The voids comme from the arachne perimeter generator - since that’s what the slicer uses in the letters, because they’re too small to contain anything but perimeters. You can even see them in the slicer’s rendition:

There seems to be a way to eliminate then - in the slicer anyway - by increasing the perimeter transition threshold angle from 10° to 40°, but I haven’t tried it yet:

One-wall looks better anyway, so I’ll try it again, without ironing this time.

Something tells me you’d have fun if you got yourself a printer and got into the hobby. Hint hint… 🙂

0.4 mm.

I mess around with one setting at a time, to find out what each of them does in isolation. At some point I will look into calibrating the rate of extrusion. But for now, I’m playing with simple options.

Also, it’s not art. This is a piece of equipment for the shop floor. It’s already plenty good enough. I’m just curious how to make it better 🙂

I finally had time to look into this - in the slicer at least - and I think you’re right: one wall should solve the issue. I can tell just by how the slicer arranges things. I turned on ironing too for the topmost layer. That should make it even better.

I’ll go to the office to start the print today. It takes about 5 hours - and 20 more minutes just for the ironing of that one surface 🙂 I’ll let you know how it goes.

Thanks for the suggestion!

I’ll look into this. Thanks!

Arachne perimeter generator to Classic

Yes I do use arachne. I did try to change it to classic when I was messing with my 3D-printed lens experiment, and while arachne wasn’t perfect, it left fewer artifacts inside the “lens” than classic.

I’ll try to revisit classic for this one print.

doing an ironing pass on your top layer may help conceal this from an aesthetic standpoint but won’t do anything for you structurally

I’ll try ironing, This one is purely an esthetic problem. The part is just a cover for a case that holds electronic bits inside.

Measured the real filament diameter before printing and corrected the slicer settings to the measured diameter?
Are the extruder steps calibrated?

No and I don’t even know how to do that 🙂 The printer is the company’s Prusa XL and we’re using it as it came out of the box. I’m normally very happy with what it churns out, it’s just that small esthetic issue on a part that bears the company logo, that we intend to sell to customers.

I’ll look into that. Thanks!

It’s probably the cost to produce them. That’s real countable money.

The Cybertruck has always been a vehicle designed by a childish mind for equally puerile customers. Now it’s also a strong indicator that you might be a bit of a Nazi if you own one.

So yeah, I don’t expect it to sell too well, as most motorists are adults who tend to dislike Nazis, or would prefer it if they didn’t have to worry constantly about their vehicle being defaced by non-Nazi adults.

Youtuber Johnny-come-lately gets way too much attention.

Calculating the number of hours I had left on Earth, and realizing that every hour I spent fretting about shit that doesn’t matter is an hour I won’t spend having the best possible time on this dirtball with my family and my friends before I kick the bucket.

Once I “let go” and decided nothing really mattered, it felt like my whole body finally deeply relaxed for good.

Finished print 🙂

the frame rate is ass

Well, in my case, I just bolted an el-cheapo supermarket-bought webcam inside the printer’s enclosure. It’s terrible in every way: it has fixed focus and the bed of the printer isn’t in the focus plane, it has terrible rolling shutter and no manual exposure control.

The webcam is connected to one of the production servers nearby that serves up the video as a MJPEG stream using Motion. It’s Motion that limits the framerate to 2 fps, and I configured it that way on purpose: I just need the camera to know whether something terrible has happened to the print and I should stop it remotely - like parts lifting or coming fully unstuck from the sheet, extruder collision… I don’t need quality video for that, so I chose the low framerate and poor resolution primarily to save bandwidth on my home internet, which is kind of crap because I live deep in the forest 🙂

I’m much more interested in whatever mechanical contrivance you’re printing parts for, there.

It’s a bit complicated to explain, but to make it simple: the top parts are optical couplers. They have a slot and a dovetailed circular rail inside that you can’t see because it’s buried in the support. The bottom parts are shutters that ride in the rail and block off more or less of the light in the side of the couplers that has the rail, and have a lever on the other side. The side parts are just mounting clips to hold the couplers onto the optical measurement instruments they’re meant to be mounted on.

Those parts cost cents to make and work just as good as multi-hundred dollar professional optical attenuators, and they’re a lot more convenient for a quick manual adjustment that doesn’t require a precise number of decibels of attenuation.

IANAL but my attorney once told me he witnessed a guy defending himself in court for involuntary manslaughter saying “I didn’t see the red light because I was drunk.”

So far our (new) machine is performing well. We’ll see how it fares in the long run. That’s one of the advantages of having my company purchase it: it’s getting a beating for work purposes, so I can test it properly before buying one for myself 🙂

I think the pros/cons come down to what you need a printer for. If you print mostly flat things, a bedslinger is fine. If you print large parts with sketchy bed attachments like I often do, a coreXY makes a lot more sense. You have no idea the amount of filament I wasted on giant brims and rafts to keep parts from flying off the sheet - not to mention the time it takes to print them.

And then of course, the Prusa XL in particular can be outfitted with up to 5 separate extruders. It has nothing to do with coreXY but it was a big part of why we bought it.

I haven’t tried pushing the speed yet. I’ve been playing with multi-color and multi-material prints, as well as long tall thin prints that were kind of impossible on the Mk4. And when I’m not playing with that, I’m running it almost 24/7 because I have to produce sets of parts for our production floors asap and each set takes about 20 hours.

But soon the machine will be more available and I’ll play with it some more.

That’s true. The Prusa XL is larger than our Prusa Mk4 with the enclosure, but still fairly comparable. However, the XL’s build volume is kind of… staggering in comparison.

The Prusa XL doesn’t lack rigidity. That thing is build like a tank. It feels a lot sturdier than the Prusa Mk4.
Then again, I guess they’re not in the same category…

With those flat plates I’m printing, there’s zero difference. But when I have to print tall thin things, like for example a long tube to adapt diameters, it’s doable without any support on the XL, while I need a gigantic raft and glue on the Mk4 - and even then, it shakes enough that the diameter is not that great at the top.

Also, the XL has two heads, so I can print TPU with PLA support.