I’ve always done my best to try to print benchy and calicats and other benchmark prints and try to dial in the settings for different filaments but I it’s always been haphazard and except for stringing I never really knew exactly what to change to address various issues. Even with stringing I never knew how to adjust the parameters and by how much for any of them. It was always trial and error until I got to “good enough”.
Recently I’ve been experimenting with the beta Orca for Snapmaker and even though it’s a slight pain to have to run Luban to connect to the machine and then connect Orca to Luban. There are certainly a lot more properties to configure and I still don’t know what a bunch of them do. But what has improved my prints the most are the guided calibration steps.
I’m sure a lot of old timers out there already do all these steps already, but having them there in the tool along with instructions on how to interpret the results is what finally made it click for me.
I found the most benefit from the temperature tower, flow rate, pressure advance, and retraction towers. I don’t see much change after running max flowrate and VFA.
Both prints are made with an old roll of Snapmaker brand PETG with the same overall print settings. The print on the left is using the Snapmaker PETG profile that ships with Orca. The one on the right is after running the calibration tests and adjusting accordingly.
The new print is not perfect by any means, but the improvement is remarkable.
If you are hesitant to go through the steps all I can say is do it for every new roll of filament. You won’t regret it.
I use orca and I think it is far superior to luban or even cura which is what I used before but I’ve not seen the calibration commands. Where are they? Thanks!
@Cadae posted the link to the docs. But I can go through my overall process for calibrating a new filament if it helps. I’ll try not to reproduce most of the content on that calibration link so definitely don’t skip that page.
Create the filament profile:
Start a new project. Click the filament field and scroll down to “Add/Remove filament”. Click on “Custom Filaments” and “Create New”.
Select the vendor or, if it doesn’t exist check the box next to “Can’t find vendor I want” and type it in.
Select the filament plastic type.
Enter something meaningful for the “Serial”. Here is where I usually enter extra stuff like “Silk”, “Snapspeed”, “PLA+”, etc. What ever you need to uniquely identify this filament beyond the info you’ve already entered.
Choose “Copy current filament preset” and choose your printer and the filament closest to what you are currently calibrating as a starting point.
You will need to select the new filament profile on the main Orca page.
Click the pencil icon to edit the new profile. Enter in what ever relevant information you can find about the filament. At a minimum you’ll have the min and max temp and heated bed temperatures. Pay attention to the notes tab. Here is a good place to keep track of test results and any other relevant info.
Temperature Tower:
Click on Calibration → Temperature. Select the temperature range. I usually do 5 above and below the min/max. Make sure to enter the rest of the properties as appropriate.
Slice the plate and print. You might want to use a brim.
Examine the result and find the ranges where the tower looks the best. Those are you new temperature ranges to enter for the min and max temp.
Flow Rate:
Delete the temperature tower and click on Calibration → Flow Rate → Yolo (recommended).
Under Strength change all the patterns from Monotonic to Archamedean Chords. The Yolo calibration is designed for this. Even so, I find the top layer to still be monotonic but there is enough quality difference to use the prints. If you struggle you can use Pass 1 and Pass 2 which do work with monotonic but require two passes to calibrate and requires some math to calculate the new flow rate.
Examine the results and pick the block with the fewest problems. Add the number from that block to the flow rate which will be something around 1. I have found this to be the most impactful parameter.
Pressure Advance:
I’ve done the line and the pattern test. If your bed level calibration is good (I use glass so mine is pretty good) the line test is fastest and uses the least amount of filament and it’s the easiest to interpret.
Delete the blocks and choose Calibration → Pressure Advance.
If you have a Bowden tube choose that. Otherwise keep Direct Drive selected (i.e. DDE).
Be sure to read the tutorial linked above because the recommended numbers to run in the test is different between Bowden and Direct Drive.
I have a Bowden tube so I usually test between 0 and 1 to start and then narrow it down if the results are not clear or beyond the test range.
Note, I don’t find the number to be all that legible with PETG so recommend against printing the numbers in that case. You can count to figure out what number the best line represents.
Retraction:
This is a nice fast tower with little rings indicating the retraction length so it’s easy to find the shortest length to the 0.1 mm with the least stringing. By now you get the drill so I won’t repeat the steps.
Depending on how many go-backs I need while calibrating it takes about an hour to do all four of these.
There are more calibration options there but I didn’t see much change in the prints overall when trying to calibrate them so I don’t use them any more. YMMV.
