Hi,
does anyone use CURA with his Cetus? Or is it impossible to use it with this machine?
Greetings Joe
It works great with S3D. I've tried to make it work with Cura...spent hours and even trying to go some Gcode stuff but for some reason, Cura just doesn't work at this time. I think they will need to update the Gcode translator for Cura.
Harm 2017-4-1 07:19 edit
@BlueDinos: I had a closer look at Cura myself as well last week though didn't get to the point of firing the GCode to my Cetus as I am not familiar enough with the way GCode works.
As you did try it:
- What did you do with the 'default' end-code instruction?:
M84 ;steppers off
Did you remove it to prevent the Z-axis to fall down after the print or should it remain in place?
- Where did you enter the 'nozze height' (for me with the non-extended Cetus something like 183.6)? I doubt that it is the 'printer gantry height' in the machine settings or is it? Or is it some start.gcode that is needed?
- Did you use the printer-head size section at all (I think it is only needed to print multiple items piece by piece?)
@BlueDinos, just tried Cura and slic3r myself, but it seems the Cetus3D gcode implementation doesn't follow expected coordinate system conventions.
What I mean is:
- Cetus3D Z axis 0 is at the end stop (top)
- slic3r and cura expect Z axis 0 to be at bed level
- I researched a bit, doesn't look like either slic3r or cura allow for changing the axis direction or homing direction. So I think until/unless the Cetus software is fixed to conform with common 3d printer g-code expectations, you can only use S3D (because it allows you to mess with the coordinate system)
There is a command-line utility which translates g-code to UP3D machine code (https://github.com/UP3D-gcode/UP3D) which added preliminary support for Cetus late last year. Unfortunately that project doesn't seem to be very active and use at your own risk, obviously. I tried it once, but the machine code upload didn't succeed.
CAUTION! Do not share or use somebody else's gcode files, you will most likely scratch up your build plate!!! The nozzle offset ends up being part of the gcode file.
Ok, so I got it working w/ slic3r, haven't gone back to try w/ Cura, yet. The key is to set the x and z axis offsets such that X and Z values are negative homing towards 0, whereas the Y axis goes from 0 to 180 (mm).
So the coordinate system should be:
- X axis: -180 to 0
- Y axis: 0 to 180
- Z axis: -180 to 0 (actually -182.5 in my case, basically the nozzle height that you've figured out for your printer / plate)
I'll try to put together a post explaining my slic3r settings, a calibration cube is currently printing and half-way done.