Cup/Vase/Surface thickness mod for Skeinforge 50 fill plugin

thingiverse

Update 2 These plugin changes were rolled into the Sailfish version of ReplicatorG a couple months ago, which can be found here ( http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:32084 ). So, you should only need this plugin if you are using a non-Sailfish version of ReplicatorG. Update I have added the ability to limit the number of layers printed. See the last bullet point below for more info This is a replacement for the Fill plugin used in Skeinforge 50. It adds 4 useful features: -The ability to disable the top layers of a model for printing out cups, vases, or other hollow objects without deleting lines from gcode manually -An automatic solid surface thickness feature, which lets you set the thickness of top, bottom, and overhang surfaces in milimeters, instead of layers. This keeps top and bottom surfaces proportional, even when printing in thin layer heights. It results in much cleaner top and bottom surfaces, even with ridiculously low infill settings and small layer heights. -Forcing even/odd top layers. The fill patterns on the top layer of a surface are different, depending on whether there are an even or odd number of solid surface layers. I prefer to see the even layers, which use vertical lines. Odd layers tend to use slanted lines, which print more slowly and can be a bit messier. You can now choose whether you want the final layer to be even or odd. -You can now determine how much of the object to print using the 'Object printing percentage/layer limit' feature. This lets you print 1 layer of an object, which can be handy for printer calibration. It also lets you print a custom percentage of the object, or a custom number of layers. This feature is disabled by default, and is ignored if you have Disable Top Layers enabled. Instructions Before you install this plugin, you will want to make a backup of your current fill.py plugin. You can find it in your ReplicatorG install folder, under this path: skein_engines/skeinforge-50/skeinforge_application/skeinforge_plugins/craft_plugins Once you have your original fill.py file backed up, just save the new version to the same directory Once installed, edit your slicing profiles in ReplicatorG and open the Fill settings screen. When 'Enable automatic solid surface thickness' is checked, Skeinforge will ignore the old 'Solid surface thickness (layers)' value. It will instead look at the 'Desired solid surface thickness (mm)' setting. I usally set this to somewhere between 1mm and 1.2mm, as it tends to give pretty good results, even under 0.1mm layer heights with very sparse infill. This feature is turned off by default. When you enable Force even/odd top layer, it may cause slight inconsistencies in layer thickness. For example, if you set it to prefer even layer heights and an odd height is generated, this feature will add an additional surface layer in order to be sure that an even top layer will be extruded. This doesn't affect the size or dimensions of the object, but it does use a little bit more filament. This feature is set to off by default. The 'Disable top layers (cups and vases) setting is pretty straightforward. It is off by default. The 'Object printing percentage/layer limit' feature lets you choose how much of an object to print. By default, it is set to 'Print entire object' If you are printing a calibration object, you may wish to set this to 'Only print one layer' You are also given the option to print a certain percentage of the object via the 'Print x percentage of object' option. This looks at the value in the 'Percentage of object to print' field and determines how many layers to print. The final option is 'Print x layers of object'. This looks at the 'Number of layers to print' field and only processes this number of object layers. If the number of layers specified is larger than the number of object layers, this setting is ignored.