on today's makers mashup we're getting better prints by using an arc welder
on today's makers mashup we're going to be using an arc welder to improve our 3d print
quality now i'm not talking about the kind that joins metal i'm talking about a piece of software
that is called arc welder that does an amazing job at approving your g code before you send it
to your 3d printer you may be familiar with the popular octal app software and if you've seen
a youtube video or a video on instagram where 3d prints magically develop into a full 3d print that
octolapse software, the author of that also wrote this brand new piece of software called arc welder
now what arc welder does is it takes the different points that are straight lines in your 3d print
because your 3d printer really just prints straight lines and what it does is it takes
that g code and then turns them into arcs so it reduces the total amount of g-code that is being
sent to your printer it also uses marlin smoothie wear all the different types of software out there
to use their arc functionality so instead of the slicer creating circles by using individual lines
it is now offloading that to the firmware and allowing it to go ahead and create arcs
now for those of you that are very familiar with marlin we talk about marlin software a lot here
a lot of times people have seen arc support inside marlin but never really seen
how that works because slicers don't generate arc data out of the slicer
and that's where arc welder comes in it changes everything in the way that 3d print g-code is sent
to your printer in that it creates arcs and we're going to cover that a little bit more detail here
but at the bottom line we're talking about improving our 3d print quality so i've got
two prints here and from this distance you can't see it but i'll show some close-ups here
these are two couplers that I printed one of them the traditional way by just slicing it in
cura and then after I sliced it I sent it to marlin now this print over here which is much
smoother is printed after I've pre-processed or post-processed depending on the way that
you look at it post processed it out of cura send it through arc welder and then send it to marlin
it saves a tremendous amount of data in some cases these sample prints were compressed in g-code
95 so from the data that came out of cura 95 of it was compressed down or removed because it created
this arc data and then I sent it over to marlin so that's a tremendous savings in not only speed of
transferring things to marlin but it also reduces the amount of g-code that marlin has to process
and if you've ever tried to do high-speed printing like we've tried and done successfully with the
x301 printer or any other core xy build if you try to get that high speed you notice
that what happens is you get a buffer under run or basically the buffer is not able to keep up with
the data that's coming in so it requires marlin to process far more data than the cpu supports
so that's why 32-bit boards and 32-bit cpus are really more beneficial so if you have an 8-bit
printer you're definitely going to want to watch the rest of this video so with all that said let's
get to work let's take a moment to talk about how arc welder works in this diagram the first step
is to look for three points along the tool path and then determine if the arc created would be
within the configured resolution it then continues adding points while checking the maximum deviation
once the maximum sized arc is achieved arc welder ends the current arc and begins another one and
then the entire process keeps repeating until you reach the end of your g-code
you can see this happens almost instantly inside octoprint my test object was converted in less
than a second and my g-code was compressed by over 60 now let's talk about how to get up and running
with arc welder we're going to start with the cura installation because it's the easiest one to do
simply click the marketplace link at the top and then from within the marketplace scroll down to
the arc welder plug-in that was developed by field of view the plug-in directly uses the arc welder
library which we'll cover in just a minute and you can run the arc welder library directly you
don't have to run it from within cura so those of you that don't use cura and prefer something like
prusa slicer you'll still be able to compress your g-code once the plugin is installed you'll want to
scroll down to special modes and then all you have to do is click the check box for arc welder this
exposes all the different options available to you to configure the tolerance or the resolution
for arc welder I suggest experimenting with it a little bit to find out what suits your needs
best now let's get this installed for octoprint we'll start by clicking the wrench icon and from
there go to the plugin manager and get more you'll search for the arc welder plugin or
you can install it from the url like I am because i'm using the beta version this new beta version
should be released about the same time this video publishes once everything is installed you'll have
to restart your octoprint instance but overall installing this in octoprint is extremely easy
as I illustrated earlier all you have to do is drop a file in and arc welder will kick off
automatically and convert the file but we're going to go ahead and look at the statistics
for artwelder and we're going to configure it as well now something you should note is down here at
the bottom is the firmware compatibility now once you've installed this I suggest you run this check
because one of the things I had to enable in octoprint here was the g90 g91 influences
extruder option and i'm going to cover that now because once you run this firmware check you may
need to change this for your octoprint instance as well enabling this feature is really easy
click the wrench icon then go to features within octoprint and click the box that enables g90 g91
overrides relative extruder mode from there you're ready to recheck your firmware and make sure
everything is okay with all that done you're ready to drag and drop your file into octoprint and have
it instantly converted larger files obviously will take a lot longer once you've converted a file you
can click the arc welder tab at the top and you can get the analysis of each individual file by
