Bambu Studio OrcaSlicer (SoftFever) fork: An advanced slicer for many 3D printers

bamboo lab have disrupted the market with their successful X1 and p1p 3D printers some folks don't like that bamboo lab are mostly close Source but not completely because today we test a community Fork of their slicer by Soft fever [Music] [Music] you can always trust such ready printing Community to take something open source invest time and effort and make it better bamboo lab have one part of their ecosystem that is open source the slicer named bamboo Studio true to form this has been forked and expanded by Soft fever today we check it out comparing settings and testing performance not only on bamboo lab printers but on those from creality and rat Rick too if we head to the bamboo GitHub we can see that there's two repositories one of them is for the app and that's basically empty the repository for bamboo Studio the slicer however is fully open source and that's because it has to be being based on prusa slicer which was based on slick 3r or slicer being open source on GitHub means that other people have forked it and we can see at the current time of recording there's 102 Forks a fork is when someone copies the code base to make their own modifications you'll notice in the center however that many of these Forks are sub Forks of a version created by Soft fever which is what we're going to be testing out today scrolling to the readme will give a brief overview this is a modified version of bamboo studio with additional features and compatible with more 3D printers to download we click the link through to releases come to the latest release which is currently version 1.4.4 scroll to the assets and click to download the zip for our operating system in my case windows 10. inside that zip file is a folder and nothing really needs installation we just need to copy that folder to a directory of our choice once we've done that we can go inside and see that there's an executable file that will launch the app this will initiate a setup wizard exactly the same as the vanilla bamboo studio and for now I'm going to skim through because you can access all of this later on if you intend to send print jobs to your machines via Wi-Fi you'll need to install the network plugin this only takes 30 seconds and the only other thing we need to do to get set up is to log in with our bamboo lab account however this is only needed if you're using a bamboo lab printer so far the same setup as the vanilla version but what differences can we find inside the program so when it first opens and you log in you'll notice it looks pretty much the same apart from a bit of a teal color compared to the green color of the vanilla version let's come up to our printer selection in the original we have support for the bamboo lab printers as well as an Ender 3 and then a couple of different models of borons whereas in the forked version we have all of these Printers Plus the anchor M5 any cubic 4 Max Pro Sidewinder X2 and a 3v2 cr10 Max two prusa models rat Rigs snapmaker and the trunksy X5 sa and reading the release notes it looks like other printers are being added regularly the interface for the most part is identical but we do have a few additional options when it comes to slicer settings where it's the original slicer only has one setting for the scene position the soft fever version has five in the advanced section compared to the vanilla slicer we have a few extra options as well and this trend continues for each slicing section many people might not touch these extra settings but if you're someone who likes to really tweak you'll appreciate having the extra options one noticeable change to support other printers is beyond the vanilla slicer having acceleration control the soft fever version has additional options for this as well as joke control our final slicer settings section which comes from editing the filament values once again shows that there's a few extra options on the soft fever version for some parts it looks like there's more but the layout is different making the section look longer none of these additional settings are going to be make or break for your print quality but it's nice to have them for those who like to Tinker one significant difference comes along the top bar whereas on the vanilla version we have undo redo and then blank on the soft fever version we have a calibration button which we'll be exploring in more detail later on you might be wondering can I switch from the vanilla version to this Fork easily with my bamboo lab printer our first scenario is if we have a bamboo lab printer already using the vanilla slicer can we instantly switch over to this soft fever Fork to determine that we need some test prints and I chose this print in place collider cycle designed by A Chorus it doesn't take too long to print but is still a great test for overhangs clearance and overall print quality I sliced a version in pla using the vanilla slicer this is on the X1 Carbon using the textured Pei plate I was also using the AMS with my filament in slot 3. once this print was done I sliced the same model in exactly the same way using the soft fever Fork the only perceivable difference was an increase in print Time by one minute as everything else was the same including sending the job wirelessly and integration between the slicer and the printer where like before we can view the webcam feed see print progress and have the printer talk to the slicer to determine what filaments are in the AMS so how did the two prints compare let's have a look here is the version sliced in the vanilla version of bamboo Studio as you can see it's a little bit tight but loosens up as I start to rotate the design the soft fever version is more or less the same perhaps a little bit looser straight off the printer ultimately