Arc Welder - Octoprint Plugin To Help Your Prints - Set Up & Test - Chris's Basement

today we're going to take a look at an octoprint plug-in that could improve your 3d prints greatly we're going to take a look at arc welder [Music] hey everyone chris here and yes today we are going to take a look at another octoprint plugin this time arc welder now this one's by brad you might know him as former lurker over on github he's behind a lot of great octoprint plugins but this plugin utilizes g2 and g3 commands instead of the normal g1 to try to smooth out some of the artifacts in your print this is mostly related to circular objects but it should help on a lot of different prints and it might be kind of hard for me to explain so let's just take a look at the plug-in page it's going to make a lot more sense if you see the pictures brad has a lot of great information out here on the page including a few helpful diagrams and he explains it in depth about how it works i will try to go over this as well but basically what it's doing it's trying to replace some of these linear movements g zeros g1s with g2 and g3 arc movement and it greatly compresses your g-code because you can imagine you would have to have a whole lot of g1 linear movements to achieve a circular pattern when you have an arc movement that's actually a circular movement there's a lot less commands to give it and you can read all this information but just looking at this each one of these dots it represents a start or endpoint of an extrusion so on the left is standard g0 g1 movements and on the right is g2 and g3 and it states right here it's 76 smaller with 96 percent fewer extrusion slash retractions so not only is it going to give you better print quality it might even buy you a little bit of print time you can see down below here before and after of the benchy and there's some stats that go with it as well and all the information on how it works is on this page so yes just by using arc welder you could improve your print quality but there's another big issue that arc welder is trying to resolve and that's stuttering stuttering is basically a condition where your command buffer runs out of commands and you have to wait for it to get another one to start printing again so that causes your printer to halt wait for the command start stop start stop and that stuttering can leave some really strange artifacts on your print now the stuttering is caused by a few different things but sometimes it's caused by using octoprint because you're accepting commands over a serial bus when you use your sd card on your printer that's actually going over spi and it is much faster so if you see that issue most of the time you can correct it by just printing off sd you can usually still print from the serial you might have to do a little bit of troubleshooting but this is one of the main issues that you're going to see let me show you an example so here's an extreme example of stuttering you can see all these artifacts on the outside of the benchy now i didn't actually cause this stuttering by command overflow what you would see something caused by a serial connection i overran the processor and again this is a very extreme case it's going to be a lot worse if you overrun the processor you might only see it a little bit if you're having a serial issue but this is the kind of thing that arc welder is trying to fix and just to give you an idea of what this looks like it's actually really hard to see on camera but there is a stammer on this printer and this delta runs an 8-bit board and i turned the feed rates and acceleration way up to cause this just to give you an idea but this is the machine that printed that white benchy it's almost easier to hear the stutter than it is to see it again remember this is an extreme case so the fact that a g2 and g3 movement might improve your print quality and that octoprint streaming it over that usb serial might introduce some stutter those are two great reasons to try out arc welder but how does arguable actually get all this done so the first thing we need to do is make sure that your firmware has arc support marlin does have it turned on by default right here it does use a lot of memory they've even got it out here if you need to save memory on your board this is a great feature to come in and comment out but i know rip rap and clipper both support arc and if you are going to use marlin with arc support try to get the newer versions anything over 2.06 has greatly improved the support so that's the first part make sure this is enabled in your firmware and for everyone that still has an 8-bit board i did compile this on a 2560 processor just this tri gorilla board arc support will fit on that chip you have a little bit of memory left over and i do have linear advance enabled and arc welder and arc support works just fine with linear advanced enabled next up we need to install arc welder it's a plug-in so we can just go to settings here in octoprint plug-in manager and get more you can just search for arc and here's arc welder i already have it installed but if you don't just hit install once it's installed we can go back into settings and you'll have arc welder down under here under the plugins you can set the resolution that arc welder uses this is basically the setting that arc welder tries to get those arc points to if you go back to that example it's the distance between the arc movements down here it shows it a little better that's the resolution setting you can set the maximum radius and how it processes the file if you would like it to automatically process it when it comes into octoprint which i think is the handiest you can have it overwrite the source file if you wish i usually leave that turned off but that's mostly because i'm comparing the two there are a couple of arc welder specific settings you can use here i just go with the octoprint profile settings and there are some notification and progress bar settings here if you'd like to turn them on there's also debug logging you can grab the logs down here and there is a warning down here remember this is a work in progress so it might affect things not as you expect it to but i still think