Cura 3d Slicer for Beginners in Depth Tutorial

I have this urge for the doctor VAX channel and I'd have the privilege recently to begin reviewing a number of new printers this as an example is the monoprice cadet and a fascinating printer because it's so tiny yet the quality produces is outstanding now the reason a printer produces excellent quality is a combination of hardware and software in the case of the model price cadet two chips of a current version of Kyra that has a excellent finely tuned profile for the printer there are a number of other printers new in the marketplace where the hardware is really quite spectacular very very cost-effective you can get a lot for your money but the software support is a little rough around the edges so if you want to use one of those printers you need to learn about how to create your own profile in a slicer and today we're going to go in some detail through creating a new profile and Kyra and I'll talk to you about the eight to ten parameters that I think are most important to get you onto the road to success properly so stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] the first step is we're going to talk about models that I use to determine whether my printer is tuned properly then we're going to learn how to select a base printer profile we're gonna learn that not all layer heights are optimal we'll talk about temperature we'll talk a little more about speed we'll talk about travel which consists of combing and Zee hop and a number of other parameters will talk about cooling how to set it properly build plate adhesion now you might think build plate adhesion really it's nothing to do tuning a profile but if you are constantly struggling with your prints coming off the print surface then you can't tune your printer and finally we'll talk about some esoteric parameters that are relatively new called mesh fixes and how one of them can have a dramatic impact on your prints okay let's get started by talking about the models we're going to use to judge the quality of our profile so the first model that I like to use is this calibration cap and I will include a link to this in the description below the video what I really like about this is it prints quickly I don't know anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes or less depending on your layer height and it tests a number of things hey you can test the see how sharp the corners are B it has an overhang C it has two opposite areas you can use to test for stringing and finally it is a precise dimension it is 20 millimeters square so we can get out of our trusty caliper we can turn it on and zero it and then we can take and measure our print if it's undersized by a lot a lot is let's say more than five or 10% then we're under extruding we need to extrude more filament we can do that either in the slicer or in the firmware if it's much bigger than it should be it's over extruding this calibration cat is a go to print for me the second print that's a go to print is this little twin tower print you can see here there is no stringing or almost no stringing between the towers and that's what you want to look for and you use that to tune retraction now if you want to really make yourself miserable and beat yourself up you can use these for tower tower prints now in these cases you will almost always get some stringing at the very top and the reason is the very top of these towers is smaller than the size of the nozzle so you're asking your printer to precisely under extrude filament which is very very hard for it to do now the third print or the fourth print I really like to use is this kick starter test print this is from the monoprice cadet and this was from the et4 before I tuned the profile that we're going to be working on today in both cases this print can be used to check a number of factors one is how precisely is it extremely filament and you can tell that by determining whether all these pins pop out you can see in this case one pin is stuck in there the second is you can look at overhangs third you can look at bridging you can look at fine filament precision and you can see here that there's a lot more stringing on this one than this one and it's almost impossible to get one with no stringing at all and then you have a number of other features you can look at to look at whether there's ghosting or other artifacts in your print so those are the prints I use to judge how well this is working okay now get let's get started with our first new profile so we're going to go to the computer and we're going to go in you Kira now I'm using a relatively new version of Kira here let's see here exactly this is four point four one but everything you're gonna see on the screen should be pretty much the same from 4.0 onward there have been some changes but the overall look and feel will be the same so we're going to start by clicking up here and saying clicking on add a new printer we're gonna add a non-network printer and then we're going to use the scroll bar here to select a printer that is close to our printer now we're adding an amet printer and there is a profile in here for an a met six that's an older a net printer I did try that it didn't work very well so we're gonna sort of start from scratch the a nap ET four if you physically look at it it's here behind me it physically looks a lot like the Cree allottee under three line the overall layout of the components is similar the style of the printer is similar it's a Bowden style printer versus a direct extruder printer and therefore that's a good place to start so you want to find a printer that has the same general architecture uses the same firmware both these printers use