Nein, it isn't just in your head as my dimensional holes (all I print are parts with a rare one off of something like Marvin) and they are more like the holes Kisslicer used to make over what Slic3r did. I always had to fiddle with my my dimensions until just right but with S3D it is either spot on or I am the one who didn't take into account shrinkage and/or the proper size to make them.

 

Here is the link to the swiss clips for the E3D heated bed, have to select the button that says "swiss clips only". You may also want to look into a thermal pad, I have heard of people using them for their heated beds to go under glass or aluminum, and because they're somewhat tacky, the build plate isn't supposed to move around with them, but they're also supposed to give good thermal contact between the PCB and the print surface, but at 12V a bed that size will take a while to heat up. I don't have any experiences with a 12V bed at 200x300, 200x200 was the largest I went at 12V, and I've never used a thermal pad, but I've heard anecdotal evidence floating around somewhere.

yeah, some of the holes are a little tight, and my first layers tend to be squished good, but most holes I can just push the screw through with some force, a few times of that, and the screw fits nicely.

 

Ahhh, you suffer from elephant's foot then? I did all sorts of work to get around that as it killed parts that interlocked together or like a lid on a box.

 

yeah, but it's worse with PET-G, on my delta printer, when I printed the C-Bot bits, the probe detection height changed a little bit, so it printed a little higher off the bed than I'd normally like, but PET-G kind of oozes to make a solid interface layer, and spreads out a little on the first layer

 

The bouncing you see in the stream is the entire printer moving slightly due to the inertia of the XY crossbar. The camera is completely separate on it's own stand. So any movement in the printer itself results in an over-exaterated appereance on the stream.

The prints that come off the printer have no banding issues nor do they have any issues with layer consistency.

I'm using MakerFarm's 12" 12volt PCB sandwiched between a ¼" aluminum plate on top and a silicone sheet, then ½" cork and finally ¼" plywood. The Z axis is driven using two steppers driving 8mm lead screws front and rear. It's very stable and with the rear idlers attached to the rear vertical pillars, any movement in the printer head is mirrored to the Z platform. This is why I see not artifacts due to the printer moving and with the front / rear arrangement, I see no Z banding.

The bed itself is drilled and conuter sunk at the corners. No clips! When I need to printer larger, I run a 16" x 12" glass plate on top. That is also insulated, but even with that, I try to minimize printing on the unheated portions of the glass. It's works for PLA, but I wouldn't try anything else in that configuration.

I've tried all the different bed toppings and so far, painters tape with gluestick works for everything. After I replace my hotend with the PT100 blocks and thermistors, I will give polycarbonate a shot on that as well. If all else fails, I will run the buildtak that came with the poly.

FWIW - I can easily run the heated bed up to 110c for ABS prints. So far I've had no warping issues. I attribute that to a healthy supply of gluestick and the aluminum plate spreading heat consistantly.

 

Yeah, that's what I thought the wobbling was, really strange to watch happen in person though. For some reason I want a removable build plate, but I don't know why. Gluestick worked for me, for PLA on unheated glass to a limited extent on my delta printer, but i didn't like the clean up, and painter's tape gets annoying for me. I use a PrintinZ plate on my delta printer and it works awesomely, but does not fare well with hotend crashes at temperature.

 

Hi, I have a question to people using a heatbed powered by main and controlled by a SSR. What kind of insulation are you using beneath the heater ? I am planning to use a 780W silicone heater under a 6mm aluminum plate.
Thanks

Edit: I just saw Chris arrangement 2 post above. Any other setup ?

 

New generator will be up this week. Added the following relative to the C-Bot.

* E3D Titan Direct Drive.
* 360 degree fan duct. Automatically generated and fully customizable.
* BL Touch mount
* Moved hotend to edge of carriage to allow for Z probe to be on the same side.

If I get time, will add @Carl Feniak's direct drive too. But I really want to get this out and get folks testing out the fan duct. Since it's customizable, fine tuning the dimensions for it is going to need lots of testing.

The downside of these changes is that backwards compatibility is broke with previously generated carriages.

 

You totally can and should PID tune your bed like it shows in the Dbot instructions. You can't PID tune if you use bang mode or a mechanical relay though.

 

I hadnt decided what board to go with, until last night.. I ordered the MKS, and will probably get the S3D, looks like they are figuring out the bugs between the two..