it's worth a try so now we need to talk about g code and what it's actually doing to that g code so we have ravinchi here in prusa slicer we've sliced it let's just take a look at the g-code file we'll just pull it open in notepad and the benchy isn't the greatest object to use arc welder on really it's more focused at cutting down the angles on those radiuses for circle type prints you can see all the different g1 commands and arc welder is going to determine what of these commands it can take and compress it down to a g2 or g3 movement and then remove all those lines so you have a lot fewer lines of g code to process when you're processing over sd card or serial so the command buffer has less commands so less chance to introduce that stuttering caused by that buffer starvation so from octoprint with arc welder installed if we upload our g-code it'll come in as normal but then as soon as it arrives you're going to see the arc welder plug-in up here in the top corner it's compressing and then it's going to give you some stats if you want to see those again you can just pop those open it's down here on the g-code file so for the benchy it actually compressed that g-code by 40 percent it compressed 41 000 points and it created almost 6 500 arcs so if we download that g-code and take another look you can see it's introduced a g3 and a g2 here and there but you'll notice this compressed g-code file has 49 000 lines non-compressed 121 000 lines so this arc welder file is going to be much easier for the printer and octoprint to keep up with but what if we take advantage of arc welder to its fullest extent and we print something that's a circle this is just my test print that i came up with but let's go ahead and slice that and throw it into octoprint and let arc welder compress it arc welder is working on it it's done and we'll take a look at our stats we compressed it 46 70 000 points compressed 8 000 arcs created it does give you all the stats on the different segments and if we compare those g codes here's that circular shape without arc welder it takes a lot of g1 commands to create all those curves 135 000 lines of g-code just for that print and then with arc welder you can see a lot of these commands on this one are g3's g2s and we're down to 73 000 lines of g-code so it should be a big improvement so arc welder is using that g2 and g3 to condense down that g-code so that it's easier to process over the serial and it gives you more of a smooth transition for those print moves because it is an actual arc counterclockwise or clockwise that's the difference between g2 and g3 and it does greatly affect the print quality so let's take a look at a few of those so here's the circular object that i showed you in the slicer now all these were printed on log log isn't the fanciest printer in the world so excuse some of the print quality but if you've ever tried to print a circular object you'll notice a lot of these lines and those go hand in hand all the way around because of those g1 movements it's trying to take a linear movement and move it around a circular path so it chops it up so if you take a look at this print that's been through arc welder there are still some artifacts in here like that but they've been drastically smoothed out and as far as i can tell any artifacts that you see on here are on the stock print it hasn't introduced anything new if you want to side by side without with so if you're trying to print a part that has lots of radiuses on it this might be the plugin for you and i wanted to try this again just in a different color filament to see if i could see any difference and i think this really shiny blue filament shows it even better so without arc welder and width you can kind of move it around in the light and see those different points i think this one shows that it even did a better job now in something like the benchy other than the fact that log has some sort of z wobble going on that it didn't know about it really didn't improve it that greatly davinci does have some curves that it did help out on it made it more efficient but just because of the way that the benchy prints and this is pla filament you're not going at a very fast rate it's going to be hard for you to tell the difference this one is our stock this one is with arc welder just looking at the front of the ship there at one of the major curves you really can't see that much difference so arc welder isn't going to help you out with every print but i know over the years that i've done a lot of prints that this would have improved the look of greatly case in point the fan duct that i did from the fan video a couple of weeks ago you can see just how stepped it is around the barrel this would have been a great candidate for arc welder it would have taken care of a lot of this and made it a lot smoother so there are a lot of use cases here so there it is the arc welder plug-in in a nutshell brian did a really great job on this and again he has made a lot of great plugins for octoprint i will leave all of his information in the description below please consider supporting his efforts also chris one of our community members sent me an email on arcwelder and said it might make a good video idea and i had been thinking about this for a long time but lost track of it so chris thanks for reminding me on that but this plugin isn't for everyone as a lot of plugins but it does appear to work really well in some use cases so i definitely urge you to give it a try if this is something you see on your prints now there is the case of speed causing issues like this and we are going to delve into that in a later video that's why i was getting that delta set up but more to come on that that's it for today hope you like this video and i'll see you really soon on the next one you

Channel: Chris Riley

Views: 14,616

Keywords: 3D, printer, Printing, 3D Printing, 3D Printer, ChrisBasement, ChrissBasement, Chris'sBasement, Chris Basement, Chriss Basement, Chris's Basement, ChrisRiley, Chris Riley, benchy, 3dbenchy, 3d, OctoPrint, OctoPrint Plug-in, Arc Welder, octopi, arc, marlin, klipper, reprap

Id: crNU6UoBsKA

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021