Welcome back, Makers I want to ask you a quick question.
How many of you use a skirt or a purge line on your 3D printer?
Now, before you answer that, how many of you have found
one of these on your floor or back of your printer or somewhere else?
I'm betting most of you and I have got a better solution for these today.
And that's what we're going to be doing on today's makers mashup
So here's my dilemma.
Just like you, I used a skirt and a purge line for the longest time.
The problem with these things and I have a huge
amount of them, they are constantly being thrown out
and they are virtually everywhere.
When I throw them in the trash or I have a couple of boxes
that are used to shop here for recycling all of my prints.
What happens is sooner or later one of them or a lot of them end up
popping out, end up on the back of the printer or end up on the floor.
And it's really just very annoying to have them everywhere.
My wife is even found where I've walked upstairs
and had one of these on my shoe
and found them in the living room or some other place.
I hate them.
They're great for purging your nozzle, and it does an okay job of doing that
and priming it and getting ready for print.
But outside of that, I find these are a real huge annoyance.
So what I have done is actually created a G code startup routine
that you can customize yourself online, and I've got a link to it
down in the description.
So today we're going to be covering a way that will be creating what I call
a landing strip and kisses on your printer,
which will enable you to be able to print something that primes
your nozzle, clears that out, gets ready for printing,
doesn't wear directions and wipes that nozzle before starting your print.
So when you start your print, it starts off clean
and you don't have to use any of these very annoying skirts.
So with all that said, let's get to work.
Here we see the landing
strip and kisses in action right before the print starts.
I extrude one of these kisses which look like the chocolate treat.
And then after extruding it, does it wipe on the tape.
And then from there begins, ah, 3D print
So how did we make all this happen?
On the tools page of the LaserFused website,
you'll see a number of different calibration and 3D printer tools.
And if we navigate down to the bottom of this, you will see that
there is a new edition of the Startup G Code Generator.
This generator works pretty simply.
It will generate the startup script for your 3D printer.
We'll start by specifying the size of our 3D printer.
In my case, I'm using an X301,
so the bed size is 300 by 300.
The tool uses us for sanity checking so please take the time to fill this out
because it will prevent you from making some simple mistakes within the tool.
Once you've selected your bedside The rest comes down
to simply making a couple of choices on the options here and then copying
the code from the bottom startup code into Cura or your particular slicer.
Simply locate the startup code in your favorite slicer.
So let's talk about a few of these options.
The Z auto a line will execute a G 34.
So if you have a Z that is powered independently,
Marlin can automatically level your bed to some degree with a probe.
And then we also have G 29, which enables bed leveling
the kids purge parameters are pretty simple.
It does take up a 15 by 40 area on your bed
for the tape, or as I like to call it, the landing strip.
And then you simply set the position In my case
I set it at 200 on the x axis
and zero for the starting position of the y axis,
which puts it in the right front corner of my bed.
You can also configure the retraction for a direct drive,
something like one millimeter or for the X301 .7 works really well,
and then you'll finally configure the distance from the bed.
Now the distance from the bed is really the thickness
of the piece of paper or whatever you use to determine the distance
from the nozzle, physical nozzle to the physical bed.
That air gap is usually considered zero.
But what happens here is the software end stops are turned off
and then we lower the nozzle to the actual bed level.
Or in this particular case, it touches the tape.
And then once it touches the tape, it performs that wipe it does
turn the software and stops back on at the end of the process.
Now, another option you can add here is audio feedback.
And I did a separate video on this on how you can use
300 to generate sounds with your 3D printer.
So I'm going to enable it here.
And there's a card at the top that will show you a little bit more information
on how you can use audio feedback on your 3D
printer for various operations.
Once we have all of our configurations complete, all will have to do is select
all the code here and then we'll copy this into
our clipboard for our slicer.
Here we are inside of Cura
and we're going to go up to our printer settings
and we'll go to printer and then we'll manage our printers.
And you can see here I've got my 31 already selected.
We're going to go in here to the machine settings and you'll see
the start code right here inside Cura and all I have to do is delete this out
and then paste in the new code from the website.
We just need to click close and we're ready to go.
So let's give this a try and start a print
Overall,
I would say that these cases have worked really well for me
over the last six or nine months that I've been using them
and I wanted to create a video to share with you the different start up
process that I have compared to many 3D printer owners.
And I know that when I started 3D printing, I used a purge line
because there was really no tool available that I knew of at the time
to be able to create my own startup script in an easy fashion.
And I'm hoping this tool is useful for you if you're using Marlin firmware
repr app should work as well.
You probably won't be able to use this with clipper,
but it is a good tool if you are a marlin or rep wrap user.
Now one of the other things that I hated about these skirts overall is that they do
tend to curl up from time to time because they don't get better adhesion.
And if you don't catch it, I've had some cause print failures
I'm sure you have as well.
So another reason to not use these.
Now some of you may be concerned
about giving up a little bit of real estate on your bed.
The tape is a bit optional.
However, I liked using the tape as the landing strip because
the nice thing is I'm able to pull it off and it does go down a little bit
below the zero on your Z.
So there is a
possibility of scratching your bed if you could figure this incorrectly.
However, point one is usually
just fine and the piece of tape works really well.
Plus, you can always pull the tape off after or the kiss off
after your print is started.
And it's easy to get at anyone who's ever tried to pull a skirt off of their print.
Mid-Stream knows the process.
You have to go in there and either cut it and pull it up,
break it apart, and then pull it around.
The print kiss is easy to pull off the front of the printer.
If you needed the extra real estate, let me know what your thoughts are
of the G code generator and also of this KISS process down in the comments below.
And if you need help with this or anything else, feel
free to check out or channel Discord inside the channel.
Discord.
It's completely free and it's a huge makerspace of thousands of makers
all working together to help each other with their projects.
So with that, I want to say thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time.