on today's makers mashup quick tip we are turning up the speed on our 3d prints
welcome makers on today's makers mashup we are going to be turning up the speed
on our 3d print now that doesn't mean we're just going to be turning the knob
on the front of our printer turning it all the way up to however high it will go what we do is
if we need that extra push over the cliff you know what we do put it up to 11 exactly we're
going to be taking a much better approach to it than turning that knob on the front of the screen
but that knob is really key to understanding how we can get our 3d prints to print faster
now there are a lot of different tricks that you can use to get your prints to print faster
some of those tricks include using thicker infill not using infill at all but what we're
going to be doing today is addressing one of the things that take the longest amount of
time with your 3d print and that is where you're printing many different top and bottom layers
for me that's always been a frustration i can literally turn the knob up on the
front of the printer and have it print faster but then i've got to come back later on and
turn that back down after it's printing i have a volcano nozzle and it's not always appropriate
to have everything cranked up on your printer there's delicate areas of a 3d print where you
need to have it move slower and other areas where it needs to move quickly and we recently had a
question in the discord where someone was having a very similar type of problem or they needed to
move slower and they needed better adhesion for a particular 3d print but then the rest of the print
could be at a normal speed and that's really hard to do with some of the settings in your slicer
so what we're going to be doing today is i'm going to be showing you how we can adjust that
dynamically inside of cura but if you're not using cura the same technique can be used for prusa
slicer or simplify 3d you just have to modify the g-code afterwards so with all that said let's get
to work here we have three identical prints the only difference is the one on the left took 20
minutes to print with default slicer settings and by making some speed adjustments on the other two
i was able to get this down to 13 minutes a savings of seven minutes on such a small 3d print
here we are inside of cura and what i've got here is a print that i put together for this video
specifically and i printed this at 100 infill now when you look at this here we have a few things
to note we've got our first layer here which is going to get our adhesion to the bed then we've
got a number of solid infill layers that will fill all the way up to the top of the surface
and then we've got some detail these little rods that come up and then we have a rough
on top of that now when you look at this overall the first inclination of most new 3d printer users
is that they want to crank up the value for all of this type of layer work
which is the top and bottom setting now kira does only print this at 30 millimeters
a second by default so if you change this to 120 you certainly will get much faster printing
and i was able to shave off a good four three four minutes of time just by changing that setting
alone however that is not always appropriate when you get to other parts of your print so what we
get up here we may not want to print this at a four times speed because it could end up knocking
one of these pins off or causing some other issues with the print so cura doesn't really give you a
good way out of the box to be able to control the speed in which these different layers print
you can control the top and bottom speed but it's very difficult to control individual layer speed
but there are some settings in cura that you can use that post-process the print and enable that
functionality so the way that i approach this is i get a good baseline print and in this particular
case the default settings work just fine then what i'm going to do is change each individual layer
so what i'm going to do is i'm going to be using a plug-in for post-processing inside of cura so you
go to processing and you modify g-code and then we're going to add a change at height script and
this enables you to pick different layers and at the end of this layer it will apply these settings
below so what we're going to do is because we want to print those lower layers at four
times the speed we're going to put 400 in here and everything on those layers is now going to be set
to 400 so as if i turn the knob up on the front of the 3d printer till it read 400 now there are
two settings here keep value means that it will set the setting and keep printing single layer
means it applies only to the single layer so in most cases we're going to want to use keep value
now once we've got that done i'm going to close this out and then we're going to look for our next
layer that we want to change our speed at so right here after layer 13 so right at layer 13
we want to change our speed again now because this is detail work i may have a scenario where
i'm getting poor layer adhesion or maybe it's detailed and i need to be able to print slower
so if we change the layer number here and we put this at layer 13 we can then change our speed
and adjust this to something that might give us better print results let's say 80 percent
now we'll close this again and of course we're leaving keep value on so now the printer is going
to be printing at 80 percent of nominal speed when we get to the top here and after we print
this layer here which will nicely create a nice bridge there we want to change our speed again now
we don't want to do that at a full 400 percent but let's say we want to print it slightly faster
so we're going to go in here we'll change our layer number and we'll set that to 47 and then
what we'll do is we'll change our speed here and we'll change this speed to 200 percent so it will
still print twice as fast as normal which would be the same as changing this tops bottom speed
to 60. now something to note as well is that not only does this change the speed of the layers
for your top and bottom speed but it's also going to increase your wall speed and it will
increase your infill speed so everything on these layers is now going to be printing at 200 percent
so now that we've made those adjustments let's take a look at the g-code because not everybody
has this plug-in or uses cura but you can insert the same g-code into your 3d print regardless of
your slicer so we're going to save this and then we're going to go take a look at it on the inside
all right so here we are inside of our g-code file and i'm going to be looking for layer colon which
is the comment that's put in for each individual layer and as you can see here we've got our
layer 0 and then layer 1 this is the layer that we wanted to print and then after we print it we want
to change our speed so if we search one more time and we go to layer two if you look just a little
bit up you'll see there's that change at plugin and you can see it executed an m220 command and
set that value to 400 or 400 percent now this is where you can make the same change in your
g-code anywhere even without this plug-in you just need an editor like notepad plus plus or sublime
there's a number of different editors pick your favorite and you can load this file up so if you
sliced it with prusa slicer or you sliced it with a simplified 3d you can still go in here
and add this m220 command and set it to s 400 now if we change if we look for this change app you
can see that here we are at layer 13 so layer 14 is going to be our next layer and it sets it to 80
and then if we look here layer 47 layer 48 is our next one and then that would set it to 200
so with this we set three different regions of our print with different speed settings completely
independent of how the slicer is going to print each of those different types of 3d print moves
so now that we have this all done let's go ahead and print this and see what our results are like
so
so as you can see using this feed rate selectively at individual layers can really give you some
advantages of printing detail at a slower speed and getting a higher quality there or
you could print other layers fast when you know all your printing is some surface skin or
the base of something and you've already got your first layer attached so it really allows you to
save a lot of time on your 3d printer if you have a high flow nozzle or what you're printing
and how you're printing your particular nozzle can keep up with the higher speed so
i think this is a great way to adjust your print settings
in a different way to give you some granularity that you would not normally get by adjusting the
3d print settings for the entire print overall so what that's going to bring the end of today's
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uh any of the projects that you're working on and of course i'm in there as well and i would love
to talk with each of you so i want to say thanks again for watching and we'll see you all next time
you