Does anyone here use Ultimaker Cura for the slicer? If you use something else for an Ender 3 Pro I would love to hear about it.

 

I frequently use Acetone to recover hardware such as magnets embedded in my hair brained creations. I wish PLA were as soluble as ABS.

 

I'm starting this thread to put various observations I have made over the years about 3D printing.
You cannot lay a horizontal surface unsupported, with the following exceptions :
You can make a vertical Circle just fine . I do this frequently on my prints . As a matter of fact , I find that printing a circle in the X Y axis takes a lot longer than A horizontal circle. I have found the 3D printer works much better in some cases if the circle is in a horizontal mode. This is STL file work much better in the horizontal mode and it cut down on the print time considerably. I make this as a storage method for pill bottles.

I use SketchUp 2016 because it is free and does not require video accelerator. I really need to learn something better but I am pretty decent with SketchUp. Even though it is far from perfect I love my Ender 3 Pro

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Hello there Wendy,

Can i ask you, what do you mean by "you cannot lay a horizontal surface without support"?
I am unfamiliar with these printers but would like to learn more about them. This thread has been very informative.

Nonetheless I do have a suggestion that may help because i have experience with wanting to place threaded inserts into various materials including wood and sheet metal. That is what they call "rivet nuts".
These things are great if you have to add a very strong threaded insert into some material or in sheet metal. Normally you would use a special tool that does the work of fixing the insert into a hole drilled into sheet metal. It works like a rivet, but it's got threads inside so once it is fixed to the sheet metal with the tool you then have a nice set of threads to screw a bolt into. They are very strong too being made of carbon steel or stainless steel for example.
That's the main use, to use them with sheet metal. After fixing they grab the sheet metal like a rivet so they don't twist when you put the bolt in and tighten it.
As far as putting them into plastic, like a plastic sheet, the plastic would have to be a type that can give a little and not crack.
Alternately, since the hole for it would be round, that may be easier to make, but you'd still have to either glue or press fit.

One question about the hex nuts. I see you have indents where the hex nuts go, in the shape of a hex i presume. Is it possible to then place the next nut in, then use the printer a second pass to cover over the nut so it becomes embedded into the plastic piece?

 

Think about it for a second. You have an extruder pushing out a thread of molten plastic if you try to do a flat surface without support it would just fall to the ground and not form a wall. Circles and arches gradually build up in the vertical direction as well as in the horizontal and you can make a flat surface using that approach.

Here is the latest release on my 3D notes:

 

Think about it for a second. You have an extruder pushing out a thread of molten plastic if you try to do a flat surface without support it would just fall to the ground and not form a wall. Circles and arches gradually build up in the vertical direction as well as in the horizontal and you can make a flat surface using that approach.

Here is the latest release on my 3D notes:

Hi,

Well i have zero experience with those machines.

Isn't there some kind of base or makeshift base you can use to start the formation?
How can you make a circle in mid air, it has to start somewhere.

Thanks.

 

When needed, the slicer will build a support structure for unsupported surfaces. You then have to cut this out from the finished print. But that can be difficult to impossible.

Most items I make can be turned so that the horizontal surface is on the bed. You just have to design around this. The printer can span a gap of up to about 5mn.

 

I can draw a hole in my print then cap it with plastic is the printer can jump the gap of the hole. The extruder quite literally extrudes a string of plastic because it is liquid when it first comes out it will bond to any plastic it is in contact with. Allowing it to make a larger form. I have to wonder how many of my problems they're caused from the slicer itself. The slicer is a program that translates the dot STL file into layers that are used by the printer as gcode. The slicer is machine specific more or less.

 

Does anyone here use Ultimaker Cura for the slicer? If you use something else for an Ender 3 Pro I would love to hear about it.

I use Cura, PrusaSlicer, BambuStudio, and OrcaSlicer.

Since I am doing most printing on the Bambu Lab X1 Carbon now, the latter two are most common. Each have strengths and weaknesses.

Cura and PrusaSlicer are similar, but Cura’s UI is probably a little friendlier than PrusaSlicer which is a bit more feature-forward. Cura’s latest version has an interesting feature that prints interlocking tabs so otherwise incompatible materials can be used on the same print.

Cura is a good choice in general and you probably won’t see any huge advantages to using something else. If oyu aren’t using the Cura plugins you should certainly consider starting. You an add a lot of functionality and maybe something you need but can’t currently do.

