the Perfect Ender 3 Cura Profile - 1.0

Alright guys, welcome back. This video is all about setting up Kira after receiving your Ender-3. Now, you need to do this before printing anything unless you are printing the test dog G-code that is already on the SD card that came with the printer. You'll notice here all of these files here came off of that SD card that arrived with my Ender-3 Pro. I did take those files and save them into a folder on my computer to be sure that I would know where they were and have access to them in the future. Or to be sure that I didn't overwrite anything. So immediately you want to do this. You want to copy the contents of that. I just made a folder called Ender-3 files and I put them in there. That works great. And while we're in here, there are a couple things I want to point out. First of all, Creality is a Chinese company. So you notice a lot of things that are in Chinese. It is fairly easy to read if you go through the user's guide and stuff. But it is kind of broken English and an example of that is here where it says modal. You might wonder what a modal is. These are actually files. This is the STL for the test dog if you want to slice it yourself. This is their pre-sliced G-code for the test dog. The pre-sliced G-code for the test dog is also in the main directory of these files. But they also have this other little thing that we're gonna work with here. It's a rare file that you have to extract and I've extracted it to this folder here and it is a squirrel chest set. So for our print pieces, when we get to printing, which will be the next video, we'll be printing one of these. But we will be importing one of them into Cura so we can set our settings and get our printer ready. So the first thing you need to do is open up these files here and check out the quick start guide. If you haven't put it together yet, you might want to check out the assembly instructions. These things are all included with your printer, okay? There's even a little video here. But we are gonna go right to software. And in the Cura folder, there is Cura 15.04.3. All right, so I'm now extracting Cura and installing it. I do have the newest version installed down here, but we're gonna install this version so I can show you how to set up your profile with the version that comes with it. And then we will go over how to export it into the new Cura. So here we go. We're almost done. Device driver installation wizard. Go ahead and click Next on that. This is the Arduino I was talking about. And we are done. And I'm gonna go ahead and start Cura 15.04.3. And it may take a minute to load up here. There it is. It says Cura powered by Ultimaker. Don't worry if you don't have this exact version. It has shipped with a couple of versions in the past, and it's even asking me right away if I want to update. Go ahead and click No on that. The thing is, is even if you click Yes, it's gonna install it, but it won't install it over this version of Cura. It'll install both of them, so you'll still need to export and import the file. So the first thing we want to do is go to Machine. It's already got a setting in here for Ender 3, which is perfect for us, okay? If for some reason yours doesn't have an Ender 3 to click on here, go to Add New Machine, and you're gonna set the settings just like this, okay? This is actually wrong. This is supposed to be 250. It does have one extruder. It does have a heated bed. Build shape is square. G-Cload is rep-wrapped. You're using Marlin slash Sprinter. That's the flavor that they used in their profile, okay? And then all of these printer head sizes are blank, so we don't have any offsets. And then the communication settings, you're gonna leave auto for both, the serial port and the baud rate. So don't mess with those. I'm gonna go ahead and change the machine name, so we know that this is the profile I'm sending up, okay? Okay, there we have it. Now, when you get in here, the first thing you want to do, and we'll discuss this later, but for right now, just trust me, is change this to .16. .16 is one of the magic numbers for the Ender 3. Don't be intimidated by that phrase. We'll go over magic numbers in a later video. The next thing we want to do is go to our fill density, and I'm gonna take this down to 20%, okay? That is gonna be our infill density, and a lot of these terms, I'm gonna say things that are slightly different from what you see in here, because I'm using the updated terminology. But I'm gonna go ahead and open this, and the nice thing about these files, and notice, I remember I told you I opened the squirrel chest, and then I extracted it to that folder. So these are the extracted files. It won't work if they're zipped, okay? So let's see what the squirrel king looks like. You can drag and drop, and there he is. He's pretty polygonal. Kind of low-poly, but that's alright. So, I have him imported. I want to go over a couple more of our settings, and to do that, we're gonna go into our advanced settings, okay? You'll see that they have a lot of this stuff set. You're gonna want to set yours if it's not the same. So take a look at my video here, and go ahead and set your speed to 70 millimeters a second. Set your distance for the retraction. This is your retraction speed and distance. Your retraction distance to 8 millimeters a second, or excuse me, 8 millimeters. The quality is your thickness, basically, of the lines, and how smooth it comes out. So we don't want to cut off object bottom. We don't need to worry about dual extrusion overlap, because we're not dual extruding. But you want to make sure that your initial layer line width is 100%, and your initial layer thickness normally doesn't need to be that high. I'm gonna go with 0.2. Travel speed and stuff. This, you can increase and decrease these speeds as you go, but for right now, go ahead and leave them where they are, okay? So that means if your settings are blank, set them to the same as mine, and I'll leave this up here for just a second so you can copy the settings. Go ahead and pause the video if you need longer. I'm gonna go ahead and move on. So, there are two other things in here, if you click start and end G-code. Now, when my printer ends, and I will show you this G-code later, it's not vital, but in my end code, there is a line that makes the printer bed come forward. Instead of going to the home position and going back, it pushes the print forward so you can see what's printed, and it's easier to remove from the build plate and stuff like that. We'll cover that in a more