multiple questions I was not able to find answer yet

[arhi]

not very good at searching this forum yet so apologies if there are answers but I failed to find them .

anyhow, using s3d for a week now and have some questions about how to overcome some functionality

1. thin wall
If I have a wall that's 0.4mm and I tell s3d that my nozzle is 0.4mm it will ignore these walls. First, it's possible to print a line that's thinner then what you are extruding you just shoot the proper Exxx to the printer and it will extrude less plastic and line will be thinner. That works fairly nice with skeinforge, not sure why it would not work ok with s3d .. So what's more usable is to have min/max "line width" in the settings and that s3d uses width it likes for each line that's in those limits and just calculate proper E value to get the width needed.

even if this is too complicate for s3d devs, a simple "do not ignore thin lines" option and "print them with minimal available thickness" would be acceptable in many cases .. just ignoring the thin features is not acceptable

There is "thin wall behavior" segment in process settings / advanced but chosing "only use perimeters..." or "allow gap fill..." makes no difference
simple example, use this part: http://www.thingiverse.com/download:614998
it's classic 0.4mm wall, it's not printed if your nozzle size is 0.4mm .. even if you set manual extrusion width to 0.4 only 2 out of 4 walls will be printed, you have to set 0.39mm extrusion width to print this simple object... makes no sense to me, the thin wall behavior, "only use perimeters..." should print this wall no matter how thin it is, it should print it even if it was 0.1mm

2. stretching
similar to [1] there's no way to stretch filament with s3d ?! or at least I'm unable to find it. With E parameter (5D firmware) a lot of this should be pushed to firmware so if you want Xmm3 of plastic deposited during this G1 move let firmware worry about it, since you know the shape of the plastic you are depositing and you know the one dimension (layer height) the other dimension (width) you know from E value ..

3. cornering
there was a nice feature I implemented some 7-8 years ago (unfortunately lost ..) where I would "pause" at the "tip" of the corner for XXms if corner angle was lower then A .. It allowed me to have ultra sharp corners even with stretching even with nasty to print plastic like PP. Also a "corner pull" option I had once that was calculating middle of the corner and was actually before "pause" moving head XXmm in direction of middle of the corner away from part... dunno if anything like this (corner behavior) is available with s3d?

4. pause print
I see start from layer, end at layer ... I don't see a "pause at layer X" ?

5. insert custom code after/before layer X
similar to [4] or instead [4] a custom code to be inserted before/after some layer ... I see the "layer change script" but that is between any two layers, I want to have a script to be inserted only between layer 2345 and 2346, and another script (different) between layer 55556 and 55557 ...

6. tempearture setpoints
it's a bit confusing .. the "layer" here is from the "start of print" or "from the start of part" .. cause I want one temp for 1st layer of raft, 2nd temp for rest of the raft, then 3rd temp for the 1st layer of printed part, then 4th temp for the rest of the part .. and it's not very clear how this works .. also all changes here are "non waiting" from what I see, would be cool if some of them could be made "waiting"

7. smoothieware/redeem/toggle support
smoothieware is very good electronics and very good firmware, redeem and toggle I don't have enough experience with yet but are also very interesting .. knowing their G/M codes (more less same as all others, few special ones) and how to connect to them, upload file to SD directly trough serial or lan .. should be simple and should save a lot of time to some of us

8. "fancy" infill types
I'm simpleton and honeycomb is my favorite infill type since the first version of skeinforge giving way more strength to part then regular grid ... but some research we did back then when I was without a kid .. the cuboid/cubic and tetrahedral infill was very interesting and some tests we did shown that for number of parts it produced better strength with same mass then honeycomb ... I see cura supports number of these fancy infill types (Erik was part of that research so no doubt he implemented them in cura) ... both are fairly easy to calculate and implement, both print way faster then honeycomb (as they look like a regular grid on a single layer) and produce super strong parts so ...

9. "thick" infill
couple years ago someone (I think it was Prusa but I'm not sure) patched skeinforge to allow it to print one layer height for perimeter and other layer height for infill. That was a huge thing for me back then as it speed up my prints more then 10x... I know it sounds weird (how 10x) but I'm often using PP for prints and you know if you tried it it's a nasty material to print to look nice so you have to print very slow and very thin your perimeter ... but since it swells like crazy, with a 0.8mm nozzle I'm easily printing 0.15mm layer with 0.15mm wall and also with same nozzle I'm easily printing 0.8mm layer thickness (yes, with ABS with 0.8mm you would not be able to go over 0.65mm but with PP you can easily go 0.8 as filament swells up on exit and it's over 1mm thick when it exits the nozzle) ... so to get nice print you want very slowly to print your 0.15mm perimeter, but you print 5 of them and then *dange* print 0.75mm infill with 4-5 times the speed of what you print your perimeter ... you get your print at tenth of the time and it looks great and is actually stronger as printing thick infill increases the strength a lot... is ugly on the inside - who cares ... and is not only great for PP, you can print 0.1mm perimeter and 0.35mm infill it would speed up the printing for sure ..

