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Topic: Going to try Cura...any advice?

I have done a search here but haven't found much on Cura.  Just a few people saying ti works pretty good.  Anything I should watch out for while trying it?  Also will Cura act as host too?  Or is it strictly for slicing?  Thanks folks!

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Re: Going to try Cura...any advice?

Working very well. I couldnt get the host to work but it saves gcode. The part looks great so far.

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Re: Going to try Cura...any advice?

Cura is so much simpler and easier interface, however, any problems you have with repetier you will probably have with Cura. I like 14.1

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Re: Going to try Cura...any advice?

I use NetFab for repairing stl files and Cura for slicing.

I think it might be fair to say not all features are available in any single offering. It'd be nice if there were one program that does everything, but until one comes along, we're kinda stuck with learning a variety of programs and using the one that does what we need to do when we need to do it.

Cura is crazy fast at slicing compared to anything else available. The only thing I find somewhat annoying is it doesn't wait until you finish telling it what to do before it goes to work. It's a minor annoyance at worst. It has a lot of options available for adjusting the trade offs between print quality vs. speed, I have some models which require detecting open spaces to span, which Cura seems to do especially well with.

I can't think of anything one might do with it that would result in harm, other than the usual waste of plastic used in experimenting with unfamiliar programs. If you're used to something else, the differences may bug you a little bit, but otherwise, it's farily intuititive and user friendly. IMO, the thing to like most about Cura is how fast it slices. It does in seconds what takes some programs minutes. About the only "tip" I can think of is the default overlap in the expert settings is 15%. I think you get better layer adhesion by increasing that to 40-50%, but that may be because most of the models I've worked with I needed to print with 100% fill.

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Re: Going to try Cura...any advice?

I played with cura for a bit, inspired by its integration with octoprint recently. I could get a good slice and print out of it, and slicing was practically instantaneous in comparison. Print times also slightly faster than equivalent settings in slic3r for some reason - but I was disappointed by the lack of hexagon infill, and in future I'd like to add a fan for overhangs and couldn't work out whether cura would control this in the same level of detail as slic3r.

For decorative prints I think cura is great option, I'm not convinced it's got quite enough control to be as good at mechanical prints as slic3r can be.

SD3. Mk2b + glass, heated enclosure, GT2 belts, direct drive y shaft, linear bearings, bowden-feed E3D v5 w/ 0.9° stepper
Smoothieboard via Octoprint on RPi