Cool had lift setting?

[shadowfiend 9]

Hi gang,

I would like to try an experiment with the cool head lift feature, where the Z platform stays put at the current layer height and just moves to the side to allow cooling.

I think that this may be better because it always leaves a blob of plastic as the Z platform drops down. Also the X Y movemet is much faster than the Z and can usually be fast enough to stop strining.

Another thing I want to experiment with is a wipe tower that is printed at an ajustable speed to alow the main part time to cool. I will attempt to do this by hacking the Gcode but I do realise that it is not an easy thing to do.

Please tell me what you think and if you have any sugestions on how to achieve ither of these things.

Many thanks.

Ian.

 

[gr5 2,265]

The wipe tower is trivial and easy - just add it in CAD or make a seperate tower in cad and place next to your part with cura and choose "print all at once" in tools menu.

For the sideways motion on "cool head lift" that would be a great test. I also expect some improvement but note that while it is sitting there over to the side it keeps extruding. Even with retraction. Maybe cool head lift needs extra retraction? That won't work either. It works for a second or so but then the pla heats up and expands and pressure pushes the pla out the nozzle and you get a short string. Then when it is done with cool head lift it goes back and the string gets tacked onto the side of your part.

Anyway sideways *only* motion on cool head lift is trivial. Just remove the Z portion of the G0 or G1 commands in that part of the gcode.

So for example change

G0 X10 Y12 Z33

to

G0 X10 Y12

 

[shadowfiend 9]

Hi Gr5,

Thanks for your reply, I tried the suggestions you made and found that you were right ;c)

Although there was no vertical spike left on the part, the oozing started to happen and a big mess resulted.

So I did a couple of tests with the wipe tower (print all at once enabled) and noticed a few things. Although this works much better there is room for improvement.

As the slicer is optimised for the fastest print time, the nozzle may (and often does) print 2 layers on the same part, resulting in overheating and curling in some cases. Also, unless a large wipe tower is used there is no way to control how much time is spent away from the main part for cooling.

So based on these findings I am looking to try the following:-

Find a way to change the time spent on the wipe tower, whilst maintaining the speed setting for the main part. I think this would be beneficial because a smaller wipe tower would waste less material.

Find a way to make the slicer go through the objects to be printed sequentially to allow even heat distribution and maximise cooling. I think Daid may have mentioned this in another thread.

I know that I could submit these ideas as feature requests, but I would rather experiment to see if these things actually work first.

Many thanks.

 

[Titus 170]

You could add 2 small wipe towers, in the order, tower1>main>tower2. Then the double layers will be on the towers in stead of the main print I guess.

Or you could edit the Gcode so that before every z hop, it justs travels to 0,0 and stays there for a bit.

 

[gr5 2,265]

it justs travels to 0,0 and stays there for a bit.

 

The problem with that is if it sits there for a whole second then it will start to ooze and that string will then get joined/welded back onto the part.

The 2 tower method works great however.

I want a cura feature such that you can choose quality versus speed Z moves. In speed mode it does the z move and continues with same part. In quality mode it jumps to a new part after doing the Z move.

 

[gr5 2,265]

Also in quality mode it would do all islands clockwise instead of doing the next layer up anti-clockwise and retracing over hot PLA.

 

[shadowfiend 9]

Hi Titus & Gr5,

I have tried the two tower sugestion on a dry print and this does indeed seem to work exactly as you said, I will try this on my next big print. Many thanks :c)

In an attempt to get round the very frustrating oozing issue I am going to try something a bit radical. I'm going to tilt the printer forwards off the table, in the hope that gravity may have less effect on the nozzle! I'll let you know how I get on :c)

Thanks guys :c)

 

[Titus 170]

Theoretically, printing upside down would stop the oozing

But my guess is that it will introduce different problems:(

 

[gr5 2,265]

The printer prints pretty much identically whether it is upside-down or on it's side or whatever.

The oozing will not stop - it is created by expansion due to heating. Cold(er) filament is always entering the nozzle. If you stop extruding the heat moves up a bit. More filament heats, more filament expands.

 

[Daid 306]

Also in quality mode it would do all islands clockwise instead of doing the next layer up anti-clockwise and retracing over hot PLA.

 

Planning to change that anyhow, as that's one of the things "features" that currently stand in the way of multi-threading a big part of the code.

 

[pm_dude 27]

Maybe cura could have a "tower" generator just like support. This way it could know internally that this is the place where z moves are made or could do the cooling head lift over that tower and wipe the string on it

[Dim3nsioneer 558]

Such a tower already exists for dual extrusion; it's called 'Wipe & Prime Tower'. However, it's quite hard-coded and unfortunately is called 'TYPE:SUPPORT' in the gcode which makes it really hard to separate for a plugin from real support material.

I would appreciate if this tower could be a feature for any print and not only dual extrusion prints.

 

[pm_dude 27]

And thats generated by Cura? Then that could be a good starting point at the very least. If it can get added as a simple option it "could" probably also help for multi-threading like Daid was saying if it can be the starting point for every layers.

I want to get into Cura's code at some point but can't seems to find the time to do so at the moment. I have no clue of what it looks like in there

 

[shadowfiend 9]

My feature wish list here would be:-

Sequential and editable printing order

Editable speed or time spent on each object

More control over the cool head lift like height adjustment, X, Y offset and where it would happen in the printing order

If there was the option to control the time spent on each object, we could use smaller wipe towers that would waste less material.