 

That sounds like an interesting setup, mind sharing a picture or link to your stream where I can see what it looks like? Thanks!

Okay when I built the d-bot the instructions weren't finalized he just had the frame assembly part completed and some other sections, like slic3r settings and that was it. I'll revisit the manual and check it out.

 

I can only speak from my own experiences but so far ... well .... I don't completely regret buying it (In Canadian pesos as well... lol) There's a fair bit of tweaking involved. I was coming off Cura so it was a fair bit different. Have had and am still having some issues here and there. For example retraction distances, and sometimes some parts look like a fine mesh rather than a solid when looking from top down. You can sometimes see light through them slightly. I presume that is from bottom and top layer settings. Also working on getting infills and walls ( as well as walls and walls) to touch each other. Still messing with the overlap % settings. On the other side of things, the interface is nice and my parts look great on the outside. lol

It should be noted that my Cura experience is mostly with my Kossel that has a 0.4mm nozzle, whereas I started using S3D when I built my C-Bot which has a Volcano and a 0.8mm nozzle. I've tried S3D on my Kossel a few times and had the same issues but to a lesser degree. Otherwise good.

 

I think it would be absolutely worth $50. I think $150 is way too much though, considering that the free alternatives are quickly catching up to it. The place it really shines is for supports.. Other than that, it's only marginally better.

 

I have an aluminum plate (3/8".. somehow it was cheaper than the 1/4") with 4 holes, a MakerFarm heatbed under that, and 1/4" cork under that. The bed assembly is mounted directly to the extrusions with no springs, which keeps the heat bed and cork in place so they don't droop. I use an inductive sensor to level the bed rather than springs.

I've got a sheet of Printbite on the way.. Hoping it lives up to its reputation.

 

I'll chime in here. I think Simplify3D gets a lot of good rep from people who might be less technically-minded. Of which, I don't think this forum consists of.

I'm glad I didn't pay for simplify3D. In a nutshell, all it seems you're getting is a better out-of-the-box experience than any other slicer. But a headache if you intend to tinker with settings and/or want to organise print configurations.

Where I feel it falls drastically short is the processes and profiles management system.
Simplify3D has to have the worst workflow topology I've used. Editing a layer height for an existing setting means creating a whole new print profile with all print setting duplicated. Meaning managing changes made later, in order to fine-tune a profile means manually updating that parameter in every related print profile (of which you will undoubtedly have in double digits).

Slic3r on the other hand, nails this by separating print settings, machine settings, and filament settings and allowing profiles to be set individually. Which makes sense, as these are the three main areas you would want to vary depending on the print you want. Updating the filament settings for a single filament shouldn't mean having to manually go through every print profile connotation using that filament and updating their settings to keep them all in sync.

Feel free to look at the only resource that explains every parameter in detail, and this backwards topology here (as one provided by simplify3D doesn't exist) Simplify3d-docs

Another really small gripe which annoyed me, was the syntax for their proprietary scripting (tool change, layer height scripting etc) pre-processor was released a year after it was first requested in the forums. The feature has been there the whole time, but no documentation saying how to use it!

 

So do you use Slic3r directly, or via RepetierHost? The standalone Slice3r never worked for me.. It kept crashing halfway through slicing.

 

I haven't used it in 6 months or so.. I'll give it another try.

 

I use DraftSight for 2d geometry, TurboCAD Deluxe for mostly converting STL or SKP files to DWG & Openscad to generate the 3d models from dimensions I measure in DraftSight. DraftSight is an AutoCAD clone that has a very good free version. I only recently bought the Pro version of DraftSight since they had a good deal on it back in May. The only thing the Pro version really gives me is the ability to use lisp programing. It is not 100% Autolisp compatible, but I have been able to get the code I wanted to work so far with a little rewriting. I also use the free version netfabb Basic to fix problems with STL files as well as rotating some STL files from thingiverse that are not rotated the way I want them.

 

According to the latest release of S3D (3.1.0), they have a release note that says they 'Improved filtering for small movements during toolpath generation'. This isn't just an issue with Smoothie, I ran into this in Marlin & Repetier as well... that super annoys me. I've not tried any of those old models since the upate, but it's encouraging to hear at least they're going in the right direction.

Should you get S3D? There's a few things about it that drive me nuts (their 'automatic supports' are far from 'automatic'), but as a whole it's a great piece of slicing software.

