Simplify3D User Forum

I am really wondering where I can adapt the preferences of the build statistics, like estimated print time or print costs. The extimated time for printing is at the moment about half of the real time of a printout and I really do not know where the information for the costs are calculated. where can I change the preferences? Thank you for your help. Florian

Hi Florian,

You can alter the filament properties the software will use to calculate things from the "Other" Tab. I'll attach a picture to help. The print time estimates are just that, ESTIMATES. The software can only calculate based on movement speeds, accounting some time for retractions and extrusion moves. There are some unknowns for each printer, such as acceleration values and firmware tool change dances. Since you have figured it out to be about half of your actual print times, you should just multiply whatever time it says by 2!

Having accurate Printing time & Costs is very important, especially for businesses utilizing 3D printing. I understand Simplify3D does not have all the variables to the equation but my question is why cant we enter them to get accurate projections? The acceleration values and such are very easy to find even for novices. If you have an LCD you can easily go to: control>motion and find the values you need right there.

I feel having the ability to know exactly how much time a print will take and exactly the material cost would greatly benefit them.

Mike

First of all, the material usage calcs are 100% accurate. The software knows exactly what E-values are being sent to the printer, so it can tell you exactly how much filament is extruded. If you have your filament price/kg set correctly, this will give an exact cost for the material used.

The print time is a whole different story though. There are tons of factors here - temperature preheat time, homing time, communication latency, axis-dependent acceleration, and many other things that mean the value provided will always be an estimate.

DarthRevan wrote:Hi Florian,

You can alter the filament properties the software will use to calculate things from the "Other" Tab. I'll attach a picture to help.

OTHER_FilamentProperties.png

The print time estimates are just that, ESTIMATES. The software can only calculate based on movement speeds, accounting some time for retractions and extrusion moves. There are some unknowns for each printer, such as acceleration values and firmware tool change dances. Since you have figured it out to be about half of your actual print times, you should just multiply whatever time it says by 2!

Thank you very much! That's exactly what I was looking for ...

Might be good if in a future update there could be a field say under the filament properties which would allow the user to put in a fudge factor for the time on their own printer.

CT4 wrote:Might be good if in a future update there could be a field say under the filament properties which would allow the user to put in a fudge factor for the time on their own printer.

That would be great ...

fthieringer wrote:

CT4 wrote:Might be good if in a future update there could be a field say under the filament properties which would allow the user to put in a fudge factor for the time on their own printer.

That would be great ...

Unfortunately the fudge factor is not constant so would not be of much value. I have had 12 hour print estimates that were nearly dead on and 12 hour print estimates that were off by hours. Totally depends on how complex the print is, more complex the more acceleration slows it down.

Here's a plot I made of the estimated (X axis) vs actual (Y axis) print time for 91 different prints I made with S3D v2.x. The line is just a linear trend, and represents the best fit you could get with a single coefficient. The times are in minutes, from 20 minutes to 1,076 minutes (17 hours 56 minutes). You can see that after about 3 hours the estimation is hard to predict, even if you had a way of adding a "fudge factor". A 2-order polynomial fit is almost identical, and beyond that nothing really helps.

Just Curious, Have you tried the same plot using the time estimates that Pronterface gives?
I've found it's time estimates are generally quite accurate, but I've only got prints going out
for 6 hours...

Frank Pirz
Media Conversions