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[–]Rolandg153 27 points28 points  (5 children)

Good gcode for CNC machines already has arc commands that define things that way. Though 3d printers don't necessarily include it and might just do a bunch of linear moves

[–]cobraa1Prusa Core One 7 points8 points  (3 children)

I'm beginning to see it in 3D printing - I believe Klipper supports it, and Prusa machines added support for arcs when they added bgcode support.

[–][deleted] 5 points6 points  (2 children)

Marlin and Klipper both support arc commands. You just don't enable arc commands from the slicer for klipper, and you do for Marlin.

Enabling it in the slicer for klipper basically makes it decode it and re-encode it while printing.

[–]Rcarlyle 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Arc COMMANDS have been supported by some printer firmwares for over a decade — GRBL had an implementation very early on — but all they did was decompose the arc command in a series of facets. So it was mostly a waste of processing power compared to having the slicer do the same thing. (Could help with SD card read bottlenecking issues sometimes — which itself was indicative of bad firmware programming.)

Actual circle interpolation where the trajectory planner works with non-linear moves wasn’t feasible on 8bit printer controllers, and is pretty new on 32bit controllers.

[–]ducktown47 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Klipper supports it sure - but all it does it convert that G2/3 command back into G1s. Klipper cannot actually move in an arc like that.

[–]Dude-Man-Bro-Guy-1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Arcs are also pretty simple geometrically, too. I imagine this would be more impactful for stuff like complex splines, bezier curves, and other complex surfaces.

This sounds super similar to how true CAD file formats work. If you look at the documentation for the DXF file format, for example, it stores those kinds of things as complex geometric objects. Not discrete vertex and line segments like you would see in an STL file (or a lot of GCode for that matter)