PrusaSlicer is a fork of Slic3r. Prusa is pretty good about maintaining it and adding features. It has a lot of access to settings and is maybe a bit “nerdier" than Cura. There are differences in the UI that might be little gotchas until you pick up in it, but I would encourage you to give it a try to see what it does. Who knows, it might be a better fit for you.

BambuStudio is the open source slicer provided by Bambu Lab for its printers. That might seem to make it irrelevant to you but in fact it ships with an Ender-3 profile! I am not sure why, but they have just a few third party printer profiles included. Bambu Studio is and amalgam of PrusaSlicer and Slic3r but with an entirely different interface.

It would be reasonable to say that its UI is “better”. It’s more user friendly and has different features. While it is based on the other two, it is definitely a distinct application. Some more technical features are omitted, but 99.9% of users wouldn’t even know.

But, if you want to try it (and it’s worth a go) you should probably just use OrcaSlicer (formerly SoftFever) instead. OrcaSlicer is a community fork of Bambu Studio with additional features more advanced users want. It is actively maintained and so as features appear in NBambu Studio they are soon released in OrcaSlicer.

It has many more third party profiles and various enhancements. I use both BS and OS, probably leaning towards OS.

A few more things to consider. Octoprint runs on an RPi or other SBC, or even on some old PC. It will run on an RPi Zero W just fine, or a 3B, etc. It is a little hard to describe with Octoprint does.

It is an intermediary between your slicer and printer. It accepts jobs (and some slicers have plugins to make submitting the jobs easier), then queues them, spools them to the printer via USB serial. It tracks the jobs, can give you live displays of the executing G-Code as a visualization of the printer’s progress (very cool), notify about job completion or failure, and supports a web cam so you can see the actual printer when you are not present.

It has a lot of plugins offering additional functionality as well. It can support multiple printers but I found it very useful for just one Ender-3 V2 Neo. Read about it in the link for more. I would strongly recommend using DietPi to install it. I have started using DietPi for any new RPi installations and it has a specific distribution for OctoPrint. OctoPi is a good alternative to DietPi if you don’t want to use the latter.

Another thing, if you don’t already have it, is CR-Touch bed leveling. CR-Touch is Creality’s version of BL-Touch bed leveling. If uses a probe attached to the toolhead to check 12 spots on the bed then generates a mesh which is used to make a “virtual” print bed where any value sent as G-Code is passed through this mesh and modified by its values.

In this way errors in leveling and warping (almost all Ender-3 beds are slightly warped in some way, this is one reason people like glass beds). If you use Octoprint, there’s a cool plugin that visualizes the mesh which is very helpful for seeing if you do have warping and how sever it is. Replacement beds are only about 25 bucks and sometimes it’s a good investment.

CR-Touch requires a 32-bit mainboard so depending on your printer there is a chance you couldn’t run it. But, if you do have an 8-bit board, it would be a really great upgrade to put in a 32-bit board. So, there’s that.

Last thing, once you have a 32-bit board you can upgrade the printer’s firmware to Klipper. Klipper is a very advanced replacement for the Marlin firmware that ships with the printers. Creality sells an add in device that call Sonic Pad. This is their way to get Klipper running. However you do it, it is a two part thing, first upgrading the firmware on the printer so it can talk to Kilipper, then running Klipper on a more capable computer than the STM on the mainboard. This can be an RPi, or something else.

You can read about Klipper in the link, it is a big upgrade to the G-Code aspects of the printer and a lot of added functionality.

 

Does anyone here use Ultimaker Cura for the slicer? If you use something else for an Ender 3 Pro I would love to hear about it.

I am using Cura 4.13 with a Longer LK5 Pro printer. I tried the latest Cura, but it didn't work at the time I tried it (I'm guessing the Linux build was not working at the time), and I haven't yet tried again.

I haven't really tried to many features as I am still learning and I try to stick to simple designs as much as I can. I did find there is a horizontal expansion setting to compensate for differences between the designed measurements and printed that I need to learn how to use (I have just been shaving .1 or .2 mm here and there in cad to make things fit right).

As Ya'akov mentioned you may want to look into OctoPrint. I have it running on an old laptop. My main reason was because I wanted to put the printer on the other side of the room from my computer. After a few times of moving the SD card between computer and printer it became quite the pain. Although I don't have one to set up I would like to add a camera to see how well it works with detecting print errors. There have been a few times now where I have come back to check on a print that turned into a ball of random strings... luckily it always happened early in the print so far.