10. cooling
this is mostly something I need for one of my jigs but .. I like how the cooling is handled here... per layer fan controls, speed override, fan override ... all cool .. I'm missing one thing here that's not that commonly needed but "execute script if layer below XX sec" and "execute script after layer that was below XXsec before layer that's over XXsec"


that's what I have initially after a week of usage and some ~10 printed benchies and few other tests (bridges etc..), I'm noob with s3d but I'm surely not noob with 3d printing (more then 10 years in it, part of core team for more then 7, made more printers then I can count...) so while some of these questions probably have answer in options I failed to find, some are maybe feature requests for the s3d...

[billyd]

not very good at searching this forum yet so apologies if there are answers but I failed to find them .

anyhow, using s3d for a week now and have some questions about how to overcome some functionality

1. thin wall
If I have a wall that's 0.4mm and I tell s3d that my nozzle is 0.4mm it will ignore these walls. First, it's possible to print a line that's thinner then what you are extruding you just shoot the proper Exxx to the printer and it will extrude less plastic and line will be thinner. That works fairly nice with skeinforge, not sure why it would not work ok with s3d .. So what's more usable is to have min/max "line width" in the settings and that s3d uses width it likes for each line that's in those limits and just calculate proper E value to get the width needed.

even if this is too complicate for s3d devs, a simple "do not ignore thin lines" option and "print them with minimal available thickness" would be acceptable in many cases .. just ignoring the thin features is not acceptable

There is "thin wall behavior" segment in process settings / advanced but chosing "only use perimeters..." or "allow gap fill..." makes no difference
simple example, use this part: http://www.thingiverse.com/download:614998
it's classic 0.4mm wall, it's not printed if your nozzle size is 0.4mm .. even if you set manual extrusion width to 0.4 only 2 out of 4 walls will be printed, you have to set 0.39mm extrusion width to print this simple object... makes no sense to me, the thin wall behavior, "only use perimeters..." should print this wall no matter how thin it is, it should print it even if it was 0.1mm

2. stretching
similar to [1] there's no way to stretch filament with s3d ?! or at least I'm unable to find it. With E parameter (5D firmware) a lot of this should be pushed to firmware so if you want Xmm3 of plastic deposited during this G1 move let firmware worry about it, since you know the shape of the plastic you are depositing and you know the one dimension (layer height) the other dimension (width) you know from E value ..

3. cornering
there was a nice feature I implemented some 7-8 years ago (unfortunately lost ..) where I would "pause" at the "tip" of the corner for XXms if corner angle was lower then A .. It allowed me to have ultra sharp corners even with stretching even with nasty to print plastic like PP. Also a "corner pull" option I had once that was calculating middle of the corner and was actually before "pause" moving head XXmm in direction of middle of the corner away from part... dunno if anything like this (corner behavior) is available with s3d?

4. pause print
I see start from layer, end at layer ... I don't see a "pause at layer X" ?

5. insert custom code after/before layer X
similar to [4] or instead [4] a custom code to be inserted before/after some layer ... I see the "layer change script" but that is between any two layers, I want to have a script to be inserted only between layer 2345 and 2346, and another script (different) between layer 55556 and 55557 ...

6. tempearture setpoints
it's a bit confusing .. the "layer" here is from the "start of print" or "from the start of part" .. cause I want one temp for 1st layer of raft, 2nd temp for rest of the raft, then 3rd temp for the 1st layer of printed part, then 4th temp for the rest of the part .. and it's not very clear how this works .. also all changes here are "non waiting" from what I see, would be cool if some of them could be made "waiting"

7. smoothieware/redeem/toggle support
smoothieware is very good electronics and very good firmware, redeem and toggle I don't have enough experience with yet but are also very interesting .. knowing their G/M codes (more less same as all others, few special ones) and how to connect to them, upload file to SD directly trough serial or lan .. should be simple and should save a lot of time to some of us

8. "fancy" infill types
I'm simpleton and honeycomb is my favorite infill type since the first version of skeinforge giving way more strength to part then regular grid ... but some research we did back then when I was without a kid .. the cuboid/cubic and tetrahedral infill was very interesting and some tests we did shown that for number of parts it produced better strength with same mass then honeycomb ... I see cura supports number of these fancy infill types (Erik was part of that research so no doubt he implemented them in cura) ... both are fairly easy to calculate and implement, both print way faster then honeycomb (as they look like a regular grid on a single layer) and produce super strong parts so ...

