by the material, although I don't think (haven't tried) setting something higher than the maximum printer speed. Whether it does this is controlled by a setting in the quality profile: if you don't have the Material Settings plugin installed, then your option is pretty limited:

If the ƒ_x button is there, then you have the temperature hard coded in the profile. Click that and it'll automatically set itself based on the material:

If you do have the Material Settings plugin installed, then you're doing it right, and you can also set more than just the base speed based on the material profile - right click on any of the settings that should be in the material profile and click "Use value from material":

Yes the replacement pattern is a bit long. Doesn't matter. Point is that it's there.

 

Now for the part you want: Inheritance.

If it can be done, I don't know how. If you duplicate a material it says it's "linked" but changes don't seem to propagate. It just seems to create a copy of the material's XML file (what, you thought Cura would be easy on you and use incredibly picky JSON for everything?) and copies the values instead of using references.

 

...so by the sounds of it you're probably better off making your own custom definition. Initially I did it because Cura didn't have a definition for the E3V2Neo. Then the E3V3SE. Now I do it because the profiles for Creality machines seem to be maintained by clown dentists with rabies. PM me if you want help with that, they're secrets that in the wrong hands could do more harm than good.

[jaysenodell 18]

Ok. I read that through but will need to read it again a dozen more times. Let me validate the one thing that is distracting me...

5 hours ago, Slashee_the_Cow said:

If you do have the Material Settings plugin installed, then you're doing it right, and you can also set more than just the base speed based on the material profile - right click on any of the settings that should be in the material profile and click "Use value from material"

I need to do this for every setting that I override in the material definition? Or is this something that I need to create a custom quality profile to default to the "always use material defs" to do? 

 

I think this is what is boiling my brain right now. 

[Slashee_the_Cow 493]

46 minutes ago, jaysenodell said:

I need to do this for every setting that I override in the material definition? Or is this something that I need to create a custom quality profile to default to the "always use material defs" to do? 

Well you don't need to do it for all of them, but no, you're not supposed to create a new quality profile, just set them to use the value from the material in the profiles you do use. The idea then is that you could use the same profile for - for example - PLA and PETG and not have to give a stuff about making sure you don't roast your PLA or under-retract your PETG because it's drawing from the values in the material.

 

...how many things were you planning on changing, anyway? About the only things that are usually material dependent are temperature, speed and retraction.

[jaysenodell 18]

remember I'm using c-word filament becuase ... I'm stupid and like to keep my issues limited to one vendor!

 

I've had to change initial layer flow between petg and pla. Also the colors in pla seem to want different flow rates on iniial layer to get stuck on the plate but I need to keep walls "lower" on the high flow needing red and white as it seems to keep the elephant footing down but gives me lots of stick via the rest of the layer. 

 

But now I'm wondering how much I'm really tweaking each of these if the material settings aren't actually populating between meterial changes. I did create a new "overall profile" for the big tubes as so much of that was specific to the 1.0 noz and increased speed/layer thinckness. 

 

Well shoot. Now I need to open a project and see what all changed when I change materials. 

[Slashee_the_Cow 493]

1 minute ago, jaysenodell said:

Well shoot. Now I need to open a project and see what all changed when I change materials. 

Make sure you update the quality profile in that project to use the values from the material and save the profile before swearing incessantly when it doesn't work.

 

4 minutes ago, jaysenodell said:

Also the colors in pla seem to want different flow rates on iniial layer to get stuck on the plate but I need to keep walls "lower" on the high flow needing red and white as it seems to keep the elephant footing down but gives me lots of stick via the rest of the layer.

I run shiny PLA a bit hotter than normal (215° instead of 210°) but I've never had to make changes for different colours of  regular PLA. I've had to change my storage system because things can get a bit crowded when you have twelve different colours of PLA in stock at once, plus a couple each of PETG and TPU.

 

8 minutes ago, jaysenodell said:

remember I'm using c-word filament becuase ... I'm stupid and like to keep my issues limited to one vendor!

It's alright. You can say it. You use cheap filament. It's nothing to be ashamed of.