Marland and in particular has a similar extruder architecture so but both of these are Bowden tube printers so instead of selecting the a net a six I'm going to go down here to creel t and I'm going to select the ender three now the next thing we have to do is we have to make sure that the dimensions of our printer are set properly that whether or not we have a heated bed is set properly we then have to go to extruder and this is very important make sure that the diameter of your printer is correct because cura supports both three millimeter and 1.75 millimetre printers and in fact if you start with a blank profile from Curie you're gonna get a profile for a three millimeter printer not a 1.75 millimeter printer generally the other things on here will not impact your print dramatically so you can leave those alone but the startg code will now we could use the star cheat code that is in here for the Ender but it has a number of things we probably don't need and so let's look for a minute at some generic G code that I've prepared that will help us get started that I think you can use with most printers to get started so the first thing we're going to do is set up the temperature of the print bed and the extruder and home all the axes then if we have a printer that has an auto bed leveling system and the et4 has a semi-auto bed leveling system that this wouldn't apply to so we won't enable this you do a g29 a g29 command would tell your printer to level the bed to automatically probe the bed we're not going to do that but we are going to in this next section draw two lines of filament on our bed now why don't we want to do that that's called priming the nozzle some people call that a waste line or an index line and what we're doing is we're making sure that filament is going to come out of the your nozzle when you first start a print on a 3d printer it's a good idea to be there and to watch to make sure you get good bed adhesion when you first start that print so we're gonna see if this waste line or this prime line comes out then we're going to set our temperatures again and we are all done now these commands to set the print temperature may not be required depending on the version of Kirra you're using it appears that in some of the most recent releases they're automatically doing that for you but it won't hurt in this case we're going to take and select this start code then we're going to go into Kyra and we're going to delete what was in here and replace it with the start code that was on that page and I'll link to the slide deck below so that you can get a copy of this if you want the end code basically says move the nozzle out of the way turn off the heaters turn off the stepper motors we're gonna leave that as is so we're going to go to next so now we have a new profile and in fact we could just go here and using one of the standard profiles in Kyra we could start printing but instead what we're going to do now is go through the major parameters that you're going to want to set first let's start with quality well the first thing you set for quality and I'm going to make this a little bigger so you can see is layer height now all layer Heights are not created equal there are natural layer Heights for 3d printers 3d printers move up and down by rotating stepper motors they're called stepper motors because they have discrete steps the size of those steps dictate the multiples that work best for your 3d printer so in the case of most Ender style printers not all but most the natural multiple is a multiple of 0.04 you'll see in this current version of Keira the qualities that come up are all multiples of 0.04 in the past they weren't they were numbers like point 1 5 or point 1 oh and what that meant was you were printing a layer height where the stepper couldn't naturally get to that so the stepper motor had to go between its natural steps in order to get to that height which was less accurate now with new stepper motor drivers with micro steps it may be less important but it's still good practice to start with multiples of the natural spaces the natural positions for your printer next we're going to go down to Shell and we're gonna leave all of these values alone but let me tell you something about wall thickness a number of studies published here on YouTube and you can search for it you'll find it from a number of really talented creators have demonstrated specifically I think Stephin at CNC kitchen has one on this have demonstrated that the thickness of the wall of your print the outside wall of your print is more important than the percentage of infill in determining the strength of that print now if we go down to infill here we can leave this at the default but if we want to print faster we want to use less infill and so when I'm first starting a print I very often will use an infill of just 10% which works fine really works fine now let's continue down and the next layer section is material this section is really very important when you go to extrude filament in general the higher the temperature the less work your extruder has to do to push that filament out because the filament is closer to a more liquid state it's softer however it also expands so filament temperature will impact the expansion of filament and the contraction of filament and also the flow rate if on your printer when you go to print you here click click click because your extruder is struggling to push filament out try raising the temperature by five degrees at a time on the other hand generally if you're getting a lot of stringing you want to lower the filament temperature why when the filament is more liquid it will tend to string more but it's not always the