9. "thick" infill
couple years ago someone (I think it was Prusa but I'm not sure) patched skeinforge to allow it to print one layer height for perimeter and other layer height for infill. That was a huge thing for me back then as it speed up my prints more then 10x... I know it sounds weird (how 10x) but I'm often using PP for prints and you know if you tried it it's a nasty material to print to look nice so you have to print very slow and very thin your perimeter ... but since it swells like crazy, with a 0.8mm nozzle I'm easily printing 0.15mm layer with 0.15mm wall and also with same nozzle I'm easily printing 0.8mm layer thickness (yes, with ABS with 0.8mm you would not be able to go over 0.65mm but with PP you can easily go 0.8 as filament swells up on exit and it's over 1mm thick when it exits the nozzle) ... so to get nice print you want very slowly to print your 0.15mm perimeter, but you print 5 of them and then *dange* print 0.75mm infill with 4-5 times the speed of what you print your perimeter ... you get your print at tenth of the time and it looks great and is actually stronger as printing thick infill increases the strength a lot... is ugly on the inside - who cares ... and is not only great for PP, you can print 0.1mm perimeter and 0.35mm infill it would speed up the printing for sure ..

10. cooling
this is mostly something I need for one of my jigs but .. I like how the cooling is handled here... per layer fan controls, speed override, fan override ... all cool .. I'm missing one thing here that's not that commonly needed but "execute script if layer below XX sec" and "execute script after layer that was below XXsec before layer that's over XXsec"


that's what I have initially after a week of usage and some ~10 printed benchies and few other tests (bridges etc..), I'm noob with s3d but I'm surely not noob with 3d printing (more then 10 years in it, part of core team for more then 7, made more printers then I can count...) so while some of these questions probably have answer in options I failed to find, some are maybe feature requests for the s3d...

1. Thin walls are not handled by S3D. We have been pounding the table about this for years. Any walls that are less than your extrusion width will not be sliced or printed.
2. through 5, maybe 7. Handle with custom scripts
6. You can do this with multiple processes and the start and stop layer commands for each process. Each process can have different temp settings.
8. Infill in S3D is not great. But it's infill so it usually doesn't matter.
9. I don't think S3D can do this.
10. Can't do this. S3D does provide for slowing print speeds to keep layer at a minimum time to complete to aid in cooling. I like your idea better though.

[arhi]

1. Thin walls are not handled by S3D. We have been pounding the table about this for years. Any walls that are less than your extrusion width will not be sliced or printed.

thanks for confirmation. I'm playing with it bit more and while I managed to calibrate it somehow good (link between extrusion width and smoothieware E calculation) but I hate that none of these modern and fast slicers allow for "from - to" settings for extrusion width .. would be pretty powerful feature imo.

2. through 5, maybe 7. Handle with custom scripts

2. I actually managed to figure out, the "manual" setup for extrusion width does just that. So here only the [1] (from - to) is solution, the [2] itself is already there only I didn't understand that tab properly before

3. not sure how this could be "custom scripted", this is something that slicer needs to be aware of as to pull corner you want to know where you were, what's below you, where you are going, at what speed etc .. this is not a small feature at all to be implemented properly

4. 5. this should be simple - custom scripts - any easy way to do this? to add a custom "feature" to s3d? some sdk? examples?

7. I doubt a "custom script" is a solution here, just like s3d understand marlin it should understand smoothieware and redeem and toggle .. or make a pluggable "firmware support" that those who make firmware can also make a plug for s3d that understand the "differences" (and upgrade trough s3d, and query printer for capabilities in case fw supports it etc etc..)

6. You can do this with multiple processes and the start and stop layer commands for each process. Each process can have different temp settings.

hm, not sure I understand .. but yes now I see I can add multiple processes .. need to try that out, thanks for the hint

anyhow, I set it up now the way I want ... but it's not that simple, I'd rather say "from this feature to this feature" then "from layer x to layer y" as not always that simple to count layer ... a "layer info" on the g-code preview would help here BIG TIME

8. Infill in S3D is not great. But it's infill so it usually doesn't matter.

well it actually matters a lot because with same amount of plastic you can have up to 10 times difference in strength so that does matter a lot, also the same infill % will print at different speeds for different infill patterns .. again huge difference, especially on large printers (I used recently 1m3 one, building new one now... when you do a 1m "line" that can go super fast with proper acceleration.. if you use hexagon infill for strength you get 5-6 times slower print, ever 20-30 times slower infill speed if you don't have strong printer and you want to keep your jerk settings low.. but if you use cuboid fill for e.g. you have straight lines -> super fast and you still get the super strength of the part, similar or even better then honeycomb) ... so yes, if you have small 1L printer, yes it doesn't matter but it matters big time on big puppies

9. I don't think S3D can do this.

I was hoping I just can't find the settings this is a deal breaker for big prints .. it takes 5 hours for a simple small figurine (those I print with low layer height) big one will take days .. with this a print time would be cut but 30-50%

10. Can't do this. S3D does provide for slowing print speeds to keep layer at a minimum time to complete to aid in cooling. I like your idea better though.

