PrusaSlicer 1.41.0-alpha2

Slic3r Prusa Edition Slic3r Prusa Edition 1.41.0-alpha2

Summary:

This is an alpha version, introducing support for the new Multi Material upgrade 2.0, wipe into infill and sacrificial object, reworked object arrangement, time estimate in silent mode, time to end of print, and Prusa Control like 3D manipulation gizmos.

Please note, that if you decide to roll back to the currently released Slic3r PE 1.40.1, you will need to restart the application once the older profiles compatible with Slic3rr PE 1.40.1 installed, see the issue github.com/prusa3d/Slic3r/issues/1060. ↗ We are working on a fix in the meantime.

Support for the new Prusa i3 MK3 Multi Material 2.0 Upgrade

The following formerly hard coded parameters are now accessible from the configuration profiles to allow for different values for the old vs. new Multi Material Upgrade:

• Filament settings: Advanced -> Number of cooling moves, Speed of the first/last cooling move
• Printer settings: Single extruder MM setup -> Extra loading distance

Wipe into infill and/or into sacrificial object #512

To reduce amount of filament wasted due to a color change, one may now enable "Purging into infill" and "Purging into object" on the Object Settings dialog. In addition, one may now override the "Purging into infill" attribute per multi-material part.

Wipe into infill Wipe into infill

Wipe into a sacrificial object Wipe into waste object

Reworked, high quality object arrangement on the platter

We have implemented a new object arrangement library ↗ based on the ideas and papers referred by svgnest ↗. Our library is fine tuned to place objects close to the center of the print bed. Our current object arrangement works significantly better than the old implementation, although there is still a room for improvement: At this stage the arrangement does not place objects into concave corners and cavities of other objects.

If some components do not fit the print bed, they are piled onto a 2nd, 3rd and other virtual print beds to the right from the first print bed. Starting with this Slic3r release, only the objects fully inside the first print bed are sliced. The collision detection logic has been adjusted to only refuse slicing, if some object is partially inside the print volume and partially outside, but slicing is now allowed even if some objects are completely outside of the print volume.

Accurate time estimate for the silent mode

To prevent frustration over bad prints due to skipped steps, the MK3 firmware limits the maximum feed rate and acceleration with hard coded values. As the MK3 firmware in a silent mode drives the motors with a decreased current and in a silent, but weaker control mode, the MK3 firmware limits the maximum feed rate and acceleration to lower values than in the normal mode, therefore the print times differ between the normal and silent mode on the MK3 printer. Until now, Slic3r only calculated the time estimate for the normal mode.

Starting with this release, Slic3r will be calculating the time estimate twice, once for the normal mode, and second time for the silent mode.

For the time estimator to produce reliable results, it needs to operate with the same machine limits as the firmware. As long as we only supported the time estimate for the normal mode, we provided the machine limit parameters to the time estimator through the custom start G-code. In this version, as of now limited to the Marlin G-code flavor, we added a new "Machine limits" parameter page with the maximum feedrate, acceleration and jerk limits for both the normal and silent mode, and these values are used by the time estimator.

In addition, to keep the firmware in sync with the time estimator, a G-code section is generated from the "Full Power" set of parameters and inserted into the output G-code just before the custom start G-code. Also the new parameter "Maximum acceleration when extruding", which corresponds to Marlin's M204 S code, is used to clamp all other acceleration values defined at the "Print Settings->Advanced" page when exported into the output G-code.

For the normal / silent time estimate to work correctly, you have to install our print profiles of version 0.2.0-alpha and newer.

Support for the "Time to end of print" G-codes

Starting with this release, the time estimator emits a new M73 code for the Marlin firmware flavor at minute intervals, informing the firmware about the time to end of print in both normal and silent mode. Since the 3.3.0 release ↗, the Prusa i3 MK3 firmware is able to display the accurate estimate of the time to the end of print by interpreting this new M73 code.

The format of the new M code is the following:

where P is the percentage of the total time already printed in normal (aka full power) mode, R is the time remaining for normal mode in minutes, Q is the percentage of the total time printed in the stealth mode, and S is the time remaining to the end of print in the stealth mode.

Rotation & scaling gizmos ported from the Prusa Control.

In this release, we have implemented simple Prusa Control like gizmos for uniform scaling and rotation by the Z axis. In the future versions, we plan to implement the Prusa Control's right panel to control the object transformation.