on today's makers mashup we're getting
better prints by using an arc welder on today's makers mashup we're going to be
using an arc welder to improve our 3d print quality now i'm not talking about the kind that
joins metal i'm talking about a piece of software that is called arc welder that does an amazing
job at approving your g code before you send it to your 3d printer you may be familiar with the
popular octal app software and if you've seen a youtube video or a video on instagram where 3d
prints magically develop into a full 3d print that octolapse software, the author of that also wrote
this brand new piece of software called arc welder now what arc welder does is it takes the different
points that are straight lines in your 3d print because your 3d printer really just prints
straight lines and what it does is it takes that g code and then turns them into arcs so it
reduces the total amount of g-code that is being sent to your printer it also uses marlin smoothie
wear all the different types of software out there to use their arc functionality so instead of the
slicer creating circles by using individual lines it is now offloading that to the firmware
and allowing it to go ahead and create arcs now for those of you that are very familiar with
marlin we talk about marlin software a lot here a lot of times people have seen arc
support inside marlin but never really seen how that works because slicers don't
generate arc data out of the slicer and that's where arc welder comes in it changes
everything in the way that 3d print g-code is sent to your printer in that it creates arcs and we're
going to cover that a little bit more detail here but at the bottom line we're talking about
improving our 3d print quality so i've got two prints here and from this distance you
can't see it but i'll show some close-ups here these are two couplers that I printed one of
them the traditional way by just slicing it in cura and then after I sliced it I sent it to
marlin now this print over here which is much smoother is printed after I've pre-processed
or post-processed depending on the way that you look at it post processed it out of cura send
it through arc welder and then send it to marlin it saves a tremendous amount of data in some cases
these sample prints were compressed in g-code 95 so from the data that came out of cura 95 of it
was compressed down or removed because it created this arc data and then I sent it over to marlin so
that's a tremendous savings in not only speed of transferring things to marlin but it also reduces
the amount of g-code that marlin has to process and if you've ever tried to do high-speed printing
like we've tried and done successfully with the x301 printer or any other core xy build if
you try to get that high speed you notice that what happens is you get a buffer under run or
basically the buffer is not able to keep up with the data that's coming in so it requires marlin
to process far more data than the cpu supports so that's why 32-bit boards and 32-bit cpus are
really more beneficial so if you have an 8-bit printer you're definitely going to want to watch
the rest of this video so with all that said let's get to work let's take a moment to talk about how
arc welder works in this diagram the first step is to look for three points along the tool path
and then determine if the arc created would be within the configured resolution it then continues
adding points while checking the maximum deviation once the maximum sized arc is achieved arc welder
ends the current arc and begins another one and then the entire process keeps repeating
until you reach the end of your g-code you can see this happens almost instantly inside
octoprint my test object was converted in less than a second and my g-code was compressed by over
60 now let's talk about how to get up and running with arc welder we're going to start with the cura
installation because it's the easiest one to do simply click the marketplace link at the top and
then from within the marketplace scroll down to the arc welder plug-in that was developed by field
of view the plug-in directly uses the arc welder library which we'll cover in just a minute and
you can run the arc welder library directly you don't have to run it from within cura so those of
you that don't use cura and prefer something like prusa slicer you'll still be able to compress your
g-code once the plugin is installed you'll want to scroll down to special modes and then all you have
to do is click the check box for arc welder this exposes all the different options available to
you to configure the tolerance or the resolution for arc welder I suggest experimenting with it
a little bit to find out what suits your needs best now let's get this installed for octoprint
we'll start by clicking the wrench icon and from there go to the plugin manager and get more
you'll search for the arc welder plugin or you can install it from the url like I am because
i'm using the beta version this new beta version should be released about the same time this video
publishes once everything is installed you'll have to restart your octoprint instance but overall
installing this in octoprint is extremely easy as I illustrated earlier all you have to do
is drop a file in and arc welder will kick off automatically and convert the file but we're
going to go ahead and look at the statistics for artwelder and we're going to configure it as
well now something you should note is down here at the bottom is the firmware compatibility now once
you've installed this I suggest you run this check because one of the things I had to enable
in octoprint here was the g90 g91 influences extruder option and i'm going to cover that now
because once you run this firmware check you may need to change this for your octoprint instance
as well enabling this feature is really easy click the wrench icon then go to features within
octoprint and click the box that enables g90 g91 overrides relative extruder mode from there you're
ready to recheck your firmware and make sure everything is okay with all that done you're ready
to drag and drop your file into octoprint and have it instantly converted larger files obviously will
take a lot longer once you've converted a file you can click the arc welder tab at the top and you
