Arc Welder - Smoother, Faster, Better 3D Prints! Its like magic to improve your 3D Print quality.

on today's makers mashup we're getting  better prints by using an arc welder   on today's makers mashup we're going to be  using an arc welder to improve our 3d print   quality now i'm not talking about the kind that  joins metal i'm talking about a piece of software   that is called arc welder that does an amazing  job at approving your g code before you send it   to your 3d printer you may be familiar with the  popular octal app software and if you've seen   a youtube video or a video on instagram where 3d  prints magically develop into a full 3d print that   octolapse software, the author of that also wrote  this brand new piece of software called arc welder   now what arc welder does is it takes the different  points that are straight lines in your 3d print   because your 3d printer really just prints  straight lines and what it does is it takes   that g code and then turns them into arcs so it  reduces the total amount of g-code that is being   sent to your printer it also uses marlin smoothie  wear all the different types of software out there   to use their arc functionality so instead of the  slicer creating circles by using individual lines   it is now offloading that to the firmware  and allowing it to go ahead and create arcs   now for those of you that are very familiar with  marlin we talk about marlin software a lot here   a lot of times people have seen arc  support inside marlin but never really seen   how that works because slicers don't  generate arc data out of the slicer   and that's where arc welder comes in it changes  everything in the way that 3d print g-code is sent   to your printer in that it creates arcs and we're  going to cover that a little bit more detail here   but at the bottom line we're talking about  improving our 3d print quality so i've got   two prints here and from this distance you  can't see it but i'll show some close-ups here   these are two couplers that I printed one of  them the traditional way by just slicing it in   cura and then after I sliced it I sent it to  marlin now this print over here which is much   smoother is printed after I've pre-processed  or post-processed depending on the way that   you look at it post processed it out of cura send  it through arc welder and then send it to marlin   it saves a tremendous amount of data in some cases  these sample prints were compressed in g-code   95 so from the data that came out of cura 95 of it  was compressed down or removed because it created   this arc data and then I sent it over to marlin so  that's a tremendous savings in not only speed of   transferring things to marlin but it also reduces  the amount of g-code that marlin has to process   and if you've ever tried to do high-speed printing  like we've tried and done successfully with the   x301 printer or any other core xy build if  you try to get that high speed you notice   that what happens is you get a buffer under run or  basically the buffer is not able to keep up with   the data that's coming in so it requires marlin  to process far more data than the cpu supports   so that's why 32-bit boards and 32-bit cpus are  really more beneficial so if you have an 8-bit   printer you're definitely going to want to watch  the rest of this video so with all that said let's   get to work let's take a moment to talk about how  arc welder works in this diagram the first step   is to look for three points along the tool path  and then determine if the arc created would be   within the configured resolution it then continues  adding points while checking the maximum deviation   once the maximum sized arc is achieved arc welder  ends the current arc and begins another one and   then the entire process keeps repeating  until you reach the end of your g-code   you can see this happens almost instantly inside  octoprint my test object was converted in less   than a second and my g-code was compressed by over  60 now let's talk about how to get up and running   with arc welder we're going to start with the cura  installation because it's the easiest one to do   simply click the marketplace link at the top and  then from within the marketplace scroll down to   the arc welder plug-in that was developed by field  of view the plug-in directly uses the arc welder   library which we'll cover in just a minute and  you can run the arc welder library directly you   don't have to run it from within cura so those of  you that don't use cura and prefer something like   prusa slicer you'll still be able to compress your  g-code once the plugin is installed you'll want to   scroll down to special modes and then all you have  to do is click the check box for arc welder this   exposes all the different options available to  you to configure the tolerance or the resolution   for arc welder I suggest experimenting with it  a little bit to find out what suits your needs   best now let's get this installed for octoprint  we'll start by clicking the wrench icon and from   there go to the plugin manager and get more  you'll search for the arc welder plugin or   you can install it from the url like I am because  i'm using the beta version this new beta version   should be released about the same time this video  publishes once everything is installed you'll have   to restart your octoprint instance but overall  installing this in octoprint is extremely easy   as I illustrated earlier all you have to do  is drop a file in and arc welder will kick off   automatically and convert the file but we're  going to go ahead and look at the statistics   for artwelder and we're going to configure it as  well now something you should note is down here at   the bottom is the firmware compatibility now once  you've installed this I suggest you run this check   because one of the things I had to enable  in octoprint here was the g90 g91 influences   extruder option and i'm going to cover that now  because once you run this firmware check you may   need to change this for your octoprint instance  as well enabling this feature is really easy   click the wrench icon then go to features within  octoprint and click the box that enables g90 g91   overrides relative extruder mode from there you're  ready to recheck your firmware and make sure   everything is okay with all that done you're ready  to drag and drop your file into octoprint and have   it instantly converted larger files obviously will  take a lot longer once you've converted a file you   can click the arc welder tab at the top and you  can get the analysis of each individual file by   default arc welder will create a file name with a  dot aw in the middle and all you'll have to do is   click on that file and then click print now let's  talk about the command line use of arc welder this   has