I like what it does not but I'd like to have this custom scripts extra - it should be super simple thing to implement as obviously detection of how long the layer last exist and an action is taken if script is below xyz seconds so adding a custom script there too should be uber simple ... [4] and [5] are also super simple in the same way, an action is already created so pushing some extra code there should be peanuts ..

same thing for bridging ... I found (finally) how to tell it to overlap bridge a bit more with the part so that bridges are bit better .. (still some additional work I'd put into bridging but...) ... now I would really like to add a custom script for the first, second and third layer of any bridge ..

[dkightley]

not very good at searching this forum yet so apologies if there are answers but I failed to find them .

Not wishing to be condescending, but......

For "thin wall".....type "thin wall" in the box at the top of the page that has the prompt Search and click the little magnifying glass......and voila - you have found over 300 posts with "thin wall" contained within them....and spending a few minutes browsing through the hits, you'll find the answer to your question.

Now that can't be too difficult for someone with more than 10 years 3D printing experience.

[arhi]

For "thin wall".....type "thin wall" in the box at the top of the page that has the prompt Search and click the little magnifying glass......and voila - you have found over 300 posts with "thin wall" contained within them.

yeah I even replied to one of them (maybe even that post gets approved after a week or two) ... I found number of places where thin wall is being discussed, many wrong statements and rude ppl in those .. but I found no solution to the problem (other then "get a nozzle with smaller bore") of thin wall not being properly printed hence the question here

[CompoundCarl]

For #9, just change the "print infill every XXX layers" option on the Infill tab. If your layer height is 0.15mm, and you tell it to only print the infill every 5 layers, it will print 5 thin 0.15mm perimeters and then one thick 0.75mm infill layer. You can do the same thing with support structures as well.

[arhi]

For #9, just change the "print infill every XXX layers" option on the Infill tab. If your layer height is 0.15mm, and you tell it to only print the infill every 5 layers, it will print 5 thin 0.15mm perimeters and then one thick 0.75mm infill layer. You can do the same thing with support structures as well.

wow PERFECT, thanks. I thought that option will print a "one full layer" every xxx layers ... that's perfect thanks

[wirlybird]

For #9, just change the "print infill every XXX layers" option on the Infill tab. If your layer height is 0.15mm, and you tell it to only print the infill every 5 layers, it will print 5 thin 0.15mm perimeters and then one thick 0.75mm infill layer. You can do the same thing with support structures as well.

Is this limited by your nozzle size? I was told I could print .16 layers and set it to infill every 2 layers and get .32 but that was the max for a .4 nozzle, you know the 80% deal. Am I understanding this correctly?? Thanks for any insight!

[arhi]

Is this limited by your nozzle size? I was told I could print .16 layers and set it to infill every 2 layers and get .32 but that was the max for a .4 nozzle, you know the 80% deal. Am I understanding this correctly?? Thanks for any insight!

I hope it lets user worry about it and does not limit it but planing to do tests in few hours ..

as for 80% deal
- that's for ABS and PLA, not for all materials (PP for e.g. you can easily go up to 100% as it expands big time when it exits the nozzle)
- the 80% is some "eyeballed" value (iirc nop head, Chris Palmer, is the one that calculated those 80% but it works with nozzle geometry that also makes free falling extruded line to be 20% larger then the nozzle size (the famous 0.48mm line from 0.4mm nozzle) but not all nozzles have this geometry and they get thinner or thicker line going out of them. for e.g. some nozzle manufacturers lie about their nozzle size and for e.g. sell 0.36mm nozzle as 0.4mm nozzle so that they get the 0.48mm free fall extruded line..
- it is the value for maximal strength and good look so it's important for perimeter, now for infill, if you are not really worried about part strength and infill is mostly for structural support then you can have lot thicker layer then 0.8mm ... for e.g. even with ABS you can extrude 120% of the nozzle size layer height for infill (depends on your nozzle geometry and filament brand but...) it will be super ugly, filament will curl a bit and from the side the wall will be mega ugly, but layers will stick and the wall will be pretty strong .. so pretty good for infill .. try it yourself, make a single line wall as a whole object and configure s3d like you have huge nozzle and let it print it .. it will be ugly but will be solid and strong enough for infill .. like that you can test different parameters and see what is the thickest layer you can use with your nozzle and your material for acceptable support