Various suggestions of small improvements
Posted: 08 Oct 2023, 02:24
Hello everyone,
I'm a long time user of KS and always enjoyed using it. Tried every other slicers, always went back to it.
Never took the time to come to the forums until today, so here are a few ideas/suggestions coming from my modest user experience over the years:
(the order is random)
1-During the fist layer, make the Brim/skirt path the first ones to be printed. The reason behind this is that sometimes when starting a print the nozzle is empty for a little while. This is a problem when printing things with supports, because KS seems to always start with support paths. In which case it starts without filament and this messes up the print. I know this could be avoided with some custom gcode (priming a bit of material before the print), but it would be easier for us simple users to change the path printing order. This way priming occurs during the printing of the brim/skirt, which doesn't cause any problem.
2-First layer, still: being able to select different speeds for the first layers for each kind of path. During the first layer, what usually causes problem are the loops. Once the loops are done, basically 99% of the time the infill will be ok. The problem is that right now we only have the opttion to limit the maximum speed for the first layer for all kind of paths. So basically we have to choose between an unreliable first layer (but with a fast infill) or a painfully slow first layer. Allowing to set slow speeds for the loops but relatively high speeds for the infill would be great, expecially for large prints where there's a lot of infill. Toady I have to do this by hand (slowing down the printers when it does the loops, then increase the speed when it starts the infill.
3-First layer again: Being able to set some custom accelerations. I don't know if this is technically feasible, but it would be great as well to be able to set some lower acceleration settings just for the first layer (and if possible depending on the type of path as well). I've noticed that high accelerations tend to detach parts of the loops and infills sometimes because of the filament elasticity. Being able to lower the acceleration on these paths would probably solve most of the first print layer failures
4-First layer always: I think we'll all agree that this layer is the most troublesome. One of the main failure modes I have is that some little hole or some tiny island feature gets printed, then the head moves somewhere else, prints another circle or feature, then moves somewhere else, etc. What happens sometimes is that this tiny feature doesn't stick very well and then gets dragged away, because it is not secured to anything. Which usually ruins the print
So what I propose to avoid that would be that during the first layer the printhead prints a continuous path linking all these little islands/holes/spots together, before it does their loops and then the infill. This way they cannot easily peel off because they are priorly secured to the rest of the print.
The drawback might be that the firsl layer will look a little bit weird because of the strange paths, but it could be a selectable option for those of us who don't care and just need maximum reliability
5-Multi color printing: I'm new to multi color printing, so maybe what I'll say is stupid, but when selecting extruders in the extruder mapping window, each extruder button has a color. But unfortunately this color is fixed and doesn't correspond to what color is actually in this physical extruder. So it would be great if the button color could be associated to whatever material is actually charged in the extruder. Not sure if this is technically feasible but it would be very convenient, as current buttons can be very confusing sometimes.
6-Multi color printing: The octagon tower works very well for me most of the time...except when there is no color changes for a while. In which case what happens is that it tends to collapse because the extrusion on my machine isn't perfect and so sometimes there isn't enough plastic to print 100% of the layer. then next layer gets worse, and so on until it collapses. So I was wondering if it would be possible to add a small parameter, which would define the minimum quantity of material to be printed for a layer when there is no color change? This would help making the tower a whole lot stronger and guarantee print success. So far all the multicolor prints I failed were due to the octagon purge tower collapsing.
7-Also, but this is very subjective, I was liking the old versions of kisslicer's UI a lot more than the new. Sure it was intimadating at first, but we were having a view on many parameters at once instead of having to click to expand many (many) dropdown lists. It was requiring a lot less clicks by the user, in my opinion it was a lot more convenient to use. I would love if we could have a way to choose between the previous layout and the new ones (but I think this is probably very difficult to change now).
Anyway, I had a lot of other ideas and suggestions but can't think of them right now, so let's start with these ones and see what you guys think
In my opinion, issues 1,2 and 6 are the most important and would definitely help print reliability. 3 and 4 would really be nice to have, 5 and 7 are UI so that's always a bit controversial. No idea about the technical feasibility for any of these, maybe what I propose is entirely impossible, idk.
Anyway, thank you for this great tool, I've recently purchased a pro license and I'm very happy and proud to support your work.
Also thanks for the very much appreciated upgrade, that was very, very cool and really appreciated.
