<![CDATA[SoliForum - 3D Printing Community — performance of extruder travel]]> 2015-01-28T21:10:27Z PunBB https://www.soliforum.com/topic/9537/performance-of-extruder-travel/ <![CDATA[Re: performance of extruder travel]]> The tool path of the extruder is dependent on the slicer. You'll find some slicers better at this than others. For me, when I want a good tool path for a more precise print, I use KISSlicer. I'm sure other folks have their favorites too.

]]> https://www.soliforum.com/user/4235/ 2015-01-28T21:10:27Z https://www.soliforum.com/post/82089/#p82089 <![CDATA[performance of extruder travel]]> Looking at my printer operation (Solidoodle 2) it appears that there is a great inefficiency in how the extruder is moved. My guess is that the slicing software that produces the g-code does not account for the physics of head travel. My rough guess is that printing speed could be cut in half (or more in some cases) by optimizing the travel of the extruder while it prints.

With that statement comes a complete ignorance of what factors are involved and if this additional head travel is intentional, though I suspect it's just an artifact of how the object is sliced. I would think it wouldn't be too hard to create an "optimizer" for the g-code to rearrange head travel.

I've done similar things many (many) hears ago with pen-plotters that suffered a similar issue. A simple post-processor on the HP plot file would greatly enhance plotting speeds (from back in the day when pen-plotters had real physical pens that had to be swapped to change colors).

Has this been raised before? If not, why not? Are there other factors involved?

]]> https://www.soliforum.com/user/9257/ 2015-01-27T19:20:44Z https://www.soliforum.com/post/81889/#p81889