in-depth Kira video, but for right now, give it a pause and make sure that your basic settings are aligned with these. You have the same stuff turned on, okay? We don't have support turned on. Doesn't look like we're gonna need it with this model. No severe overhangs. I think we can get away without it. The diameter, this is how wide your filament is, and the flow 100%. So, now that we have our profile, it's slicing it. It's taking a little while. That happens, but just bear with me. The newer programs are a little bit better. So, printing temperature and print speed. So, that's not bad for print speed, 85 millimeters per second. We can start off with that, and the print temperature, 210 is good for most PLAs. Most PLAs will have a range between 185 and 220, so 210 is not a bad place to start. Bed temperature is 60. That's probably a little high for PLAs. You're welcome to try a little bit lower temperature. I will tell you, if you have a bigger temperature, it works a little bit better as far as keeping it stuck to the bed, and you can see here in the support type that it has a raft enabled. We're not gonna do a raft. We do want to make sure that the model sticks, so we're gonna do a brim, and that should work out just fine. Now, we're not actually printing this model right now. Well, I mean, we are gonna print the Squirrel King. We're gonna scale him down quite a bit, but we're gonna be using our other version of Cura to do that. So, what we need to do now is go to machine settings once again, and let's see here. Excuse me. It's not in machine settings. It is gonna be save profile under file. Okay, so, and I'm saving this to my CD. CD downloads Ender 3 files. That's why it's in my data. Okay, so D Ender 3 files, and it says any.ini. This is the type of file that we're saving, and this is my Ender 3 profile. Okay. Now, you have two options. You can either go to the Cura website and find version 4.0, which I recommend because it has less bugs, or you can close Cura and reopen it. When you reopen it, it'll ask you to upgrade. You can update your program at that point, and then you will have the new Cura. Once you have the new Cura, I will open that up, show you how to import your profile, and we'll go over how some of the settings are different. So, give me just a second here. All right, I got Cura all opened up here. Now, we're going to go to settings, add printer, and add non-network printer. The Ender 3 is actually in here now, so you'll click that one. Click add, and two days later... Come on now. There we go. Now, you'll notice that it has set the size of my build area to the Ender 3. Mine says Cruelty Ender 3 number 2 because I've set it up before, so now if we go in here, and we go to profile, manage profiles, and up here at the top, you have this handy import button. You're going to hit import. You're going to go to the directory where you put your .ini file, and you're going to click on it, and hit open. Successfully imported profile Ender 3 profiles. That's this one here. Okay. So, now, I'm going to close, and go back into settings, profile, and I'm going to select that profile. Now, all of my settings that I set in the other program have carried over. Okay, there are a lot more settings in here, and in fact, this is what you'll see when you first start. I always go into the custom settings, the advanced settings. There's a lot more options in here. You'll see that fill has changed to infill. It has carried over the proper density for that infill. There is a pattern selection available in here. Now, the pattern in here is set to grid. I'm going to change it. I'm going to change it to cubic. I do that because I get better infill that way. You'll see our temperature hasn't exactly carried over the way we wanted it to. That's not a big deal because we're going to be adjusting that right now. Go ahead and get your spool of PLA, whatever you're going to be printing with, and look at the front of it. There should be a little tag on there somewhere. Now, not all the time, but usually there's a little tag on there that tells you what temperature to be printing at. For me, we're going to be using some green 3D Solutec PLA, and we're going to be printing at 220. The difference in temperature is automatically adjusted unless you alter them yourself, so it automatically starts printing when it's 10 degrees below your ideal printing temperature, and for the last layer, it'll start to cool down a couple degrees. We're going to leave the build plate and temperature alone. We're going to leave the retraction alone. It looks like most of the rest of this is pretty well set up for us, so we don't really have to mess with anything. Now that we've got Cura all set up, we are going to re-import our Squirrel King model. Now, you can print any model for a test model, and in fact, for your first print, even if you're not sure it's going to turn out, I recommend printing a tool holder for all the tools that came with your Ender-3, because you will be using most of them quite a bit, and it is handy to keep them all in one space. If you need such a tool holder, all you need to do is look for Ender-3 Tool on Thingiverse. I will link to Thingiverse in the description. It's a great place to get models, mods, and other items that you can print for your Ender-3. Now, I've taken my model, I clicked on it. This is the scale factor. I reduced it by half, so we're at 50 percent. Now, using the settings I have hooked up up here, we're going to go ahead and hit slice, and it says 47 minutes. That's not bad. It's going to use 5 grams of this PLA, and we're going to load it up and print it. But first, before we switch over to the other camera and show you how to load your first filament spool, we need to save the file, so I'm going to hit save. Now, I personally am using a program on my Raspberry Pi called OctoPrint. If you don't have OctoPrint, or you're printing from the SD card, what you're going to want to do is drag and drop this G-code file, the one that you're saving right now, save it directly to the micro SD card. For me, I have a separate folder inside another separate folder, slicedRTP, which means slice ready to print. Save it as SquirrelKing. Now, at this point, what you're going to want to do is remove the SD card from your computer, eject it properly, and insert it back into the Ender3. Then, you can select the SD card from the menu on your Ender3 LCD screen, and click on the file you want to print. But, first we need to make sure that your filament is loaded and loaded properly, so let's do that.