I really think that serious improvements are being made thanks to the support of people in this forum and of course the continued support of Daid and the Ultimaker team. I'm getting some good results thanks to the suggestions made in this thread already, almost zero strining and the two wipe tower idea is working great :C)

Many thanks.

 

[Daid 306]

If I tell you I'm working on adding "setting overrides" on sequential printing. Would that make you happier?

Note that some suggestions sound easy, until you try to figure out what kind of GUI makes sense for that.

 

[shadowfiend 9]

Hi Daid,

That sounds really interesting, I can appreciate that sometimes interface functionalitly can be more difficult to impliment than the actual feature itself.

I had an idea based on the Autodesk Maya Attribute Spreadsheet.

Object ID

 

Object name

 

Printing order

 

Shell thickness

 

Print speed

 

Bottom/top thickness

 

Fill density

 

Layer height

 

Support type

 

Platform adhesion type

 

Flow

 

Minimal layer time

 

Cooling Fan

 

1

 

Wipe tower

 

1

 

0.8

 

10

 

0.6

 

100

 

0.1

 

None

 

None

 

100

 

30

 

1

 

2

 

Bracket

 

3

 

1.2

 

30

 

0.6

 

25

 

0.1

 

Everywhere

 

None

 

98

 

0

 

0

 

3

 

cap

 

4

 

0.8

 

40

 

0.6

 

50

 

0.1

 

Everywhere

 

None

 

98

 

0

 

1

 

4

 

ball thing

 

5

 

0.8

 

50

 

0.6

 

100

 

0.1

 

Everywhere

 

None

 

98

 

0

 

1

 

5

 

Wipe tower

 

2

 

0.8

 

10

 

0.6

 

100

 

0.1

 

None

 

None

 

100

 

30

 

1

 

This is one way you could add tremendous flexibility and power to Cura, though a simple interface.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Many thanks.

Ian.

 

[shadowfiend 9]

Sorry that was supposed to be a table, it worked fine in the preview :-/

 

[gr5 2,265]

You should only have to put things into the "override table" that are different. For everything else it should take cura settings. So you should be able to leave out "platform adhesion type" if you want it the same for all the objects.

 

[shadowfiend 9]

Hi Gr5,

My line of thinking for this feature was that almost any parameter could be controled on a per object basis, in the spirit of open source access to everything. In my opinion if there is a parameter that could go in this table then it should be in here. A simple 'available columns' option would keep down clutter.

Do you see my point?

Cheers :c)

 

[Daid 306]

Hi Gr5,

My line of thinking for this feature was that almost any parameter could be controled on a per object basis, in the spirit of open source access to everything. In my opinion if there is a parameter that could go in this table then it should be in here. A simple 'available columns' option would keep down clutter.

Do you see my point?

Cheers :c)

 

Codename Pink Unicorn has about 85 settings. Sure you want 85 columns? Not sure if that gives a easy to use user-interface ;-)

 

[shadowfiend 9]

LOL :-)

As I said though, an 'available columns' preference would alow the user to select only the colunms that would be needed but would give very fine control over print settings. It also may be a unique feature not found in any other software ;c)

Thanks.

 

[gr5 2,265]

shadowfiend you are not clear at all. I dont' know if this is what you are saying but you should be able to put any of the 85 columns in there but should only include columns you need FOR THIS SPECIFIC PRINT JOB. It's a royal pain to check 85 columns times 5 rows when 95% of those values don't need to change.

So if you don't care about print speed, leave it out of the table and use the global print speed setting.

To know the column names it is simple - look at the ini file (file -> save profile...). That's how it works now - you can put almost any of those 85 parameters in the gcode.start or gcode.end and it will fill in with the appropriate Cura setting. Or the feature where you load the table can list the names of all the potential column headers.

 

[shadowfiend 9]

Hi Gr5,

Ok I may have not been very clear, I do apologise.

The way the feature could work is similar to the following.

So if you are using MS Windows and you open a folder there are a number of columns for name, date modified etc. If you right click on those column headings you get a dialogue where you can select more or fewer parameters, there is a huge list of parameters here but most people don’t need to go in there often. I’m not saying that you would need to check these every time you print, but only if you need to alter something specific for a particular job.

Also if like you say, you want a setting to be global just remove that one column and the normal Cura parameter will take over. Daid called the feature "setting overrides", so this is my humble suggestion on how it might work.

My point is that the column list could be saved in the Cura preferences and only modified if needed.

I hope this makes better sense.

Thanks.

 

[shadowfiend 9]

Hi Gr5 and Daid,

Any further thoughts on my suggestion? I might start a new thread as a feature request, perhaps if I explain myself better, people would be keen to have this feature.

I know it is a lot of work for you Daid, but I really think that it would add a lot of value to the software.

Many thanks.

 

[Daid 306]

I'm not working on that UI part yet. So I will see it when I get there. First, I'm changing a lot of engine code, so I can set settings per "mesh" (1 object can be multiple meshes, one print can be multiple objects) which gives a huge amount of flexibility. But requires quite a few changes in my engine code.

Note that this doesn't just mean the above feature can be implemented without hacks, but a lot of other things as well (including, but not limited to, one print with different infill amounts, settings per extruder for dual-extrusion, settings per object on a one-at-a-time but also a all-at-once print)