Calculate time and filament consumption

[gastonfama]

Hello everybody.

Does anybody knows a way to calculate the time and the filament consumption for a given bfb after the cubeitmod post processing?

The original kisslicer time is not accurate and not even constant, I mean, if the difference in time for a piece is 20%, it is not 20% with the same profile for a diferente piece.

What do you use as a rule for measure this?

Thank you very much.

Regards.

[lonesock]

The time estimate is based on 2 things: the speed of the extruder (as it lays down the plastic, and as it skips around), and the time it takes to warm the extruder.

For the first, KISSlicer knows exactly what speeds each path will use, and the exact path lengths. If you specify a value for "XY Accel [mm/s^2]" that matches the printer's actual acceleration used, then KISSlicer can get that timing pretty exactly. Note that each firmware handles things like sharp corners in a path differently, so KISSlicer has no way to know if the motion planner is actually coming to a full stop on a sharp corner, etc. I recommend finding out what acceleration your printer is using and entering that as a starting point.

The second factor is a small source of error for a single extruder print, or a multi-extruder print where the extruders change rarely. If you have the extruders changing each layer, this can be a huge source of error! For each material in use, you will need to enter a "Warm Time" coefficient that gets you a correct answer. I use a stopwatch and manually time how long it takes an extruder to warm from the ambient temperature to the main extrusion temperature, then I use the [Coef Calc] button to enter those numbers and get an initial value for that setting.

If you want to tune the time estimate from there, first do a single extruder print and time it exactly. The single warm-up time should be relatively accurate from the previous step. Then you can tune the XY acceleration value until the estimated time matches the actual print time. From there you can then do a multi-material print and time it as well. It's a little trickier to tune the warm-up coefficients, since there will be at least 2 of them (unless they both use the same material).

The upshot of all this is that it might be nice to have a timing wizard to help dial in the settings used for estimating print time.

[8^)

Thanks, and sorry that I didn't answer the actual original question.

Jonathan

[gastonfama]

Jonathan, thank you for your response.
It was very precise and useful, mostly for pure kisslicer users.
As I mentioned above, with the postprocesor changing the speeds, the information that kisslicer can give is not reliable. Also I belive that some of the fields that feed the time calculation are used for some other purpose with cubeitmod.
My question was more focused on Cubeitmod users that perhaps use some program or webpage that takes the final bfb file and gives some information about it.
Thank you again Jonathan.
Regards.

[Giovanni V.]

Jonathan, thank you for your response.
It was very precise and useful, mostly for pure kisslicer users.
As I mentioned above, with the postprocesor changing the speeds, the information that kisslicer can give is not reliable. Also I belive that some of the fields that feed the time calculation are used for some other purpose with cubeitmod.
My question was more focused on Cubeitmod users that perhaps use some program or webpage that takes the final bfb file and gives some information about it.
Thank you again Jonathan.
Regards.

You're right, the KS's Warm Up factor is used for M228P, hopefully Jonathan will introduce some "free parameters" into KS menu, this way I can use them for Cubeitmod instead of hijacking the KS parameters.
If you use only extruder 1 you can rename the bfb file to gcode and use the gcode viewer WEB site to estimate the time, but I don't know if it's reliable.

[gastonfama]

Thank you Giovanni.
I will try that and will post the results.
Regards.