Have you ever noticed that if you slice with Cura and 3D print something that
first the heated bed heats up and then the hot end and then it starts printing but
with Prusaslicer they both heat up together and start your print a lot
faster so I wondered if there was a way to do that in Cura
turns out there is and I'll show you how to do it on today's filament Friday
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I'm just going to take my CHEP cube here and cura 4.3 I'm going to use a creality
ender 3 profile which comes with the Cura software. I'm going to slice
this at a magic 0.28 my profile and it says 22 minutes so we're
gonna save this file and it's a g-code file so i'll save it on my computer and
now let's print it. I'll take that g-code file put it on the SD card select it here
and it'll start to heat up and you notice right away that there's 50
degrees on the bed and it starts to heat up but the hot end is at zero it's not
starting to heat up. this is the normal process and this is because if I go look
inside the g-code the Cura slicer automatically generates this g-code
highlighted in blue here based on the temperature settings we had in a slicer.
M140 heats the bed to s 50, 50 degrees C and M 190 says wait until it's done
before moving on then it does M 104 which is heat the hot end to 205 and
m109 wait until it's done. so it does this serially, that way it doesn't pull too
much power from the power supply. first it heats the bed then it heats the hot
end. but many printers can handle heating both at the same time because they have
enough power in their power supply so the idea can we change the Cura slicer
to make it not generate this code and actually generate code that heats them
both at the same time. let's see if we can do that if I go to settings > printers>
manage printers back in Cura and look at the standard profile we've been using
machine settings there's some start G code and nowhere in this start G code, let
me expand it here, nowhere here is there temperature settings. there's some
acceleration at the top there's a home and then there's a
test strip that it's going to print so this is what they recommend for the start
gcode but there's nothing here it says temperature. it turns out there's a
variable for both the bed temperature and print temperature. if you use those
which I'm gonna add them here for start preheating and end preheating if you use
those it will override those automatic settings so now I'm going to come in
here at the M 140 only I'm going to say s instead of a number use their variable,
material bed temperature and then I'm also gonna start the hot end with an M
104 for the material print temperature so these two lines will actually start
the heated bed and the hot end at the same time and then I'll follow it up
after it homes the device, it's going to M 190 which says wait until the bed is
heated up and m109 wait until the hot end is heated up
before moving on. so both of them have to reach their temperature before it'll
move on and then it goes and does a test trip and everything like that so I'm
gonna change the profile and make a new profile with this in it and I called it
CHEP Ender3 so I'm gonna go into machine settings and they go down to the
start G code and all I really did is copy and pasted it here you can see that
section is right around where that home section was so you can see that is the M
140 when i'm 104 the g28 home and 109 and M 190 so now let's use that profile
the CHEP Ender 3. everything else is the same
I'm gonna slice the same CHEP cube and save this to a file now let's look at
the g-code file. up here were generated steam engine 4.3 there is no temperature
setting so it goes right into our start g code and so if i scroll further down you
can see that that start preheating is right here but instead of the variable
it's saying s 50 and s 205 which is what I wanted. I want them to heat
together at the same time and in both of them wait until they're done before
moving on. so instead of auto-generating it, it's now using that code that was
inside the start G code so now let's actually print this and see
what happens. I'll select the file we just created and right away you may
notice that the hot end shows 205 degrees C and the bed shows 50 degrees C
so both of them have a set point and both of them are heating up together and
over time you'll notice at least on my machine that the hot end and the heated
bed reached their set temperature at about the same time so I've essentially
cut my heat time in half and once they've reached that point and a little
beep and it starts printing. so there you have it, add a little start g-code to your
printer profile and you're ready to go. now I've only tested this on Ender three
which has a small bed and a pretty good size power supply. the CR 10 I haven't
but that's got a bigger bed it draws a lot more power and a rather small power
supply so I'd be a little bit worried about testing it on there, but the Ender
3 works great. now if you like that little beep I'll show you how I did that
and added beeps to the end so it tells me when the print is complete. let me show
you how I do that. if you're curious where that little beep
came from it's right here in the startup code M 300 s 1000 P 500 creates a little
chirp to tell me that the print is started and then it does the test strip
so it's something I added right there to the startup code. here's an example
I also like to get a little notification or beep when the print is done so I have
a message here M 117 says print completed and right after that it does
three tones. the print completed message is really really quick so see if you can
catch it in this example.
both of these are either in the start gCode or End Gcode. the single chirp for
starting ofcourse is in the start g code the end g code displays the print completed
briefly and then the three chirps. so both of these are in the G code also in the
start G Code where I added the temperature settings to control that, all done
right within Cura. I hope it helps you out I know it helped me. I use it all the
time. In fact I have two G code files: a text file for the start G code in a text
file for the end code. I'll link to them in the description below. you can
download them, open them and and copy and paste it into your start G code and