case so I found as an example on the et4 that with standard PLA from multiple vendors I've tried it with matter hackers build PLA and I've tried it also with hatch box PLA with both of them a print temperature of 200 C works better than 195 so how did I determine that well I printed a whole bunch of models and you can't see them here on the table but there are lots of them there must be 20 models here that I've printed in order to determine these parameters so it ends up that for the ET for 200 C is a good print temperature flow rate generally I would leave this at the default once again theoretically if you reduce it it will reduce stringing but you may end up with under extrusion under extrusion is where you're not getting good connections between the layers or perhaps between the walls and the infill this print happens to have perfect extrusion it's really beautiful but so in that case you might increase it a bit I'll link to another video where you can learn about setting the extrusion rate properly on your printer I would start this at 100 enable retraction absolutely I would turn this on and this is an area where you're going to have to just print lots and lots and lots of sample prints to try this out I'll give you an example for my under sale printers I use the defaults that are in here for Kira that's not the numbers that used to be in there those are the numbers that the community has really discovered over the past year or so and that's pull back the filament by six point five millimeters at a rate of 25 millimeters per second now when you pull back the filament you're not pulling it out of the nozzle the melted filament in the nozzle is staying there you're just reducing the pressure on that nozzle so therefore temperature and retraction really work together it ends up that for the printer were working on right now the et4 I find that 7.5 at 30 works better how did I find that by printing lots and lots of prints now what I did these prints for two reasons I'll explain why is I print them with a raft and that gives me an area to write on the bottom because I'm going to print a whole bunch of these and I'm not going to remember which is which so I just write with a marker on the bottom what the various parameters were when I'm tuning my printer let's continue down speed many printer manufacturers set the default print for their printers at 60 millimeters per second I find that's a little fast for tuning and I find that at 50 millimeters per second I get better more consistent prints now once you've tuned it in I often will run some of my printers as fast as 75 or 80 or even a hundred millimeters per second but when you're doing that first profile I recommend you start at about 50 millimeters per second and yes it will take a little bit longer but a successful print that takes a little bit longer is worth a lot more to you than a failed print that went very fast all of the other numbers I would leave alone an able acceleration control and enable jerk control start with those off when you go to print you're not going to be able to move the printhead at the speed you're looking for instantly it's just your the stepper motors aren't strong enough it's not possible there's inertia of rest if you remember physics so inertia is gonna hold that back so you have to ramp that speed up then you're going to print and when you're ready to stop you don't want to stop like you're hitting a wall cuz that's gonna make your printer vibrate and shake you want to ramp it down it's very much like you're in a car yoke's if you accelerate slowly and you brake slowly it's a more comfortable ride for your passengers than if you hit the gas and then you hit the brake in order to get better print quality we also want that nice curve of speed transitions the ramp up of speed is called acceleration the ramp down of speed is the jerk control and by default most printers burn into their firmware standard recommended starting values so to start out I'd recommend you to use the firmware values so leave those alone for now okay let's continue travel one of the most important parameters that you're going to set is coming now this is a value that's changed prefer between the version 3 X versions of Keira and version 4 that X most of the default setups for 3x HECO me turned on what is coming well when I go to move my print head without extruding that's called a travel with retraction on during that movement before I start that movement I pull back on the filament so that filament won't leak out of the nozzle as much but because I've eased the pressure but that takes time if I'm going to be traveling between two points of my model that are later going to be covered with another layer of filament why bother retracting I don't care about stringing if it's gonna get covered up so that's what combing does when you have combing on when a travel is inside your model area and it's gonna get covered up by another layer it doesn't bother to retract the problem is when you get close to the top surface of your model and you maybe have one more layer on top if you have strings underneath you'll see all those lines in your model and it won't be a beautiful print so the new default for combing and the value you want to set is not in skin if you have a model that you've printed and you've printed a surface and then you're going to move your nozzle to another area it shouldn't be hitting anything because your nozzle is the height most recently printed at but because of the characteristics of filaments because they expand they can track because of the characteristics of the cooling sometimes you will see your nozzle hit your print to avoid that you can click avoid printed parts when