Thank you for pointing it out to me.

I installed the flatpak and it works just fine! I’ll have to check if the gcode files it produces actually work okay on our printers, but so far I’m pretty happy with it.

Also, I like that OrcaSlider has features to defeat Bambu’s privacy invasion nonsense. I don’t have a bambu printer myself so it doesn’t concern me, but I like the developers’ attitude 😃

I’ll look into Orca Slicer. Thanks!

I suspect that you can compile from source with whichever version of OpenGL you want … if any.

I wouldn’t bet on that: I compiled PrusaSlicer from source and it really does require OpenGL 3.2-only features. I mean it’s not like just an unfortunate dependency. Disappointing considering the time it takes to build this monster 🙂

Clones made in Draft can be resized in the data tab. This is super useful for creating offsets.

Yeah I’m aware of the resizable Draft clones. But in my case, it’s not helpful: in the case of the letter R for example, if I shrink it, the outside of the letter creates a gap but the inside of the letter invades the shell’s material. What’s needed here is moving surfaces inward - meaning outward vertical features move inward and inward vertical features move outward (and horizontal surfaces stay put) which is quite different from wholesale resizing.

You insert this print as you would with a nut or bearing inserted into the paused print and continue the print

I thought that’s what you meant. This is WAY too labor-intensive for my purpose: I print those tabs in batches of 256. I can’t imagine printing 256 tiny lettering inserts and manually placing them iin all 256 shells when the print pauses. That’s crazy!

Is this what Prusa does for their parts? They must be using slave labor or something. Then again, at the price their sell their wares, they can take a few minutes to manually insert parts into their prints…

If you have trouble with first layer crispness, print the lettering face up and use ironing to get a flatter crisper edge.

Face up looks very nice, even without ironing. The issue is, the shells have very thin (one line width) walls, and those would need support. That means carefully removing 256 supports for each batch of tabs, trying not to break the walls. Crazy amount of work. Not to mention, the wall’s height needs to be quite precise, and supports usually screws up with vertical dimensions bad, at least for the kind of precision I need here.

Someone else mentioned a 0.2mm nozzle. They are not as slow as one might imagine.

The real issue is, this is the company’s printer. It’s used for printing jigs and things. I’m really trying to avoid changing how it’s usually setup because I don’t want my colleagues and I to change the nozzles several times a day. Also, my boss thinks the markings as I print them now are good enough - which is true enough - so I can’t justify the expense of a smaller nozzle.

In short, I try to make the best of what the printer offers without modifying anything significant.

I would rotate the text 90 degrees so that it has the full length of the top tab

Not an option I’m afraid, as I have to fit two lines of text.

I have not, but I will today.

Make two separate parts in CAD. You can join them as separate shapes in a Parts Workbench compound or using the Mesh Workbench tools. Then upload the meshed file into the slicer. Empirically tune the gaps to suit your printer.

The letters are separate parts - well, bodies:

Basically I use the same shapestring to cut the letters into the shell and pad each letter as a separate body.

I thought about somehow pushing the lateral walls of the letter recesses in the shell outward to create a gap around the letter bodies, but I haven’t figured out how to do that smartly in FreeCad. I have a feeling I should work on them as meshes, but I’ve never used the mesh workbench. Is this what you’re suggesting?

Of course, I could also import the body in Blender and do that there.

Personally, I like to use manual inserts or layer changes. Print your text separately in one color. Recess the text in negative for a few layers. Then add a print pause where you drop the lettering into the designed voids and continue the print, letting the voids and bridging bond the inserted letters.

Wow I’ll have to re-read that when I’m fully awake: you totally lost me there 🙂

If you design the 0,0 location of the parts so that they import into PS already aligned but as separate meshes, you can also use the elephants foot or other unique settings to manipulate how each section prints.

They do import as separate bodies that are aligned. I did try messing around with settings in individual parts, but it didn’t do anything.

You’re correct. A 0.2mm nozzle would certainly improve things. But it would also make printing those tabs unbearably long.

I wish my company had bought a 5-head Prusa XL: then I could have loaded black PLA and white PLA in two heads with 0.2mm nozzles, and a separate feed of black PLA in a third head with a 0.4mm nozzle for the rest of the parts that don’t need to look nice. But… ours only has two heads and it’s 0.4mm on both, because all the other parts we prints just don’t need finer details.

I did. No difference whatsoever.

So the guy printed throwaway first layer that he filed off to uncover nice- (or at least nicer-)printed letters underneath? Interesting concept. Too much time to spend on my little tabs though, since I make them by the bedloads for our many cables, but I like the idea.

Thanks!

Yes, they’re perfectly serviceable. I’d just like them to look more “professional” I guess, for my personal pride 🙂

So why not put the letters in the flat piece? That way you can print them either way up.

Good thinking!

In fact, that’s what I did first: the markings were on the lids rather than on the shells.

The problem is, because the lids are dovetailed, they’re narrower than the shells they dovetail into, so the width for the markings is reduced. meaning the letters need to be smaller, meaning they look even worse on the lids.

Hmmm… This setting looks like it could be the soruce of the issue:

Can you change it only for the 1st layer? Because it’s correct for the rest of the part.

Good tip. I shouldn’t have too much problem with adhesion with the XL, since it’s a coreXY printer. But then, I left 256 parts printing at work on Friday, and this is what the printer cam shows today (I’m at home at the moment):

So yeah, even printers that don’t shake the bed can have adhesion issues.

I’ll try that, thanks!

How do you change the color sequence? I couldn’t find anything in the settings.

small text is notoriously difficult to print

Actually, when printed topside, even 3mm letters are quite decent. They’re only one line thick, but they come out quite nicely considering. They’re not flawless by any stretch of the imagination, but they’re perfectly legible.

When printed face down however, they completely disappear into the black. I had to increase the size to 3.5mm - the maximum before the markings run off the models - to make them legible at all.

I tried with 0.2 mm elephant foot compensation, as well as no compensation. It doesn’t do anything.

Also, whatever compensation should happen with both heads. This problem is one color bleeding into the other.

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… 🙂