On the fly object height adjustment
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Alright, so I had this idea the other day, And weirdly enough I think it could actually come in handy. I’ve always thought it would be cool to make changes to a model while it’s in progress, or without having to open it in CAD and re slice the STL, but obviously there’s a whole host of issues of why that’s not easy/possible to do.
Sometimes, though (actually pretty often), I’ve found that my models are extruded straight up in the Z direction. These kinds of models make on the fly changes easier because in most slicers I can turn off uniform scaling and scale my object only in the Z if I need to adjust the overall height or extrusion depth.
What if there was a little button in DWC that would allow this change to be made to GCode that’s already been sliced, or even while a print is going?
So here’s how I think this could work:
When we make our initial gcode, we have let’s say 100 layers, and each layer has a height of something like 150 micron. If we can just tell the printer to step Z twice as much for each Z move, and extrude twice as much material, we can effectively make our model twice as tall with the same gcode, only by telling each layer we’ve already sliced to be twice as thick.
I think this would pretty much have to be a temporary and on-the-fly change to Z rev/mm. You would also have to tell the printer that it’s max Z travel is only half as far now so it doesn’t try to move outside of the physical bounds of its full travel.
I just know I’ve had times where I print an extruded piece of text, for example, and it wasn’t tall enough, or it was too tall, and I really wished I could have just told the printer to reprint it shorter or taller. Interested to see what other people think.
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I doubt it would work. However, there is way that you could get what you want to happen - at least for test purposes. Write a macro that changes the Zsteps per mm to the desired percentage change and at the same time, change the extrusion multiplier.
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@deckingman I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t even think about the fact I could just use a Macro for this. I may try, just because I’m curious how well it would work. I guess I was also hoping for the functionality of being able to make changes /during/ the printing process
Original Prusa i3 MK2
Hephaestus (Custom Duet based large format FFF)
Aeon (Custom belt printer)
Elegoo Mars -
@wcj97 said in On the fly object height adjustment:
I guess I was also hoping for the functionality of being able to make changes /during/ the printing process
Why can't you make changes during the printing process? You can execute gcodes and mcodes from macros and the console while a print is going on.
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@wcj97 For sure you can make changes during the printing process like the Z steps per mm by entering the gcode command via the console. Likewise the extrusion multiplier. The only reason I suggested using a Macro is that the commands would be almost simultaneous. You can of course call the macro "on the fly" during a print.
Might be an idea to use two macros. One with the changes you want to make, and the other to restore the defaults. Then if it goes haywire, you can quickly undo it. -
You don't need to alter the Z steps/mm, you can use M579.
