PrusaSlicer 2.2.0-alpha1

PrusaSlicer PrusaSlicer 2.2.0-alpha1

Summary

This is the first alpha release of PrusaSlicer 2.2.0, introducing support for 3rd party printer vendors, filament installation, pause at height, Color Print for MMU2, adaptive elephant foot compensation, automatic variable layer height, wipe tower without sparse layers, 3dconnexion support, OSX dark mode, export to removable media and eject, reworked Reload from disk and path planning, 3MF thumbnails, Flash Air support, Japanese translation and much more.

To let you enjoy the alpha without worries, the alpha builds save their profiles into PrusaSlicer-alpha directory, so you may use the alpha side by side with the current release without ruining your production configuration.

The PrusaSlicer 2.2.0-alpha1 brings the following new features:

Support for third party 3D printer vendors

We have extended the Installation Wizard and configuration layer to support 3rd party 3D printer vendors. A 3D printer vendor may provide a versioned Config Bundle to us. We will store these 3rd party Config Bundles into resources/profiles directory of PrusaSlicer, and once any of the 3rd party printer is installed, PrusaSlicer will pull updates of these Config Bundles from the internet.

For starter, we have created profiles for the Creality Ender-3 printer. Please consider this profile experimental, we expect the community members to build upon our initial draft. We will publish a guide for contributors on how these Config Bundles are structured and how to contribute them.

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Filament installation, filament & print preset aliases (logical profile names)

PrusaSlicer stores the Print, Printer, SLA Print and SLA materials in separate lists and the names of the profiles are required to be unique inside their respective groups. For example, a "Prusament PLA" profile is used by the "MK3S" and "MK2S MMU1" printers, while a "Prusament PLA MMU2" is used by the "MK3S MMU2" printer due to different MMU ramming parameters. Before this release, the full "Prusament PLA MMU2" profile name was shown at both the Plater and at the Filament parameter page.

Starting with this release, a shorter "logical name" aka "alias" is shown at the Plater, while the full profile name is shown at its respective parameter page.

The "logical name" aka "alias" is defined in two ways: First, the "@" sign in the preset name is interpreted as a separator of a logical name from the full name. For example, the full Print profile name "0.15mm QUALITY MK3" has been renamed to "0.15mm QUALITY @MK3" (the difference is in the @ sign), and the part before the @ sign - "0.15mm QUALITY" is considered a logical name. In a similar sense, the "Prusament PLA MMU2" has been renamed to "Prusament PLA @MMU2", so that a logical name "Prusament PLA" applies to both the MMU and non-MMU variant of the filament profile.

The second way to assign a logical name to a profile without the use of the "@" sign in the profile name is through an "alias" configuration value of a profile.

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Starting with this release, the Filament and SLA Materials provided by various 3D printer vendors may be installed in a similar way to how the printers are already installable. The filament and SLA materials are referenced by their logical names in the installation wizard, so one filament or SLA material profile is being installed for multiple installed printers at once.

Insert pause or custom G-code at a certain layer

The Color Print tool is highly praised as extremely easy to use and intuitive, but until now it only supported filament switches and it was limited to single extruder printers. Based on the feedback from our customers and the community, we generalized the Color Print tool to support print stops to insert magnets, weights, bearings, nuts or a custom G-code.

Slicercustomgcode

Color Print for MMU2

Color Print newly works with MMU2 as well. There are two use cases for this new feature:

1. Printing signs unattended. Here a filament switch event is inserted at a selected layer height, which will trigger the MMU2 unit to switch filaments automatically while wiping the extruder into a wipe tower. In this scenario there will be just a handful of filament switches performed, therefore many layers of the wipe tower will be printed with sparse layers. Check the other new feature "Wipe tower without sparse layers" on how to reduce material waste and print time when printing with MMU2 Color Print.

1. Extending the number of colors of MMU2 prints above 5. One may assign a single extruder to two parts separated in Z axis (for example shoes and eyes of a standing figure), and then plan filament exchange (M600 G-code) in between.

The Color Print also newly supports generating color bands at regular intervals: image

Adaptive Elephant foot compensation

The Elephant foot compensation feature shrinks the contours of the first layer FDM slice inwards to compensate for the first layer squash. The first layer squash is often ugly and it complicates fitting of multiple printed parts together, therefore quite often the elephant foot needs to be filed or scraped off after the print, which is a tedious process and which may negatively influence accuracy and surface quality.

While PrusaSlicer implements the Elephant foot compensation for a long time, it was used much less than it deserves due to the following drawback: The old algoritm shrank the first layer contours evenly, thus shrinking thin protrusions as well as large areas, leaving the thin protrusions unsupported. This PrusaSlicer release brings an adaptive version of the Elephant foot compensation, which ensures, that no area is made narrower than the width of two perimeter lines, minimizing the necessity of post processing of the print while ensuring good print adhesion to the print bed.