Filament usage and print times?

[Walt44]

I just purchased the Creator software the other day, and have just been playing with the settings. One thing I didn't see was a readout of the amount of filament used for a print, or the elapsed time it would take to print. These two pieces of information are critical especially when you approach the end of a roll of filament, and you want to be sure you have enough remaining to complete the print. The amount of time it will take to produce the print is important especially when you have other activities planned for later (like going to bed!). It may be that the program displays this information when you start a print, but since I haven't used it for a print yet I wouldn't know.

Feature Request: Filament usage, Print time duration.

Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thanks,
Walt

[Simplify3D]

Hey Walt,

Lucky for you, the software already includes estimates for build time, plastic used, volume, etc. It's in the bottom of every G-Code file Creator makes. So after you click the "Prepare" button to actually make the G-Code instructions, just open up the resulting file in a text editor and scroll to the bottom to see the estimates. That way if you go back to print some G-Code you made a few weeks ago, you can easily look up exactly how long it will take to print

Hope that helps!

[Walt44]

Thanks for the heads up. I'm glad the information is there, however to make for a better integrated package, and not have to use yet another program, could you add displaying this information within your program?

Thanks again,
Walt

[Simplify3D]

I'll make sure we have this added for the next release. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Walt44]

Great! Thanks.

[TravisB]

How is the print time determined? I am working on a batch job, and it says 133 minutes; but it seemed to take longer than that. So I am timing it now; I started it 23 minutes ago but according to Creator's 'count down' on the control panel it has only been 17 minutes. I'm using an M2 with the default profile, only difference being I slowed it down a bit, 3000 and 9000mm/min print/rapid respectively. Does it calculate based on the default speed perhaps?

[Simplify3D]

The print time estimates are usually fairly accurate, but how that time is distributed among different commands in your G-Code file is a bit of an assumption. Creator evenly divides the total print time by the number of lines in the file so that it can give you the estimated time remaining based on how many lines have been executed. But it doesn't account for the fact that a single G28 command might take 10 seconds to execute while a M104 S180 command is almost instantaneous. Or you might be printing something like a pyramid where the upper G1 commands will be much shorter and faster than the G1 commands for the wider base. While the estimation error usually isn't too bad, this is a tradeoff worth making since we can reduce the latency between commands by not trying to do these detailed calculations for each line. The faster we can send commands, the better your prints will look