Managing machine & material specific settings.

[DocTrucker]

Hello.

I'm currently looking at trying to manage as much as possible of the machine and material specific settings and tuning parameters on the machine's duet controller. I'm looking at this as I would like to continue to use two different slicers on both my laptop and desktop. The issue is it is all to easy to neglect to update four sets of config files following a retune.

What is current best practice for managing this? It's never going to be perfect as the slicers want to dump temperature settings in the files, and speeds of course are deep in the slicers territory. Stuff like non linear calibration, and filament diameter are straight forward but dealing with temperatures and speeds leaves me thinking I need to parse the gcode and strip discrete settings to references to global variables?

[deckingman]

@DocTrucker

Hi Wes,

Can you clarify a bit please? Do you have multiple machines or just use different slicers and computers with a single machine?

If it's the former (multiple machine configurations) then take a look at M505. This allows you to change the path of .sys. So you have a single config.g which has multiple M505 commands and a single M98 P"config.g". You comment out all the M505s apart from the one you want to use. So anything that you want to be machine specific, put in the 'sys folder for that machine, and anything that's common to all machines, put in the /macros folder.

So you can have multiple instances of global variables with the same name but different values. I used to call a macro call "load globals" from config.g but this macro was in the .sys folder for each machine, rather than the .macros folder. So the actual "globals" were different for each machine but the command to load them was the same.

[DocTrucker]

@deckingman said in Managing machine & material specific settings.:

@DocTrucker
Can you clarify a bit please? Do you have multiple machines or just use different slicers and computers with a single machine?

Hi Ian. Four printers, two computers both with two slicers. Wasn't too complicated when just using slic3r as I directed the software to use a network share. Alas not so convient with two different slicers. I'll read through what you've discussed tomorrow, thanks.

[deckingman]

@DocTrucker To elaborate a bit more, in Prusa Slicer, in the custom code section for filaments I have just one macro call - e.g M98 P"prePrintAbs". That macro sets things like retraction, pressure advance, speeds, etc and it resides in the .sys folder. So each machine has it's own .sys folder and therefore it's own "prePrintAbs" macro. So any gcode file becomes machine agnostic and by editing the single macro call at the beginning of the file it becomes filament agnostic too.