There's another version of cura out, doesn't feel like two minutes but apparently it's
3 months.
Anyway there's stuff worth seeing in this one especially if you have a multi material
capable printer, so let's have a look!
This video is sponsored by PCBway, more about that later on.
before we get to the main topic of the video, there's a few other bits you need to know
about especially if you have a relatively modern printer.
There's a tonne of new print profiles added including neptune 3 pro plus and max, the
sovol ones are now more inclusive with most models now available, there's an official
flsun v400 profile, and quite a few more.
There's also a few other quality of life fixes like minimum layer time temperature setting
here which appears to have been released as "small layer printing temperature", I think
this is when you're printing fast and raising the temperature to increase throughput, but
once minimum layer time kicks in you want to lower that to avoid burning the filament.
Also there's some changes to saving profiles, you get a compare window now where you have
a bit more control over saving as new or overwriting.
But the big change is around multi material.
The new feature is something cura has called interlocking structure.
The problem it's meant to solve is material adhesion.
If you print TPU next to TPU, it will work usually, but it won't have any strength.
It's material dependent but for example PETG and PLA don't stick well together, and TPU
and PLA don't really either as you can see here.
Interlock solves this by making these shapes you can see here between the two parts, but
even better, it swaps direction and goes the other way.
The settings for it are in the experimental section of cura, to turn it on you have to
tick the generate interlocking structure option.
As explained on the cura croc clip which is the demo piece everyone is using, there are
five further settings which change the width, angle, number of layers before changing angle,
and depth from the top and distance from the edges, measured in cells.
What are cells, I hear you ask?
Are you sure you want to know?
So this feature has been introduced based on a paper titled Interlaced topologically
interlocking lattice for continuous dual material extrusion, or I guess ITIL for short.
If you recognise the names here it would be from the arachne paper which I went into around
a year ago, but the paper is...comprehensive, and I think if you're super into multi material
especially in business then I think it's worth reading, as you can see, some nice pics for
those of us allergic to equations, with some really good use cases.
Anyway about cells, I asked the cura team to explain it to me, I'll put the answer on
screen while I fail at trying to explain it.
It's kind of a single iteration of the pattern.
I guess.
Which I suppose would turn out to be maybe n line widths for n equals beam width..or
something.
I suppose from a user point of view, trial and error and checking the preview is the
way to deal with this, and using defaults would be a good idea.
So!
Examples!
I've got a few to show you after this video's sponsor, PCBWay.
PCBWay offers manufacturing services across a whole range of processes, they can make
you PCBs exactly to your specification in low quantities, with a plethora, yes, a plethora,
of options available, including colours, thicknesses, materials, including flexible PCBs and they
can even put the components on them for you which seems useful for smd components which
are impossible to solder at least for me and I'm not bad at soldering, contrary to popular
belief.
PCBway can also manufacture metal parts via CNC or sheet metal processes or even 3d printing
which includes myriad, yes, myriad, options for other materials too.
I'm running out of words for lots of things now so we'd best get back to it, actually
I'm not, there's untold, innumerous, incalculable, scads?
okay yes I looked that one up, scads..yeah me neither..anyway thank you PCBWay for sponsoring
this episode.
First up some basic stuff, here's a joint with TPU between PLA.
And I'm going to be using PLA and TPU to show all of this stuff off because they are materials
that really hate each other.
You can see that it meshes pretty well, here's another with holes in for me to try to break,
and of course I've printed the same test part in older cura without the interlocking.
In terms of practical applications, when I reviewed the printer I'm using way back, that's
the SV04 idex, I designed a hammer that used TPU for the hitty part, but I had to design
a way to hold it in place.
I made another for this episode, but this time without that, and let cura do the work
for me, and you can see it's generated those patterns..and here's the finished hammer in
glorious yellow and red.
This is actually a perfectly functional soft hammer, I've hit several walls with it and
it doesn't mark them at all.
I also designed this corner joint that shows how you can create different material properties
to use as hinges or whatever.
And finally I got a friend to design this for me because he's actually good at CAD.
This looks really cool, but it also shows how you can use this interlocking functionality
for a range of interfacing shapes, not just straight edges.
These flexible suckers are solidly fused, this wouldn't work normally without having
to design a joint in there to hold them in.
I suppose to wrap up I want to really point out how big this potentially is in terms of
being able to design and produce things in FDM that we couldn't before, it might not
seem that interesting as a headline feature, but if you think about it, previously if you
wanted to make any object with different properties in different parts, you would have had to
design in complex mechanisms to keep those in place, things that come to mind that you
can now just print include maybe speaker cones, compliant mechanisms, flexible joints, soft
rubberised handles, ...diapragms on stuff like speaker cones?
none of this now needs designing with FDM in mind, it's as if we've been given the glue
for free, a glue that holds any two materials together.
So yeah I think this could be quite important.
Anyway, if you are in the privileged group of people who has access to two colour printers
then give this a go, otherwise let me know what you think, I will see you next time,
thank you for watching!