New user recommendations

I’ve been trolling around these forums gathering as much as I can from the posts, hopefully having this all consolidated into a single place can help someone else down the line.

I think I’ve got my setup at 90% of what I want, a summary of things I did, since they’re not all obvious things you should do:

  • Changed to using Cura slicer and imported the profiles
    • Note: the current version of Cura only allows negative numbers, so you’d swap the min values to negative numbers (e.g. -20 and -10)
    • @MooseJuice’s start/end gcodes are great, and should have been in the original setup (although, I’d switch back to extruding 20mm since I frequently see a bit of goobering on my initial prime)
    • You really should do this, the quality of Cura (or simplify3d) is leagues ahead of luban, I don’t understand why SM doesn’t just tell people to use Cura directly for the slicing, it works so much better and has so many more (better) config/setup abilities.
  • Plugged in an octopi
    • I was a bit hesitant at doing this, since I’ve seen complaints about how it could go wrong (power loss recovery and filament runout are definitely nice to haves), but in the end, I’m pretty certain the benefits outweigh the losses (I don’t expect to hit either runout or power loss as nearly often as I have to turn the SM on/off remotely).
    • This was a relatively easy setup once I got my pi, but the whole time I felt really dirty, since I’m basically copying the functionality available from the touch screen
    • It’s extremely disappointing that we have this fancy, full android device plugged into our machines, and I’m getting a richer experience from a $60 micropc w/ open source software
    • I also set up octopi to use the PSU control plugin to power a smart switch that the SM’s PSU (and some enclosure lights) are plugged into, the PSU fan is just way too loud (and probably sucking so much unnecessary power) to be on all the time
    • Best part of octo pi is that I can now just open a web page, press a button, and get going on printing, without having to run over to the printer again to “confirm connection” and “confirm start” (from any computer or phone, which luban can’t handle (idk why, but it refuses to connect on my chromebook, but my windows PC works))
  • Updated the firmware to 1.9 (note: there’s 0 indication that this is something you should maybe do without visiting the forums to read up!)
    • I didn’t go to 1.10 yet because of all the complaints I see in the update thread
  • Follow @brent113’s tuning guide to get the printer actually calibrated
    • It’s amazing how out of tune our printers are out the gate. You’d think they could at least run the extrusion setup pretty much automatically in the factory.
  • 11 point bed leveling
    • Again @brent113 coming in with the save, I was really scared I was going to have to go through all of @Tone’s (amazing, but intimidating) setup, but luckily w/ just the standard 11 point I seem to be printing fine (I did purchase an indicator gauge though, so we’ll see how far off I am once I print an attachment for the print head)

To the experienced members of the forums, is there something I’m missing? I’m about to print my second blower addon, but AFAICT, that’s not exactly a “must do” to get the SM going well, it’s just a nice to have so I can move my supports out to 70 degrees!

2 Likes