3D Printing without Slicers: Introducing FullControl.

this is full control no half control here let's [Music] go this episode is sponsored by sunlu you might have heard of full control G-Code it's been covered before by at least one Creator in full but and this is a big but there's new things to talk about with full control and not small things either full control used to be and still is an excel-based worksheet that generated output using macros and it was quite for boing uh let's have a look at it I think I tried to use this about a year ago but I I struggled at the time I didn't really want to put the time into learning it so I I never got anywhere there's samples on the sheet that says demos and you can cut and paste those into the main sheet and click the button at the top that says generate G-Code I don't want want to delve too far into this because it's not the full control g code that I want to look at today but before we look at that even there's this other full control the one that's been all over YouTube shorts and Tik Tok for about a year I think remember this ball on a stick it came from the full control XYZ website maybe you saw this or this the full control website is an easy way to experience the power of full control without having to understand how to actually use it for better or worse most of the models here are parametric so you can play around with them and customize the output but that's not full control proper because you have to use these models and you can customize them but you're not actually making your own models so what makes full control different to um let's go even simpler normally the fdm process starts with a model that came from a CAD program or another modeling program maybe blender and it's usually in some kind of format and eventually makes its way to STL format which is basically triangles to get a 3D printer to turn that into a physical product we have to slice that STL file [Music] or that's what we've come to call the process of converting the geometric model into a series of movements that happen in distinct layers on the printer we should call them slices not layers I think so yeah consistency not a thing slicers are um quite rigid in the way that they work they're often called 2.5d as a result as opposed to 3D but more than that slicers follow a very specific set of rules to interpret what you put in full control doesn't do that at all full control does not interpret CAD objects or STL files at least so far as I know it's hard to find an analogy as to um what full control is but it works at a much lower level than any slicer and since it's hard to explain let's look at some examples here is the model I made for the review I just released you might have watched this most of you didn't I could see that in the stats but don't worry I'm not offended you can watch what you want take a look at how it's operating a slicer would usually want to do a nice neat reliable job of this by cutting it into paths that are known to work full control G-Code though it doesn't really want to do anything it does exactly what you tell it and in this case if we poked into the code we would see that it's telling it to just eject a blobber filament and then move a bit and then eject another blobber filament and then move a bit um around in a circular shape in fact without getting too deep yet I can tell you it's using loops and mats um trigonometry because this is a design that repeats every layer and it repeats around a circle now you should not be scared of programming in full control you might have some programming knowledge or some python knowledge but it's actually quite approachable to almost anyone even if you haven't really got that knowledge this is the part where we start looking at full control the python Library this is fairly new although I suspect it might have been around for a year now because I have a really distorted view of the passage of time but it's still fairly new in the grand scheme of things and you may not have seen it at all even if you've used full control before and I think a lot of people are hiding behind furniture with regards to full control because scary python but no we can do this as it says itself minimal python knowledge is required which is great because that's exactly how much I bring to the table the author of full control has given us a lot of help to make this approachable and above all else he set up the website and the tutorials and the whole thing in fact so that you never have to worry about installing python on your computer this helps a lot because anytime you look up how to do anything in terms of setting python up people just yell venv at you and I'm not even sure if anyone knows what venv means I think it's Latin anyway I've lost my train of thought let's just look at some code this is the simplest demo there is it's called Fast demo probably for a reason and it's broken down and explained so it looks longer than it would be if it was just raw python uh the first thing here is just python stuff importing the library you can ignore that the next section is easier to understand if you've used python but if you haven't it's just creating a list in um kind of an array uh called steps and slowly building that up by filling that list with steps which is coordinates it's just doing this I'll give you a minute to read that pause if you need to you can and should click in the corner to get these to run sequentially down the page you will get a plot of what will be printed if you run this code um to this point if you click and drag you can turn it but you probably can make out that it's two layers on top of each other uh crosschecking the code that is exactly what it's doing the Z axis goes to 2 and then on the second layer to 0 4 none of this is particularly tricky to understand it's kind of a bit like a G-Code preview in your slicer the next section is like start and end G-Code but actually a bit easier you're setting up the printer most printers will work if you set them as an end of three but discussing that is beyond the scope of the video at your own risk you should just set the printer to the closest one you have and obviously bear in mind that you have to deal with um bed mesh and Zed offset if you if you have those things set up on the printer then you need to make sure that that's somewhere in your G-Code um otherwise you just have to manually level and Clipper is another consideration because you have the start macro which you will want to somehow insert at the beginning of the G-Code again that's something thing that I don't want to go into because it's something you could just figure out yourself I think the last line here is just to turn this thing that we've done into G-Code and on these notebook thingies it seems to just download it in the browser and that's all there is to it you just have to look at your downloads folder if I print that it will do exactly what we expect congratulations I guess you now understand the basics of full control G-Code what's beyond this is limited by your willingness to learn a bit more Python and your imagination and time I guess and how much you want to do trigonometry let's talk about the sponsor of this video sunlu sunlu makes filament as you probably know but what you may not know is that I use and have used sunlu pretty