 

When Filastruder had a online chat option I hit them up and had them measure the clips, they wouldn't fit with the overhang on the pcb in relation to the glass. So i'm screwed there sadly.

 

All I use is S3d. To me it is worth the money, I've gotten the best prints with it. The paths it chooses compared to Slic3r are make much more sense. The supports/Rafts pull apart with pretty good ease, I have yet to perfect supports though as I don't print many things with them.

And what do you mean automatic supports? every time I generate automatic ones it puts them everywhere with an overhang, it might be too many but better to be safe than sorry, plus it's easy to remove the ones you don't need as well.

I wish it was cheaper but I use it every day, so thats how I justified the $$.

 

I use Slic3r as a slicer, and repetier host as a print controller. Slic3rs views really come in handy when you're fiddling and testing new settings.

Otherwise, once my tinkering is done, and im ready to commit to some tried and tested print profiles, Slicing and print management should all be done in octoprint. But that's a way off

 

I have the exact opposite experience with their 'automatic supports' : It will leave any sort of floating feature completely unsupported, I've experience multiple failed prints because of this. Lots of pics and examples here:
Simplify3D User Forum • View topic - Overhangs not being supported
But here's a good comparison pic:

It's a straight up bug: I can slice the same mesh in other software (shown in the above pic) successfully where S3D is comply blind to the problem, thus no supports. The thread shows even more mesh that have this problem.

But other than that, I really like it

 

+1 - Having experienced Auto Supports leaving things hanging....
+1 - Really like it regardless.

 

Their supports work most of time for me, but i did have a problem with the same issue when i printed AK Eric's fan duct from thingiverse. It didnt automatically support the ribs on the bottom.

 

Their response to this (there are other bugs too they don't care to fix for 3 years now) would be "that is why we have manual supports".

 

Yeah their whole attitude seems to be "Look people pay us a lot of money for this software so it must be doing it right" and then completely ignore issues and have no roadmap. That said it is a pretty OK slicer, and as @Spiffcow said, it could definitely be worth $50 but $150? No way. I have it and never use it, but I think that all comes down to whatever slicer you've spent time honing your settings in. I make some beautiful prints from Slic3r because I use it all the time (crashes and all) but never have been able to get the same quality from S3D. If the auto-generated supports work in S3D, they are awesome. If you have to manually add your own, then they are s*** because they cease being nice zigzags and become a mess of overlapping U shapes (one for each support column). I am not evangelizing slicers here, S3D is pretty good, Cura is pretty good, Slic3r is pretty good. Each one does something wrong and you just gotta work around it. S3D's major fault to me is that I shouldn't have to for $150. It just shows you how much you should appreciate free software.

I would also appreciate S3D more if I could tweak FFF settings without going back and forth between the preview -> setup screen -> edit FFF -> OK -> preview -> repeat.

I should also say that I don't print directly from any of these packages, I upload it to OctoPrint, so I have no experience with how well they actually communicate to a printer.

@Bravojul: I run a 750W silicone heater stuck to the bottom on a 1/4" MIC-6 aluminum plate, no insulation under it. It maintains 100C at about ~30% power. I have a cork sheet that I used to keep under it but I removed it so I could mount a fan underneath for cooling at print completion. It does make a difference having insulation under there for sure but it isn't necessary. I've been as high as 115C, and can get to 55C in just under a minute (although the build plate takes a few minutes to even out). I watch the M105 output and wait for the PWM output value to stop dropping, 55C is around 30/255 output.

 

I have been saying that S3D shouldn't be more than 50 dollars and it has constantly went up over time. I get people getting mad at me for saying that saying their/his time is worth the money yadda yadda. I agree S3D is pretty nice but I seriously believe it shares the same engine with Cura considering the bridge issue I brought up to them, and has been duly noted on their forums since 2013, has the exact same issues as Cura. He has never fixed it nor even addressed it so it must be at the heart of the slicing engine.

S3D is seriously fantastic for noobs, which it was made for with .factory and .fff files you grab from the net once you login, but for others it simply isn't worth the 150. Now if Slic3r would try and keep up I think it could do a better job at a lot of it but they don't care either.

My I3 Rework hates Cura and the parameters to get it to work are not available to me to tweak like they are in Slic3r so I say it should have stayed with the UM where it belonged.