can get the analysis of each individual file by default arc welder will create a file name with a
dot aw in the middle and all you'll have to do is click on that file and then click print now let's
talk about the command line use of arc welder this has the advantage of working in windows mac and
linux being slicer agnostic you can also use this to bake it into any scripts or applications that
you see fit here we have former lurker's github page and from here we're going to navigate to the
arc welder lib on this page and links for all this are in the description now to download the latest
version you're going to want to go to the tags and from here you'll see that there is a releases
tab once you click on that you just need to scroll down and from there you can see the various
releases for different operating systems we're going to download the windows version
here and then we're going to unzip it google chrome did give me a warning and I just
told it to keep the file after this I proceeded to open it up and then we unzip the file giving
us a directory structure of both the libraries and the binary files where the arc welder executable
exists here we are at the command prompt and you can see the arc welder executable and also the
arc straightener I suggest checking that out but i'm not going to cover it in this video so we're
going to do a simple conversion of the test ring g code that you see here and it's simply a matter
of giving it an input and output file name I used the same aw nomenclature and you can see here
we can press this file 95 percent listing out the directory you can see here that we took this
from a 4meg gcode file down to a 441 kg code file so that's a substantial difference in what
you're transferring through the 3d printer you can control the resolution as well at the command
line i'm going to set this to the same value which is the default of 0.05 on the resolution and
you can see our conversion rate is 95.3 percent however if I change this 2.1 and execute the same
g code you'll see that it actually compresses it down to 95.4 percent so you can play with these
different numbers and get the best compression with still the type of quality that
you want to see out of your 3d prints now let's take a look at the quality you can
see here that because the 3d printer always does print in straight lines then you always
get a slight ripple effect but the one on the left that you can see all the bumps in there
that is the one that was printed without arc welder and you can see how much smoother the two
on the right are one is a .05 and .1 respectively all of these prints were done with 1.8 degree
steppers now in theory if you were using a 0.9 degree stepper you could get some additional
resolution that might improve this further I was very impressed given all we did was run this
through arc welder now let's get down to the nuts and bolts on testing tolerance in my tests I was
able to print three different versions of these nuts and bolts that pieced together and in my
testing each one of them worked perfectly I had no issues assembling the nut onto the bolt here's
the nut and bolt before arc welder and you can see the seam that comes out the same on both but you
can see the ripples that are caused by the stutter of the 3d printer when it's printing on this
original bolt the arc welded version looks much better it's completely smooth all the way
around with the exception of the seam itself performance was improved overall you can see here
that this print running at 300 percent feed rate stutters constantly from buffer under run and you
can also see those vertical lines in the print like we saw on all the others this is the unarc
welded file this print is a 400 percent feed rate based on the exact same print only run
through arc welder you can see how smooth it is generally going all the way around and
all of those vertical artifacts that you saw are removed from the print ring I found that
you can run about 200 percent feed rates over the serial cable but the sd card is really where
it shines where I was able to get a 400 percent feed rate from the normal 60 millimeter a second
settings so as you can see using arc welder is really rather simple you've got a number of
different options you can use it inside cura if you don't use cura for your slicer you can use
it either in oct print or the command line version that's pretty much universal and it works on
various operating systems too so you're not stuck with windows only or only linux there's a couple
of different options as well and links for all that are down in the description so you can check
out their page download the software and get up and running with this video pretty quickly and you
can start improving your print quality overall I know I covered a lot of information pretty quickly
in today's video on how to use arc welder and how to get it up and running and I just want to say if
you're having a little bit of trouble getting it running feel free to reach out to our channel
discord we're over a thousand members strong and there's lots of people in there that can help
you with this project or any other project that you're working on and links to our discord are
down in the description I also want to especially thank former lurker for his support in producing
this video it was great having him available to answer all of my questions and really help during
some of the testing I really encourage you to check out the software and if you're not using arc
welder you may already be using octal apps which is another great piece of software he put together
this is a great project and it's even supported by layer fuse layer fuse team is a patreon supporter
of arc welder because I feel that it's really a game changer in the 3d printing community and I
really suggest you check it out so with that it's going to bring the end of today's video if you
enjoyed it make sure you mash that like button and don't forget to share and subscribe so
you don't miss any of our upcoming videos i'd also love to hear if you're going to be
using arc welder down in the comments and I would also love to hear what your test results
are and your experience with arc welder as well so with all that said I want to say thanks
again for watching and we'll see you next time you
