Scott_M wrote:In one of the links provided by upsm somebody came up with "Arc Compensation" to fix this problem, why it has not been developed further is the big question.
I can guess only but I believe it all revolves around $$$. The link you mentioned, it's Adrian's work, the guy who started the RepRap project and the whole 3D printing revolution. He's a scientist that's looking at all this as a big science experiment. He gave the "science" behind the problem and "initial" solution. That's what you can expect from scientists. Now someone should take his work (and Chris's work and work of few others) and put it into good use. But who? We come back to $$$.
Look at the history of slicers. We had original (very basic) slicer made by Adrian that few ppl used. Then Enrique started making Skeinforge and that was the "industry standard" for many years. Few people know but Enrique
never owned a 3D printer. He was offered one many times as a gift, he never wanted one. He was writing that software purely out of wish to "better himself". He did it best he could but number of issues remained that were hard to fix "virtually". There were number of patches for skeinforge seen in the wild (many made by Chris) that fixed some of the problems but then the public turned to new and shiny and fast slicer with gui and skeinforge development stopped. In the meantime few other slicers came and went unnoticed, all of them, like skeinforge, handled "images". The way skeinforge (and the early slicers) worked is they generated 2d image of every slice and then run a "feature recognition" algorithm to create G-Code out of that image. That process have a lot of benefits (for e.g. you can easily define resolution, you are very immune to non manifold objects etc) but it is painfully slow. Slic3r, Netfabb and other "new kids in the block" were looking at vectors and not bitmaps and they were thousands of times faster, offered real time preview etc. so skeinforge died. Many of the problems that skeinforge had solved never went into all these new and shiny slicers. The "wrong hole size" is one of them. It was not fully solved but you could configure it for your printer and your material and your parts would come out perfect. Calibration was painful but once done..
Anyhow, skeinforge is done and forgotten, what do we have now
- Slic3r - free
- Cura - free
- Craftware - free
- Kisslicer - almost free
- reprap-pro - free
- kiri - free
- e3d - free
- Axion - free
- Simplify3D - not free
- MeshMixer - free but does not support all printers
- SolidWorks - costs arm and a leg and requires win10 to slice (no clue if it works at all, never see it in action)
...
The free ones are mostly "one man show" with some contributions. For e.g. the biggest contribution to world of slicers was the work of that german guy who wrote master thesis on slicers and created a patch for Slic3r that implements the variable layer height (
more here ) and while he did everything, did the research, wrote the paper, wrote the code, this feature is still not implemented in all slicers!! Why? Well it takes time, as I said, most of these slicers are one man show, that man usually have a dayjob... ignoring SolidWorks and MeshMixer for a sec as they are still halfbaked solutions, Simplify3D is actually the only slicer getting any "real money" so the expectation to get the bleeding edge features from them is present. They used to deliver on that big time, these past years no so
, maybe it will change soon who knows.. but compare this with the CAM software in milling world, the cheapest CAM I know of that's usable is ~$200 (Aspire) and it's "pathetic" compared to other "serious" ones. More then 50% of cnc users paid way more then $200 for the software, many users, lot of licences, lot of $$$$, companies invest in research and solve problems. Compare that with reprap/repstrap biz? 99% of users use free open source slicers and very very very few are willing to donate some $$$ to those doing research. Most will rather donate to a YT channel talking about how to do stuff they will never actually do, then donate some $$$ to research and development.
That's my view on it. Might be skewed, dunno. Maybe the reasons are completely different, but in my opinion, it's the time and the cache that are "why we don't have this or that feature". And many will tell you that you are crazy for paying 150 for Simplify3D when you have Cura or Slic3r for free and "it does the same thing", even "Slic3r does better bridging than Simplify3D, why did you waste money, you better spend it on new %$#^@#" .. etc etc.. probbly if market was prepared to put $$ where their mouth is the slicers would have more features, do things better, smarter, faster.. but for now .. I drill my holes after printing
and I always like it when that happens.