default arc welder will create a file name with a dot aw in the middle and all you'll have to do is
click on that file and then click print now let's talk about the command line use of arc welder this
has the advantage of working in windows mac and linux being slicer agnostic you can also use this
to bake it into any scripts or applications that you see fit here we have former lurker's github
page and from here we're going to navigate to the arc welder lib on this page and links for all this
are in the description now to download the latest version you're going to want to go to the tags
and from here you'll see that there is a releases tab once you click on that you just need to scroll
down and from there you can see the various releases for different operating systems
we're going to download the windows version here and then we're going to unzip it
google chrome did give me a warning and I just told it to keep the file after this I proceeded
to open it up and then we unzip the file giving us a directory structure of both the libraries and
the binary files where the arc welder executable exists here we are at the command prompt and you
can see the arc welder executable and also the arc straightener I suggest checking that out but
i'm not going to cover it in this video so we're going to do a simple conversion of the test ring
g code that you see here and it's simply a matter of giving it an input and output file name I used
the same aw nomenclature and you can see here we can press this file 95 percent listing out
the directory you can see here that we took this from a 4meg gcode file down to a 441 kg code file
so that's a substantial difference in what you're transferring through the 3d printer you
can control the resolution as well at the command line i'm going to set this to the same value which
is the default of 0.05 on the resolution and you can see our conversion rate is 95.3 percent
however if I change this 2.1 and execute the same g code you'll see that it actually compresses it
down to 95.4 percent so you can play with these different numbers and get the best compression
with still the type of quality that you want to see out of your 3d prints
now let's take a look at the quality you can see here that because the 3d printer always
does print in straight lines then you always get a slight ripple effect but the one on the
left that you can see all the bumps in there that is the one that was printed without arc
welder and you can see how much smoother the two on the right are one is a .05 and .1 respectively
all of these prints were done with 1.8 degree steppers now in theory if you were using a 0.9
degree stepper you could get some additional resolution that might improve this further
I was very impressed given all we did was run this through arc welder now let's get down to the nuts
and bolts on testing tolerance in my tests I was able to print three different versions of these
nuts and bolts that pieced together and in my testing each one of them worked perfectly I had
no issues assembling the nut onto the bolt here's the nut and bolt before arc welder and you can see
the seam that comes out the same on both but you can see the ripples that are caused by the stutter
of the 3d printer when it's printing on this original bolt the arc welded version looks
much better it's completely smooth all the way around with the exception of the seam itself
performance was improved overall you can see here that this print running at 300 percent feed rate
stutters constantly from buffer under run and you can also see those vertical lines in the print
like we saw on all the others this is the unarc welded file this print is a 400 percent feed rate
based on the exact same print only run through arc welder you can see how smooth
it is generally going all the way around and all of those vertical artifacts that you saw
are removed from the print ring I found that you can run about 200 percent feed rates over
the serial cable but the sd card is really where it shines where I was able to get a 400 percent
feed rate from the normal 60 millimeter a second settings so as you can see using arc welder is
really rather simple you've got a number of different options you can use it inside cura
if you don't use cura for your slicer you can use it either in oct print or the command line version
that's pretty much universal and it works on various operating systems too so you're not stuck
with windows only or only linux there's a couple of different options as well and links for all
that are down in the description so you can check out their page download the software and get up
and running with this video pretty quickly and you can start improving your print quality overall I
know I covered a lot of information pretty quickly in today's video on how to use arc welder and how
to get it up and running and I just want to say if you're having a little bit of trouble getting it
running feel free to reach out to our channel discord we're over a thousand members strong
and there's lots of people in there that can help you with this project or any other project that
you're working on and links to our discord are down in the description I also want to especially
thank former lurker for his support in producing this video it was great having him available to
answer all of my questions and really help during some of the testing I really encourage you to
check out the software and if you're not using arc welder you may already be using octal apps which
is another great piece of software he put together this is a great project and it's even supported by
layer fuse layer fuse team is a patreon supporter of arc welder because I feel that it's really
a game changer in the 3d printing community and I really suggest you check it out so with that it's
going to bring the end of today's video if you enjoyed it make sure you mash that like button
and don't forget to share and subscribe so you don't miss any of our upcoming videos
i'd also love to hear if you're going to be using arc welder down in the comments and I
would also love to hear what your test results are and your experience with arc welder as well
so with all that said I want to say thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time
you