Hi guys,
I have to print a thin grid with a Bambu X1C for my company.
The slicer make the printer head print each holes individualy. This result in a poor grid quality.
I’d like to know if I can tweak a parameter to make it pint linearly in the direction of X an Y axis ?
Thanks for your answers !
Does your STL file or whatever you import into Studio have all the holes in it already? Can you post an image of the STL you are trying to make? The actual STL might get you better advice though.
Is the print head drawing each square one by one? It can work but if your adhesion has any issues it can be problematic.
I don’t know your answer but the answers might help someone else help you. Infill prints like I think you want when set to rectilinear but you’d need to configure all the settings to match what you are trying to do.
Also, something I didn’t realize about rectilinear infill is it’s hard on the print head. Where filaments cross you get a raised bump and next time through it hits the bump as it makes another. If you find a way to do that with full extrusion like for a wall it may get kind of extreme.
What is the source of this grid? An existing STL or a CAD file? What is the height of the grid? I ask those questions because one method that might be possible is to segregate out the the X-Y grid path and then overlay them as an assembly. If the grid height is short, you can simply overlay the two items.
Alternatively, you can also create a grid within the slicer itself. Take a cube primitive and make the dimensions 200x200x1 or whatever your dimensions need to be.
Then perform the following settings in the strength menu.
Hey thank you for your answer.
This part will serve as optical purposes I can’t say more.
Here’s the initial design.
Yes the print head print each square individualy.
I’ve already try to print this piece but the holes aren’t well define.
But it’s quite ok regarding the adehesion
The only optimisation i found is to uncheck the thin wall detection:
If it is checked it will print it like a “staircase”
I was also worring about the repetition of small bumps on the Z axis but for our purpose it might be ok.
Thank you dude !
I’ll have to check that !
I’ll get back to you once it’s done.
It’s a CAD model I designed for my company for a camera.
The grid is 1.6mm height.
I choose to merge the two items.
I’ll check the quality in the end.
Idealy the grid have to be 0.1mm thick, it’s obviously impossible with the 0.2 nozzle but it might do the job.
So this use-case had me curious. Just how square can the technology be counted on? So I put it to the test.
I created a simple cube primitive with the dimensions of 75x75x3mm. I then employed the features I listed above.
I printed a 1mm high version in TPU first because that’s what I had in the printer. I expected the results to be very stringy but it was not. So I moved on to a 3mm high test using Overture PLA. I added one more step and cut the sparse infill speed from 270mm/s to 75mm/s to mimic the speed of the successful TPU run. I was stunned by the uniformity of the result.
Here’s a closeup. The grid I use was 2.25mm holes. This is the plate-side of the model. I used a Specular PEO plate which provides for a mirror finish. What’s noteworthy in this example is this sort of shows what is nearing the limit of the technology using a calibrated PLA filament and a 0.40 nozzle. The layer lines were set to 0.20.
What that looks like backlit and close up.
On the plate
I then tried to replicate your specifications. This is what that looks like in the slicer with the correct settings.
Although I was able to get it to print, the results were totally unsatisfactory. As you surmised, with a 0.40 nozzle, it just doesn’t produce a result that is porous enough.
Here’s the side by side of the 5 holes be CM and then going up to your resolution which I calculated at 10 holes per CM. This image was backlit but you can see the start difference in transmissivity and of course since I was relying on the slicer, I could not achieve uniform stroke patterns per your original question.
That’s a helpful piece of information. This may be your solution then.
So what I might suggest is to create two models. One, a series of columns, the other a series of rows. Then bring them into the slicer as two models and create an assembly stack on top of one another. If you keep the model layers under 0.2mm, the top layer will overlay the bottom layer and still fuse with the plate. This should trick the slicer into laying down horizontal and vertical lines as the slicer will see this as two objects in an assembly. Note that the slicer won’t let you stack two models unless they are part of an assembly.
If that experiment proves correct, then all you need to do is to clone and stack that assembly into multiple layers to achieve the thickness you are looking for. It would be easier to do in CAD but when you export, you want to ensure that you maintain assembly integrity so the slicer obeys the order of construction. Note that I have not test this yet but have had to do something similar albeit not at this precision level.
Hadamard transform camera?
Looks like Olias has a path for you, though.
One thing is if you can find someone with a resin printer (some machine shops or specialty manufacturers) you might get a better print than with fused deposition. Resin printers can do some amazingly precise prints.
There’s specialty printers also available on the web who print and ship.
Anyway, good luck!
No it’s more a multispectral camera.
By the way we are curently in discussion with some local suppliers for that purpose 
The idea was to test quickly the process and the feasability.
Thanks for all your test !!!
I really appreciate it.
As a reminder:
Hardware:
Here’s a brief summary of what we were able to test:
1st try:
The walls of the part were enlarged to 0.2mm (for the 0.2 nozzle).
The parameters was the 0.06mm High Quality (default parameter of BambuStudio)
With this specific tweak:
This result in a printing of each square individually and a poor resolution and quality.
2nd try:
I tried the solution of Olias.
I imported the STL with the same parameters (0.06mm High Quality)
But with no specific tweak.
This made the grid part disapear
Then I insert a Cube mesh.
! Don’t forget to set your settings for objects !
And set its infill parameters with:
And tweak only the infill percentage to have the specific number of holes
The result was quite good enough !
We’re still observing some issues probably linked to retractation or overlapping.
It’s definitely not an industrial solution but it might help !
Well you should feel good about making such great progress in such a short time. I agree, the example above may stand to benefit from retraction settings.
One thing you may try if you haven’t already, take a look at the settings in the filament profile and set the retraction to 0.8mm. I found that to be a good place to start. This may address the final parts of your print. It worked for me at least using PLA as I showed in the example above.
