Tapering extrusions
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I am playing around with tapered extrusions, both where the layer height varies (think of non-planar printing) and where the width of the extrusion varies with constant layer height. Both of those things are fairly easily accomplished with segmentation of the moves into multiple G1 or G2/G3 lines. That leads to my hand-made G-code being extremely long and harder to parse than I would like.
Is it possible to tell RRF to make a tapering extrusion? Would that be a sensible extension to ask for?
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There are various slicers that generate variable extrusion width (not height AFAIK) using the Arachne engine.
You'd probably have to give a lot more detail about the usage case and why this would be required as an RRF feature rather than a slicer based feature. -
@OwenD For my use case it's easy to justify: I am writing gcode without using a slicer. For some others it may not be interesting, but for anyone experimenting with non-planar slicing or hand-optimising gcode it will be worth consideration.
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@MJLew would you require the extrusion speed to be tapered linearly from start to end of the move? Or tapered in some non-linear way?
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@dc42 A linear taper would suffice for most or my purposes. Tapering according to a non-linear function would be great but not so easily specified, I would think.
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I have a new application for tapering extrusions that might make this feature request more popular. Moves that taper z height with fixed extrusion width will facilitate the production of invisible seams.
I have proposed a new feature for PrusaSlicer whereby it would make seams that I call scarf seams where the seam is spread out over complementary tapers. The feature request is here.
The scarf seam could be made entirely b y the slicer, but it is my opinion that the firmware should be responsible for the tapers. That would allow me (and others, presumably) to easily use tapered extrusions for other purposes.My proposal is for an extra parameter in moves to allow the extrusion to start at one value and end at another.