Change extruder name from E to A

[kurtnelle]

Is there a setting that I can use so that the extruder changes from letter E to letter A?

[SteveYYC]

I'm dying to know why you want to do this.

I think you'd probably have to do this in the "post processing" section of the Scripts.
It's pretty ugly because you don't want to replace every E, just the E's that are part of extruder moves or refer to tools.

{REPLACE "E0","A0"}
{REPLACE "E1","A1"}
{REPLACE "E2","A2"}
{REPLACE "E3","A3"}
{REPLACE "E4","A4"}
{REPLACE "E5","A5"}
{REPLACE "E6","A6"}
{REPLACE "E7","A7"}
{REPLACE "E8","A8"}
{REPLACE "E9","A9"}

There. Now every E followed by a digit has been replaced by an A followed by a digit. Please note that now your g code is not compatible with any firmware and will do weird things to any printer you attempt to run it on.

[arhi]

I'm dying to know why you want to do this.

probbly running some cnc firmware 'cause he detached his machining head and attached printing head and don't want to replace perfectly good electronics just 'cause it don't know how to deal with E axis ... originally E was not axis but you was setting E as a speed, so E letter was used and not A what was always a proper next letter for axis, and reprap firmware (all three of them existing back in the day) were 3 axis only, then someone introduced the idea of acceleration in order to speed up the printing process (back then there was no acceleration, so speeds were waaaaaaaaaay lower), and with accelerated movement we had to figure out how to accelerate and decelerate E as well so the extruder was implemented as new axis (4 and 5 axis reprap firmware was born)... the mistake made then was that E was kept as a name of that axis and we did not switch to A.

number of slicers understand that all professional cnc equipment use A,B,C as axes after XYZ so you can select a g-code "flavor" ... e.g. if you use cura the g-code flavor "mach3" will generate g-code with A for first, B for second and C for third extruder. note that there was a bug in cura where even if you select mach3 flavor it will generate marlin flavor, that bug was fixed in 3.x but I see it was reintroduced in 4.0

because you don't want to replace every E

trying to remember if s3d is generating any code with E in it except when it's about extruder? of course there can be letter E in comments but who cares , I advised him (on other forum) to try

{REPLACE "E","A"}

have not tried it myself but imo it should work

[arhi]

btw s3d already support number of profiles (reprap variants, makerbot variants, flashforge variants and bfb variants) so adding a mach3 or cnc profile should be simple ... supporting grbl code... etc.. anyhow, I'd prefer that they make "variant" external library and give source for e.g. marlin, and then we can add as many variants for our custom machines (emc/linuxcnc, mach3, mach4, tormach, many other professional drivers out there with custom non g-code code...)