 

I probably don't have as much choice as you though. Amazon AU doesn't have nearly as much stuff as Amazon US, especially when I filter it to things with prime shipping, because a) %#@$ paying delivery costs, it's expensive as hell here, no matter what you order from where and b) Amazon customer service (at least in my experience) is second to none when I have problems with stuff and need to return it.

 

Meaning given how many brands are either on my blacklist (I'm looking at you, Voxelab and CC3D) or my "seems a bit too <c-word> to be trustworthy" aversion (seriously, is someone going to expect me to buy this?)

...I'm probably limited to less than half the brands available. Although I get all my PLA from one brand (except some shiny stuff), PETG from that one or another, and TPU from that "another".

 

Oh, and if you're curious:

• Voxelab: Killed my E3V2Neo. Clogged about an hour in to a three hour print, about ten minutes after I'd stopped watching it and gone somewhere else. Realised it was clogged relatively easily when I took out the Bowden tube and the end of looked like this:
  
  Cut that bit off, obviously. Tried printing a couple of times immediately after I'd done that and it just clogged within a couple of minutes both times, fortunately only enough that I could take the tube out and pull out the clog with tweezers. What I didn't know was that while the printer had been dancing around in the air for two hours at over 200°, the rubber boot that goes around the hot end and the top of the nozzle had practically disintegrated. When I switched to a different filament that actually worked (although I just realised I need to get to that in a little bit) and printed the thing which took three hours (successfully) because the boot was loose it had covered the whole hot end in filament, started trying to clean it off immediately but when it started to set it broke the wires to the thermistor so the printer couldn't read the temperature and would refuse to do anything.
• CC3D: No gory photos, unfortunately. But clogged the hot end so badly nothing I could do would unclog it and since I didn't fancy trying to change the hot end on a pretty new E3V3SE so I demanded a refund on the filament and to cover the cost of a replacement printer.
  
  Also they win the award for stupidest spool design in the world: between the two sides is just a solid plastic tube, completely round on the inside. When I was trying to print with it the vibrations actually moved it down and then off the filament holder on the printer (which has a stopper on the end) and hit the bed... hard. Not great, especially when there's no way whatsoever to adjust the bed's height (the E3V3SE just relies on fancy ABL and has a force gauge under the plate to determine the Z offset based on how far down the head has to move for the probe to put enough pressure on the bed, although you can adjust the Z offset manually, and you can adjust the values it gets from its ABL, but that doesn't help when something has smacked the front half of the bed with the force of a full spool of filament).

Dishonourable mention goes to Comgrow: Filament hasn't hurt my printer, but the one spool of their filament I tried, the first half was fine but the second was so tangled it was beyond a joke. I ended up printing myself a spool holder and got some tubing to run the filament through to the printer and put the spool holder next to me so I could regularly turn and unspool a bit more manually. First time I noticed it was a problem was when the printer had such trouble pulling a little more filament off the spool I got a layer shift of about 5cm. And at one point there was a knot in the filament. How the kangaroo-$%&@ing-*$#! do you get a knot in your spool of filament?

[jaysenodell 18]

Because the creator of my printer provides filament and they barked at me running a different brand I've been sticking with the c-word filament. It isn't cheap unless you but it in stupid quantities. Once I feel I have a better understanding of how to make things work without having to dial the slashee phone, I will likely start trying other brands. But sparkle booger string... nah. 

 

back to the topic...

 

So open a new project, create a quality profile, go to each setting that has a material override and pull set it to use the material setting. What happens if I don't have an override for that setting in a material def? just gets ignored? 

[Slashee_the_Cow 493]

6 hours ago, jaysenodell said:

So open a new project, create a quality profile, go to each setting that has a material override and pull set it to use the material setting. What happens if I don't have an override for that setting in a material def? just gets ignored? 

That seems like the sort of thing you should be more than experienced enough to just test by playing with settings, you know.

 

But to answer the question, having just played with settings, it seems to be pulling some sorts of defaults from the extruder stack . Where they come from I don't know.