Improvements

[John James]

I tried IceSl slicer with a print and realy liked the supports so whenever I realy need supports it is my choise. And after several prints I have some suggestions about what could be improved.

1. I was printing a standing dog model and the support towers under the chin and ears were around 5.5-6 cm. As the print progressed they started to flex when the next layer was printed. I was expecting for them to break or be knocked over (two actualy did) and the print to fail but miraculously the print succeeded. It would be good to  be able to adjuct the lenght of the X segments (wider and more rigid columns) or/and add a horizontal bridge every 15-30 mm between the towers to make the whole support structure more rigid.

2. I was printing this dolphin and since the back fin was thin I added a cooling tower to allow the fillament to cool and solidify before next layer. But the way the gcode is generated it prints a layer of the tower, then moves up and immediately prints the next layer over the freshly layed plastik. Near the top it does not have enough time to cool and starts to warp. It would be nice if there was a minimum time between printing a line and printing something over it

3. Enable "Minimize" button of the 3D window. Windows 8 here.

4. Allow to deselect/cancel/... effects. I know reloading the model is an option but this also resets any scale/orientation options selected.

Just my 2cents based on a limited experience :)

[sylefeb]

Hi John,

Thanks for the feedback, these are all good suggestions. We will try to implement them soon (we had a 'minimum time per layer' at some point - have to look back at why this is gone).

Best regards,
Sylvain

[Maze Mietner]

Hi

I think he's describing the current IceSL code generation, that is printing layers in a forward-backward-forward-backward path, and therefore heating the printed object at both ends of the path. Starting each layer at the same position would resolve this.

As far as I remember: 'minimum time per layer' just made the head move slower, heating the lower layers even more. Printing slower usually make the overheating problem worse.
Nice options would be:
-Wait [...] seconds before printing at the same xy position as the previous layer, do not slow down prints but use a tower to 'idle' at x[...] y[...]
-Wait [...] seconds before printing at the same xy position as the previous layer, do not slow down prints but simply 'idle' at x[...] y[...]
-Wait [...] seconds before printing at the same xy position as the previous layer, do not slow down prints but use a shield to 'idle' with distance [...] (and shells as needed).

For the dolphin: Lowering the extruder temperature should help (try to print only the fin, not the hole thing to get an idea. I'd rather use a shield instead of an extra tower, with ABS.

Maze

[sylefeb]

Hi - quick progress report:

- added settings for supports (size of pillar anchors on the bed, size of the X pillar segments)
- minimize button is back

The two other items (cooling and deselecting effects) are still pending.

These changes will be in next beta (should be very soon).

Sylvain

[David]

Hello everybody,

I am new in iceSL and first of all I would like to say that i found the work excellent. I have only one request on "supports" and mainly I would like not to have any bridge support. I am printing in ABS and "bridging" with this material results sometimes impossible, at least with my experience and on my printer (an homemade prusa). Do you think this can be easily added? 

Thanks a lot

Best regards 

David

[sylefeb]

Hello David,

Welcome to the forum! 

To be sure: would you like to force all "bridges" in the part to be supported? (since the supports themselves are made of bridges, the term is somewhat ambiguous). If yes, then lowering "Max unsupported bridge length" should do the trick. On the opposite if you increase this value, there will be less and less support below part bridges.

The support bridges themselves are not expected to look good, they are optimized to print "reliably" and fast, but they often sag. There is however an internal setting (not currently exposed) that also controls the max length of a bridge in the support. However, if it is lower then there are more pillars in the final result. Would that help?

We made a lot of prints in ABS without specific trouble, I wonder what the difference is (we mostly used a Replicator 1 for these prints). The one material that works bad with our bridges is PVA. It is best to print a small dense PVA crust below the object and have it supported by PLA bridges.

Best,

Sylvain

[David]

Sylvain,

Thank you so much for the very quick answer. I think you got the point: I do not want parts of the support to be bridge structures and all parts of the supports must be connected to the printing bed. As you suggested I tried to reduce  "Max unsupported bridge length" but it doesn't produce any change. Furthermore it is impossible to decrease under 1.00000 value and the unsupported part are anyhow more than this value. Maybe there is a bug in this control?

"The support bridges themselves are not expected to look good, they are optimized to print "reliably" and fast, but they often sag. There is however an internal setting (not currently exposed) that also controls the max length of a bridge in the support. However, if it is lower then there are more pillars in the final result. Would that help?"

Yes, that would help.

I am sorry to ask this. I mean I know that you have much more experience in 3D printing than me. The point is that i am 100% shure that with ABS i won't solve this case that i will illustrate. I do this because maybe there is some other solution that doesn't need any change to your code.

The print is reported in figure 2. In figure 1 it is reported the problem in red and my need in yellow.

Let me know if I can help you in other ways.

[John James]

Just  checked 2.1.13-beta1 and the minimize button is still inactive in IceSl-slicer 3d window. Windows 8.1 here if that is relevant.