both of these had sufficient clearance and quality to work effectively a observing the print quality side by side I would have to say they look identical because they're based off knee identical profiles no problems yet so let's say how easy it is to use with a non-bamboo lab printer as we saw earlier the soft Beaver fog supports more than just bamboo printers including rat Rigs and I built a v-core 3 300 millimeter version previously on the channel therefore it's convenient to tick this printer from the selection and see how well this slicer can handle it the rut rig doesn't have an AMS so the first thing I did was reduce the spools of filament back to one and then I saw that a range of filament profiles had already been set up if we like we can click to customize this printer profile all of the printed dimensions are already correct so you shouldn't need to make any changes there so perhaps the most valuable thing you can do is edit your machine start an NG code to match what's in your existing slicer but for this test I chose to leave everything as is the other thing you can do is to click the Wi-Fi button and enter the IP address of your printer for a Clipper printer you can leave it on octoprint even with fluid or Mainsail what you should Now find is that if you click the device tab it will load the web interface for your printer as if you would enter the same IP address into your web browser I think this is a simple but really convenient feature time for some print tests and as a baseline I slice the same collider cycle in my regular software super slicer using all of the same profiles I normally would and using these regular settings this print completed in 1 hour and 22 minutes and as I would have hoped the parts move freely and looked pretty good too this is a well-tuned printer so how will the soft fever 4 candle it selecting this printer will give us a range of pre-made profiles but before we can use them we need to make sure our printer supports G2 and G3 commands as the bamboo slicer will use these by default if your printer runs Marlin you can check in configuration underscore ADV in the section called Arc support making sure that it's defined which it should be by default for Clipper there's a section of code that we can simply copy and add to our configuration mimicking some Marlin based G-Code and ensuring compatibility I pasted in this section of code to the end of my printer configuration saved and restarted and my setup was done I then sliced the model matching the amount of infill and wall Loops as well as turning off the brim but otherwise leaving everything else on default to keep things comparable just like with super slicer when I came up to print I had the option to upload directly to the printer and commence the job switching to the device tab I could see that this was successful and the print job was commencing so far the rat rig integration was quite seamless so how did the soft fever print compare the first thing I noticed is that although some of the parts would move freely I couldn't get the model moving well enough for a complete rotation but then I noticed on the underside that one segment of the model hadn't printed properly and this had fused that joint probably my fault for leaving a greasy fingerprint comparing the two in terms of quality the underside and all of the overhangs look equally good on both and the top Solid infill probably looks a little bit nicer on the soft fever version however the simple reason for this may be that the soft fever version took 20 minutes longer to print so things were moving a little bit slower which generally can help Quality Soft fever bamboo Studio was able to complete this great print with zero modifications to the inbuilt rat rig profiles remember I didn't even change the start and NG code so what about printers that are not officially supported how about a creality ender 3 modified with an omniodrop extruder a machine I've dedicated to printing flexibles in the printer selection only the creality N3 version 2 is there but I ticked it anyway it still has the same print dimensions and firmware so my setup was limited to inserting my starting NG code from my regular slicer and also porting over my retraction parameters this machine is running octoprint so I paste it in the IP address and API key and like with the rat rig running Clipper when I switched to the device tab it loaded the web interface as if I was in my browser one thing I struggled with was selecting TPU as my filament of choice even though I had it ticked in the filament selection dialog it still wouldn't show up on the list of available filaments I switched back to vanilla bamboo Studio enabled the same printer enabled the same selection of filaments but the same thing happened there's clearly something I'm not understanding if you know what it is please let me know in the comments section back in soft fever I opened up the pla setting and set it to TPU before copying over some of the settings from the bamboo lab generic TPU profile including the max volumetric speed which will limit the speed this filament prints at to ensure reliability I saved the modified pla profile as a generic TPU profile and got ready to print just like with Clipper you can upload directly to octoprint and have the job start I had recently printed this exact model on this exact printer with super slicer so I already had a nice Baseline for comparison and this is one example where the highly tuned profile was comfortably ahead of what bamboo Studio had by default the surface quality was definitely not as clean on top of the stringing which was quite prominent not perfect but still a reasonable Baseline finally let's try the inbuilt calibration the inbuilt calibration is best suited to printers like the bamboo lab p1p which doesn't have the x1cs