much right back to the time I started 3D printing here's a video I made in 2021 and Brace yourselves this is pretty terrible no issues whatsoever with sunlu in fact I think they might be my favorite brand overall the red shiny filament here is also one of my favorite so you that is genuinely terrible did I actually sound like that in my opinion which hasn't hugely changed if I'm buying filament myself then suddenly hits that spot between price and quality that makes it really good value for money especially if you take up one of their deals speaking of they have asked me to tell you about their Black Friday promotions which I will link below I know filament might seem like a mundane thing to buy on Black Friday but there is money to be saved and if you do that money could be spent on a new printer so check out the links for sunl below and I will update those links if you're watching this after Black Friday just to make sure that they continue to point to the right places sunlu also makes resin here's some that I have and I haven't used yet because I haven't got my act together yet on resin um yeah it's taking a while they actually do some interesting colors of this stuff and it's available in water soluble as well the latest thing that they have sent me though is this anti string PLA and while I haven't really been able to put it through its Paces yet to see just exactly how anti string it is after all professionals like me don't get stringing in the first place it is a really nice PLA and it has a sort of matte finish and the colors are actually really good I'll put links in below to that too so thank you sunlu for sponsoring this video and make sure you go and check them out as I said I don't want this to turn out to be a tutorial but I do want to show you something let's make a square vase so we don't have to do any Circle stuff and I want the vase to get wider until halfway up and then just go inwards a bit we'll start with the design template this is provided um it's on the main page of full control so that we don't have to do all the boring setup or try and figure out how to include the python libraries and stuff we can get straight into writing the um the actual code for what we want to create I'm going to make it a chunky vs because we absolutely can on a point4 nozzle so let's do 1 mm wide lines and4 mm tall and we'll do 30 total layers you can even see here that there's already most of the code to do this with just some minor adjustment um we can plot just what's there now and we can see how how far we are we need a lot more layers and perhaps a thinner vs and it also doesn't go out and back in yet and now it does all I've done here is increment some variables and change the coordinates to include them granted our vase has no base but who wants functional vases anyway uh there's obviously a lot more functions you can use in full control above and beyond adding points and joining the dots but it's very much up to you what you want to get into you can get a long way without it with just using points um like like I did in that example you can make stuff like this so my next logical thought was I should try and make something a bit more interesting but then I thought well let's go one better because I hate having to do trigonometry let's try and get AI to make something this model you see here was programmed entirely by chat GPT admittedly I had to put a lot of effort into describing to chat GPT what I actually wanted it to give me meaning I told it that I wanted a list and I wanted Point objects and I told it exactly what those Point objects should be and I didn't really know what I was asking for half the time which is kind of hilarious cuz my python is not really that great but we got there and we got this of course once I had that and the AI knew exactly what I was asking for I could ask for variations um like I asked for this which kind of turns as it goes upwards it's kind of nice of course there's no guarantee and this is one of the caveats with full control G-Code there is no guarantee that the output from full control will be printable that's totally a thing with slices too but less so these days slicers are really good at telling you or refusing to do things that aren't printable but with full control the guard rails are completely off the previous example did print out out but it it kind of messed up at the top because the overhangs were too far so I had to kind of edit it a bit to make it more printable you can go a long way with better Cooling and this is why for this video I was using the Sall sv7 Plus for the bulk of the print because it has a huge fan thing on the back that that just blasts air forwards you will find that if you start stretching full control in terms of line Heights speeds flow rates or doing the blob examples things like that uh sometimes no amount of cooling will help but the more cooling you have the better that's something to consider that that cooling is probably one of the most important factors when printing with full control in terms of the AI generated code I only told it to give me points so I wasn't really using most of the functions in full control defining points is as I said it's kind of like pegs and strings um admittedly that's how G-Code Works generally anyway you have Arc functions but slicers don't always use them but you're not really leveraging any of the really clever stuff that uh full control can do and there is a list of those functions around somewhere I'll hopefully put it on screen so given that we have slicers what is full control for why do we need full control gcode and I think the answer is it's mostly for the things that slicers can't do and I know that might sound like too obvious an answer but I think it's the truth slicers are powerful but fairly stubborn in the way that they work and that's something I'm all too aware of when I'm trying to create examples or test out things in 3D printing you often have to kind of prod the slicer to do what you want and it's literally often the case that if you're doing any kind of research or testing around fdm you end up designing for the slicer rather than for what you actually want as the output obviously that is not ideal having a Slicer in the middle that's trying to sort of do the opposite of what you want and that's the Gap that it seems to me that full control fills for an example maybe if if you wanted to make a flow test if you want to gradually increase the flow rate until the extruder can't extrude anymore then full control is the ideal environment to program that in if you want to do some non-player stuff where you're moving up and down on the Zed axis full control doesn't restrict you there either you don't have to stay on one layer I've really just touched the surface of full control in this video If even that we've gone embarrassingly um shallow into the actual functionality of full control but I hope this has given some insight into what is going on Behind These demos you've been seeing and maybe you might even be curious enough to give it a go and try and make something cool that is it thank you for watching and see you next [Music] time

Channel: Lost In Tech

Views: 168,112

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Id: Sp2qHM-0Boc

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 23 2023