Orca slicer and Duet

omni

Hi guys,

Is anyone using Orca Slicer with Duet and what are your experiences? In the initial configuration for a custom printer there is not even an option for a custom RepRap firmware printer (only Klipper and Marlin), but digging deeper in options there is a RepRap gcode flavor. Currently I am using SuperSlicer and like it, but Orca seems interesting, so before giving it a go I wanted to check out what you guys think?

Exerqtor

@omni
I've made a go to setup my Duet powered Voron Trident in OS. But i miss some of the features PS and SS have, so I kinda shelved the plans for a bit.

The shaved down UI is somewhat of a double edged sword imo, i like that i have less choises IF they give me what i need. Also the built in browser/viewer solution is kinda nifty.

The main things i miss is a more involved multi extruder system, and a option for output "filtering" like the exclude words function in PS/SS.

Get the feeling they are mainly trying to please the Klipper crowd now at the start. So hopefully they will shift over to RRF when that's done.

oliof

@omni it doesnt work without Bambulabs' proprietary libraries so I am very wary about this poisoning of an open source project with binary blobs.

button

I'm using OrcaSlicer for 3 months and pirint looks briliant. Same settings, copied from SuperSlicer and quality is flawless

omni

@button Thanks, good to know. I was hesitant to try it out since it looks mainly Klipper oriented, but I'm gonna go ahead and set it up...

br7408

Late to the game here, but I am having reasonable success with Orcaslicer. Having experience with Cura & SS, It seems to do very well right out of the box at managing gap fill line widths and flow. Overhangs and especially supports are done extremely well with no tuning required. I still prefer SS for the plethora of features, but I have yet to get SS tuned optimally for all conditions and materials.

My issues with Orcaslicer:

There is a Reprap bug which prevents the individual feature acceleration settings to be applied, so one must stick with the firmware accel settings. I have confirmed this bug in the g-code. This feature would be a huge benefit if they could fix it. This issue has been acknowledged by the developer but no fix yet.
The line based calibration PA test will not work on a large bed with bed center 0/0 origin coordinates. It still wants to push the test off the plate as if the 0/0 origin was in the front left. Examining the g-code validated this.

ctilley79

@oliof said in Orca slicer and Duet:

@omni it doesnt work without Bambulabs' proprietary libraries so I am very wary about this poisoning of an open source project with binary blobs.

You sure? I'd like to investigate this myself. Are you sure the binary blobs aren't specific to the bambu printers themselves? They mentioned that the tweaked slicer algorithms were open sourced and had to be to satisfy those license requirements

oliof

@ctilley79 I am sure: You cannot run OrcaSlicer without the bambulabs libraries, and those aren't available in source last I checked.

br7408

Per my last post, I can confirm the latest Orcaslicer (1.8 RC) now has individual feature jerk settings working as advertised with Reprap. I did not see an entry in the release notes addressing it.

I incorrectly called it acceleration on my last post.

Notepad

@br7408 There is a minor bug currently where selecting RepRap as the Gcode flavour will hide the "Motion ability" tab

To overcome this. You just need to select a different Gcode flavour (I recommend Marlin 2 as it unlocks all the features). Then save and select a new machine.
Selecting the new machine forces the window to refresh the list at the top, and then reselecting the prvious machine keeps the motion ability tab visible.

Change all the settings you want, and then reselect RepRapFirmware as the Gcode flavour.

br7408

@Notepad

Thanks, I will check that out.

SDJ

I switched over to Orca Slicer when it looked like SuperSlicer had be abandoned after no updates since March. But I found a Sept post from the creator that says he is going to work on SS full time starting this month. I hope it's true.

Screenshot 2023-11-19 175231.png

From this post: https://github.com/supermerill/SuperSlicer/discussions/3902

omni

@SDJ
If that is true, it's really good news. It sure seemed like it had become abandonware.
I definitely prefer Superslicer to anything else I've tried.
Each slicer has some things that are cool, and others that are kind of annoying or lacking, but SS was definitely the sweetspot, at least for me.

jay_s_uk

@omni @SDJ
you can see work has begun here https://github.com/supermerill/SuperSlicer/commits/nightly_dev