inbuilt lighter to automatically tune flow rate and pressure Advance normally for the p1p on the device tab we would connect to the printer and then we have the option to set our pressure Advanced K value for that particular role of filament the first thing the soft fever version adds is a box a tick for enable pressure Advance where we can directly input at K value to be applied when the file is sliced in this section we can also input the flow ratio regular bamboo Studio gives us no way to tune these two values which is why the calibration section on soft fever is so handy so if we come up to calibration we can see that the two current tests are for flow rate and pressure advance but we should start by clicking on tutorial this will load a web page where everything is explained really well including animated diagrams and these instructions will always be more up to date than my video so you should follow them but here's what they currently entail firstly you need to have the printer bed type and filament all selected and then come up to the menu and select flow rate pass one this will load some items on the bed which we can slice and then send to the printer each item is going to be a variation with either more or less filament than your current flow rate and when they're done you're going to inspect the surfaces we can see that 20 is over extruded whereas -10 and Below has gaps in between the extrusions I actually think zero is the best for me but for a demonstration's sake let's go with plus 5. the formula you need plus an example is written in the instructions my old flow rate was 0.95 I'm going to multiply that by 100 plus or minus whatever result we went with mine being plus five therefore times 105 and then divide that result by 100 to get my new flow rate I can then paste that into the flow ratio section and save it ready for the second test we then return to the calibration menu and select flow rate pass to when prompted we can discard all of the old values slice the new test and send it to the printer again we're looking for the nicest top surface and I think minus five my original value is my favorite so I went back to 0.95 in the slicer but assuming you have a different value there's another formula here for you to compute and save to your filament profile now the pressure Advanced calibration which we again select from the top menu we have a choice between direct drive or Bowden extruder and then a choice between a Tower or line method the line method is very quick but the tower method is probably a bit more reliable I'll start with the line method hit OK nothing will be displayed until you slice the file in which case you can see it's just like Marlin's pattern and you're ready to send it to the printer just like Marlin we have a series of lines with a fast acceleration and then deceleration each line is extruded with a different pressure Advanced K value the instructions explain that we're looking for the most consistent line and in their example there's clearly a line that has less blobs and thin sections for me however with black filament on a black base it's almost impossible to tell them apart but this is the filament that I use on this machine so I guess I'll try the tower method instead so this time from the menu the only change I'll make is to set Tower which as you might expect will generate a tower with a pressure Advanced K value is changing for every layer this print took a tad over half an hour for me but even with dark filament the result was clear you should see on one corner some bulging and on the upper corner some Extrusion breakdown and what you're looking for is the sweet spot in the middle we then measure the vertical height of this sweet spot from the base of the model in my case approximately 24 millimeters on on the instructions we have another very simple formula for direct drive this is going to be .002 times the height that we measured for Bowden it's just going to be .02 this gave me a new K value of 0.048 on the device screen we can set this for the current role of filament or as I did we can tick the box for pressure Advance enter the value there and then save this profile with the name of the specific filament this is receiving frequent updates so I currently don't see any downsides to using the soft fever version so I'll be sticking with it I should also mention that the bamboo handy mobile app is independent and works equally fine with either version hopefully I've shown that it's easy to hit the ground running with this Fork of the slicer yet there is room for growth if you want to get into the fine tuning so thank you soft fever for your work if you're planning to give this a go let me know in the comments section below whether it be with a bamboo lab printer or perhaps one from another brand thank you so much for watching and until next time happy experimenting with new slices for your 3D printer g'day it's Michael again if you like the video then please click like if you want to see more content like this in future click subscribe and make sure you click on the Bell to receive every notification if you really want to support the channel and see exclusive content become a patron visit my patreon page see you next time

Channel: Teaching Tech

Views: 127,087

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, 3d print, 3d printed, bambu lab, bambu studio, bambu handy, slicer, open source, prusaslicer, slic3r, fork, upgrade, download, free, how to, tutorial, guide, p1p, x1, x1c, x1 carbon, step by step, test, test print, calibration, pressure advance, flow, ams, tower, creality, ender 3, cr-10 max, rat rig, v core 3, print in place, teaching tech, softfever, pla, tpu, profile, modify, customise, customize

Id: MqkC-STieww

Length: 16min 49sec (1009 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023