Skinny Support Warning

[Sovereign]

Description: A notification during the generation of "prepare to print" that informs the user of any supports with one or more base dimensions (length and/or width) less than X percent of its height. Example: A support will be 50mm tall, but its base is only 5mm wide. This trips the warning on a ratio of 1:10, a configurable setting.

Rationale: I've had many tall supports tip over during print which makes the rest of the operation fail because at some point the machine tries to print on air. Even with lower print speeds and a sanded/alcoholed blue tape bed it happens.

Solutions: At most basic, just let the user know there's a problem and leave it at that. Perhaps a different color highlight for such supports in the print preview. A more thorough solution could try to fix the problem as I have done manually by increasing the support's surface contact with the bed, preferably by connecting it to other supports nearby (this worked for me). Note that this did increase print time and material usage, but it also enabled the print to complete.

Obviously, this whole request runs on the notion that two mathematical formulas could be used to diagnose the problem programmatically. If fixing it is best left up to the user, then an alert would still be nice.

[CompoundCarl]

Neat idea. A quick tip in case you haven't used this before - I like to use the support "extra inflation distance" if I have tiny pillars that need to have a bigger surface area on the bed. For example, if you set this setting to 2.0mm, it will make the foundation of all of these supports 2mm larger so that it will stick to the bed better.

[dkightley]

....and a second quick tip.

Set your support so you have support angles of say 45, -45, 45, 45, 45, 45, 45, 45, 45, 45.....and your support structure will have cross-members every 10 layers. This will increase the stability without adding extra material.

[Sovereign]

Neat idea. A quick tip in case you haven't used this before - I like to use the support "extra inflation distance" if I have tiny pillars that need to have a bigger surface area on the bed. For example, if you set this setting to 2.0mm, it will make the foundation of all of these supports 2mm larger so that it will stick to the bed better.

There's one potential issue with this: I have some supports that stick out of the item in question but don't touch the bed itself. Extra inflection makes these messy if not outright done wrong because it's literally printing on air during some parts of the support.

I know that's a unique case (e.g. chins or eyes), and these "air" supports rarely fail--it's usually the ones on the bed that tip.

Thanks for the suggestions, though, I'll be trying some of them.