print gcode files to miniMaker (Page 1 of 16)

I just found a nasty bug in my code that causes this to crash when run outside of the debugger.  I will put up a new version later tonight that fixes the issue.

Good job! Thanks for sharing

I'm still working on that myself.  I am trying to use Cura 2.7, since it is relatively intuitive to use and still has lots of power.  Last night I had my first successful print.  Everything looks good but I think the nozzle is running a bit hot, I printed a rabbit and the ears were a bit melted on the underside.

I will give you my settings for you to start with, but these could use some more tweaking.

First I had to raise my z-offset in XYZWare to make everything work, I found that Cura does not let you adjust the brim thickness and so you can only control it via the z-offset adjustment.  I leveled the bed and did general maintenance (cleaned the nozzle etc).  Then I adjusted the z-offset as instructed by XYZ using a business card as a feeler gauge. 

I then ran a test print from cura and got a lot of clicking from the printer and very little plastic on the bed so I used an iterative approach to work out the optimal height.  I raised the z-height by 1mm and nothing stuck so I lowered it by 0.5 and things stuck quite nicely.  At some later date I may try going up and down by 0.25 mm to see if it works better.  Anyway on my machine I ended up with a z-offset of 3.17 mm, if that helps at all.  Using a pair of calipers my brim was coming out at a thickness of just over 3 mm and the first layer was also 3mm as requested by Cura. 

As near as I can figure the z-offset sets the minimum first layer height, so if the printer request a 1 mm first layer but the z-offset is 3 you get 3mm, but if the printer requests a 4 mm first layer you get 4mm.

In cura I setup a custom printer with a 150x150x150 mm build volume, a 0.4 mm nozzle and 1.75 mm diameter filament.  My filament actually measures at 1.76 mm but for now I'm keeping it at 1.75, that is an experiment for another day.

I swapped out the start gcode with this one from the xyzware gcode:

And the end gcode is this:

All other settings remain the same

I used the default fine profile in cura but lowered the print speed from 60 to 15 and lowered the travel speed from 150 to 60.  At higher speeds I was getting shifting on my x axis.  I can probably bump these speeds up some, and I need to double check that my x axis belt is properly tensioned.  I also enabled the brim, I have the worst time getting prints to stick without it.

Finally I just hit the 'save to file' button in the lower right corner and then dropped the resulting gcode file onto my miniMover exe.

Here is my fan.  I temporarily mounted it with double sided foam tape.  There is a small gap on the left side of the nozzle that has just enough clearance for the fan.

Changing direction is not the biggest problem, it is the surface area of the fan opening vs nozzle opening.  The nozzle opening is somewhere around 1/5 the area of the fan.  I did some experiments on this, plugging up the fan opening with tape, and you can only reduce the surface area by 1/2 before the fan starts to loose energy.

Also it is super tight in the case, I have almost no clearance around the fan.  I spent some time trying different locations trying to find a way to fit a fan in, this was one of the only options.  The other ok option is to mount the fan directly above the extruder and use a long duct to bring the air down.

I did think about replacing the shroud around the hot end with a custom part but decided against it for several reasons.  First my 3D modeling skills are weak, and I can only print PLA (heat is bad) and this is a rather elaborate part.

In a future version I will probably make the opening as wide as the extruder block, I can probably get 2x as much air flow that way.  I may hunt around for a more compact fan as well, then I can experiment with other mounting options.

I did buy a 6" box fan and mounted it to the back of the machine to just blast everything with air, but I did not see much benefit from that either.  I think the way the extruder is setup it is just difficult to get good air ddsflow to the plastic that is being extruded.

That's great, thanks for sharing all of those info.

I'll try on my printer, but still trying to get a grasp of how everything works :-)

For the print time, XYZWare also have a hard time giving a precise estimate, sometimes displaying up to 10h of estimated remaining time after 10minutes of print for a total of 2 hours printing time...

So I have been trying to work out a proper profile in Cura now that I can actually adjust everything.
For starters I have been experimenting with print speed and temperature.  I printed these three temp towers.
  The one on the left goes from 210 C at the bottom to 250 at the top, with no cooling fan, and is a complete mess.  The one on the middle goes from 210 on the bottom to 170 on the top and is ok, but with poor overhangs. You can't tell in the picture but from 200 to 210 there are zits on the side of the blocks.  The one on the right is the same as the middle but with the fan turned on.  It looks much better but with tiny zits between 200 and 210.

With that info in hand I tried to print at 195 degrees but it would not stick to the bed.  I bumped up the first layer temp to 210 and now it is sticking nicely.

Next I printed some squares with small details in them (an x and y) to check for ringing.  I found that there is light ringing when running with a speed of 60, but going down to 20 removed almost all the ringing.  The ringing was not that bad but if you want perfect prints then go slow.

I spent some time playing with acceleration and jerk limits as well but mostly those seem to only slow down the print.

I'm tackling a tolerance test now, that is my main goal, to print inner holes and features with some accuracy.  I found that the xyzware software reduced my holes by a whole millimeter, too much for my needs.

Interesting tool, was actually trying to write something similar, but failed to create a proper .3w file so far.
Do you mind sharing an executable of the latest version? I can't set up a visual studio environment atm (i'm on linux), but would try to run it using wine :-)
Thank you for documenting/sharing your findings and publishing your code!

Just a quick update, I am about 90% of the way through adding in a proper windows UI for this.  I have a simple thread handler in place that wraps up the base communication class and the UI is all up and running.  I just need to take care of a few signals so that the UI is more responsive.  I will keep the command line version as well, both share a common set of classes so only the interface logic changes.

Anyway work is slow since this is just for fun, I have to fit it in around work and family.  I'm hoping to start testing the code on my end next week and maybe have something up to you the week after.

Thank you very much! I can confirm that miniMover can be run under linux using wine. I just converted a tricky gcode file and send it to the printer. No issues so far.

Ok, my UI is up and running.  See the first post to download it.

I'm probably going about this all wrong.  I'm trying to share the base libraries between the command line and windows UI but the base libraries can block for several seconds, or even minutes on some commands. 

I'm throwing the worst offenders into there own thread and letting everything else just block the UI while it runs.  That is ok, but not great.  It would probably be better to turn this all into a state machine and let windows pump while we wait on the serial port.  There is certainly nothing here that requires multithreading, and in fact it just adds to the complication.

Anyway I wanted to get this out there before it stalled out completely, feel free to use it but realize that it may hang up for a while when you click on a button.  Feedback is greatly apriciated, let me know how well it works for you and what machines you may have tried it on.

My UI seems to be working well.  I'm thinking of dumping the thread and just letting the UI block while uploading a file to the printer.  It would simplify my code a lot and it would properly block the UI from doing anything while the serial port is buisy.  Right now I have a hack to ignore button input but it is wonky.

I'm also thinking of how to monitor the print job without making the UI overly complicated.  You can hit the refresh button now to update the info tab and if you know what you are doing you can watch the print progress, but it is not super obvious.  It would be better to have a progress bar, and a pause/cancel button.

Finally I have a wacky bug I can't figure out.  When running in release mode the nozzle diameter increments every time you refresh the info tree, however that is set using a constant and should not change.  I must have a memory leak somewhere but I can't find it.  In debug builds it works just fine, of course.