Hope this helps,
Cheers
I'm a long time user of KS and always enjoyed using it. Tried every other slicers, always went back to it.
Never took the time to come to the forums until today, so here are a few ideas/suggestions coming from my modest user experience over the years:
(the order is random)
1-During the fist layer, make the Brim/skirt path the first ones to be printed. The reason behind this is that sometimes when starting a print the nozzle is empty for a little while. This is a problem when printing things with supports, because KS seems to always start with support paths. In which case it starts without filament and this messes up the print. I know this could be avoided with some custom gcode (priming a bit of material before the print), but it would be easier for us simple users to change the path printing order. This way priming occurs during the printing of the brim/skirt, which doesn't cause any problem.
2-First layer, still: being able to select different speeds for the first layers for each kind of path. During the first layer, what usually causes problem are the loops. Once the loops are done, basically 99% of the time the infill will be ok. The problem is that right now we only have the opttion to limit the maximum speed for the first layer for all kind of paths. So basically we have to choose between an unreliable first layer (but with a fast infill) or a painfully slow first layer. Allowing to set slow speeds for the loops but relatively high speeds for the infill would be great, expecially for large prints where there's a lot of infill. Toady I have to do this by hand (slowing down the printers when it does the loops, then increase the speed when it starts the infill.
3-First layer again: Being able to set some custom accelerations. I don't know if this is technically feasible, but it would be great as well to be able to set some lower acceleration settings just for the first layer (and if possible depending on the type of path as well). I've noticed that high accelerations tend to detach parts of the loops and infills sometimes because of the filament elasticity. Being able to lower the acceleration on these paths would probably solve most of the first print layer failures
4-First layer always: I think we'll all agree that this layer is the most troublesome. One of the main failure modes I have is that some little hole or some tiny island feature gets printed, then the head moves somewhere else, prints another circle or feature, then moves somewhere else, etc. What happens sometimes is that this tiny feature doesn't stick very well and then gets dragged away, because it is not secured to anything. Which usually ruins the print
So what I propose to avoid that would be that during the first layer the printhead prints a continuous path linking all these little islands/holes/spots together, before it does their loops and then the infill. This way they cannot easily peel off because they are priorly secured to the rest of the print.
The drawback might be that the firsl layer will look a little bit weird because of the strange paths, but it could be a selectable option for those of us who don't care and just need maximum reliability
5-Multi color printing: I'm new to multi color printing, so maybe what I'll say is stupid, but when selecting extruders in the extruder mapping window, each extruder button has a color. But unfortunately this color is fixed and doesn't correspond to what color is actually in this physical extruder. So it would be great if the button color could be associated to whatever material is actually charged in the extruder. Not sure if this is technically feasible but it would be very convenient, as current buttons can be very confusing sometimes.
6-Multi color printing: The octagon tower works very well for me most of the time...except when there is no color changes for a while. In which case what happens is that it tends to collapse because the extrusion on my machine isn't perfect and so sometimes there isn't enough plastic to print 100% of the layer. then next layer gets worse, and so on until it collapses. So I was wondering if it would be possible to add a small parameter, which would define the minimum quantity of material to be printed for a layer when there is no color change? This would help making the tower a whole lot stronger and guarantee print success. So far all the multicolor prints I failed were due to the octagon purge tower collapsing.
7-Also, but this is very subjective, I was liking the old versions of kisslicer's UI a lot more than the new. Sure it was intimadating at first, but we were having a view on many parameters at once instead of having to click to expand many (many) dropdown lists. It was requiring a lot less clicks by the user, in my opinion it was a lot more convenient to use. I would love if we could have a way to choose between the previous layout and the new ones (but I think this is probably very difficult to change now).
Anyway, I had a lot of other ideas and suggestions but can't think of them right now, so let's start with these ones and see what you guys think
In my opinion, issues 1,2 and 6 are the most important and would definitely help print reliability. 3 and 4 would really be nice to have, 5 and 7 are UI so that's always a bit controversial. No idea about the technical feasibility for any of these, maybe what I propose is entirely impossible, idk.
Anyway, thank you for this great tool, I've recently purchased a pro license and I'm very happy and proud to support your work.
Also thanks for the very much appreciated upgrade, that was very, very cool and really appreciated.
Hope this helps,
Cheers