the advantage of working in windows mac and  linux being slicer agnostic you can also use this   to bake it into any scripts or applications that  you see fit here we have former lurker's github   page and from here we're going to navigate to the  arc welder lib on this page and links for all this   are in the description now to download the latest  version you're going to want to go to the tags   and from here you'll see that there is a releases  tab once you click on that you just need to scroll   down and from there you can see the various  releases for different operating systems   we're going to download the windows version  here and then we're going to unzip it   google chrome did give me a warning and I just  told it to keep the file after this I proceeded   to open it up and then we unzip the file giving  us a directory structure of both the libraries and   the binary files where the arc welder executable  exists here we are at the command prompt and you   can see the arc welder executable and also the  arc straightener I suggest checking that out but   i'm not going to cover it in this video so we're  going to do a simple conversion of the test ring   g code that you see here and it's simply a matter  of giving it an input and output file name I used   the same aw nomenclature and you can see here  we can press this file 95 percent listing out   the directory you can see here that we took this  from a 4meg gcode file down to a 441 kg code file   so that's a substantial difference in what  you're transferring through the 3d printer you   can control the resolution as well at the command  line i'm going to set this to the same value which   is the default of 0.05 on the resolution and  you can see our conversion rate is 95.3 percent   however if I change this 2.1 and execute the same  g code you'll see that it actually compresses it   down to 95.4 percent so you can play with these  different numbers and get the best compression   with still the type of quality that  you want to see out of your 3d prints   now let's take a look at the quality you can  see here that because the 3d printer always   does print in straight lines then you always  get a slight ripple effect but the one on the   left that you can see all the bumps in there  that is the one that was printed without arc   welder and you can see how much smoother the two  on the right are one is a .05 and .1 respectively   all of these prints were done with 1.8 degree  steppers now in theory if you were using a 0.9   degree stepper you could get some additional  resolution that might improve this further   I was very impressed given all we did was run this  through arc welder now let's get down to the nuts   and bolts on testing tolerance in my tests I was  able to print three different versions of these   nuts and bolts that pieced together and in my  testing each one of them worked perfectly I had   no issues assembling the nut onto the bolt here's  the nut and bolt before arc welder and you can see   the seam that comes out the same on both but you  can see the ripples that are caused by the stutter   of the 3d printer when it's printing on this  original bolt the arc welded version looks   much better it's completely smooth all the way  around with the exception of the seam itself   performance was improved overall you can see here  that this print running at 300 percent feed rate   stutters constantly from buffer under run and you  can also see those vertical lines in the print   like we saw on all the others this is the unarc  welded file this print is a 400 percent feed rate   based on the exact same print only run  through arc welder you can see how smooth   it is generally going all the way around and  all of those vertical artifacts that you saw   are removed from the print ring I found that  you can run about 200 percent feed rates over   the serial cable but the sd card is really where  it shines where I was able to get a 400 percent   feed rate from the normal 60 millimeter a second  settings so as you can see using arc welder is   really rather simple you've got a number of  different options you can use it inside cura   if you don't use cura for your slicer you can use  it either in oct print or the command line version   that's pretty much universal and it works on  various operating systems too so you're not stuck   with windows only or only linux there's a couple  of different options as well and links for all   that are down in the description so you can check  out their page download the software and get up   and running with this video pretty quickly and you  can start improving your print quality overall I   know I covered a lot of information pretty quickly  in today's video on how to use arc welder and how   to get it up and running and I just want to say if  you're having a little bit of trouble getting it   running feel free to reach out to our channel  discord we're over a thousand members strong   and there's lots of people in there that can help  you with this project or any other project that   you're working on and links to our discord are  down in the description I also want to especially   thank former lurker for his support in producing  this video it was great having him available to   answer all of my questions and really help during  some of the testing I really encourage you to   check out the software and if you're not using arc  welder you may already be using octal apps which   is another great piece of software he put together  this is a great project and it's even supported by   layer fuse layer fuse team is a patreon supporter  of arc welder because I feel that it's really   a game changer in the 3d printing community and I  really suggest you check it out so with that it's   going to bring the end of today's video if you  enjoyed it make sure you mash that like button   and don't forget to share and subscribe so  you don't miss any of our upcoming videos   i'd also love to hear if you're going to be  using arc welder down in the comments and I   would also love to hear what your test results  are and your experience with arc welder as well   so with all that said I want to say thanks  again for watching and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Makers Mashup

Views: 380,694

Keywords: 3d printing, arc welder, arc, welder, octoprint, improve 3d print quality, improve 3d prints, improve 3d printer quality, improve 3d print speed, smoother prints, better 3d prints, how to get better 3d prints, how to get better 3d print quality, plugin, octoprint plugin, smooth 3d print, cura arc welder, makers mashup, arc welder octoprint, smoother 3d prints, arc welder plugin, arc welder plugin octoprint, arc welder plugin cura, beginners guide to 3d printing in 2023

Id: 18uYYXecH5g

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 30 2021