traveling so anytime it's going to go over a print part it will go up a little bit and then go down that adds a lot of time to your print so in general I would click avoid printed parts as the default but I'd leave Z hot when retracted off cooling in most cases this should be your default just take the default values and what the default values do is they say don't have any cooling for the first couple layers so that we get good adhesion to the build plate but then turn cooling on so our filament solidifies and we get a rigid structure we're printing on top of because you don't want to be printing on jello if you're printing on something that's Wiggly that's not good so in order to ensure that you're printing on something that's solid you want cooling on for the upper layers but off for the very first layers okay now let's look at build plate adhesion now why does this matter in a profile well you want to make sure that your builds are sticking to that plate while you're trying to tune them if they're moving around at all it's a problem so when you're doing your initial turn tuning I recommend you use a Rath how did I learn about this well this model price cadet doesn't have a heated print that the default is print with a raft every time and printing PLA on a cool print surface it always stuck every single time so yes a raft takes a little bit more time but they come up very easily you can see here how easily we can pull these off I don't want to lose my notes which I showed you I wrote on the bottom they come up very easily in the current version of Kyra and it will ensure that while you're doing your tuning you're not trying to fight a model that's moving around but let's show you what those actually do so I'm going to go and I'm going to load the a calibration cat here let's see if we can find that here and first we're going to slice it with a skirt on and show you what that looks like so let's move this up so that's out of the way a little bit well look at the preview and let me zoom in a bit here see this line around here this is a skirt it's just a line around your model and the only purpose it really serves is to make sure your printer is extruding properly and you're getting some adhesion to the print bed now what I like to do is when I see it printing I rub my finger on the skirt keeping my finger away from the nozzle to make sure it's sticking if it's not sticking my models not gonna stick now let's change that now to a grim and re slice now you'll see that there's an area printed around the model but if we look at this let's move this up a little bit and then let's see if we can rotate this up to look at the bottom here we go you'll see the brim is not running under the model itself it's touching the edges so you have to still peel it off but under the model itself if we look instead this time let's do a raft you'll see the raft here is completely under the model so the model is sitting on top of the raft these were all printed with rats now the last area that we're going to look at is mesh fixes because this is a parameter many people don't know about and I'll link to a video talking about this in more detail basically if you're getting a lot of blobbing on your print and temperature control does not resolve it and retraction does not resolve it increase the maximum resolution number that means that the number of little segments that your printer is going to print as it's printing around are going to be reduced because this is saying the small segment it will print is 0.05 millimeters I actually like moving that all the way up to 0.15 if I'm having a problem with a print that's getting a lot of blobbing as an example let's say you print in Vaes mode and you're getting blobbing increasing this will dramatically improve the quality of your print okay we have now defined a profile from scratch well not quite from scratch we started with the under-five profile so now I'm going to go up here and I'm going to say create profile from current settings and we're going to call this a net 84 and I'll put enter in parentheses and I'm also going to specify that it's point 200 millimeters okay so now it's time to do some test prints now I know this profile worked fairly well I'm 84 because I've done as I said dozens of test prints but you should expect this is going to take time and that's part of the art of 3d printing and in fact for me that part of the fun of 3d printing so I hope this video helped introduce you to the concept behind creating a profile from scratch there are as I said well over a hundred parameters and something you should learn to do let's look at the screen one more time for a second is you should learn to click on the names next to a various parameter because there is very very good documentation built right into Keira thanks so much for watching if this was helpful give me a thumbs up subscribe to the channel share this with other people leave comments below comments about things you like things you didn't like things you think I got wrong and let's continue to learn things together

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 107,465

Keywords: 3d Printers, 3d Printing, cura, cura 3d slicer, cura profiles, cura adding printer, 3d printer, 3d printing slicer, cura software, slicing software, beginners guide to cura, cura tutorial, cura slicer tutorial, how to use cura, 3d printer software, slicing software cura, cura software guide, cura software tutorial, cura tutorial 4.4, how to use cura 4.4 to 3d print, 3d printing for beginners, 3d printers for beginners, how to 3d print, make with tech, makewithtech

Id: 9Ja9utWCKWA

Length: 29min 6sec (1746 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020