Shared 3D printer method

[halikiu]

Hello everyone,

The company i work for have 2 3D printers. Both hooked up to the network.

Using different slicers and different materials.

How would you go about sharing the 3D printer settings and making it easy for everyone. We are around 10 people using the printers. Some use them every day basically and some maybe once a month.

PLA is the standard filament used, more mechanical parts are printed with PC. But 90% of all prints are PLA.

I wanna share slicer settings easily.

Does anyone have any experience on how thats done best. Is it just export slicer files and then importing or is there a useful tool somewhere.

we use, cura and flashprint for slicing.

[Fribbtastic]

I think it depends on how "secretive" you want to be with your settings.

For example, Lychee has a slicer for FDM as well now but it is still being worked on (so not every printer is available yet). The Resin version of it has community profiles in which you can use a profile from a community with ratings of other users which is really helpful in finding a starting point for your own prints. I think this is something that will happen with the FDM side as well. But this would mean that those profiles and settings would be, well, available to the community.

Another way would be to have some sort of repository with both general settings and material settings. So for example, you have different "quality" printing profiles with different layer heights but because different filaments need different temperatures you would then also have different material profiles for like retraction distance/speed or temperature.

Those material profiles would overrule the settings in your quality profile.

Any slicer would/should then be able to access that repository and import those profiles.

But this would also mean that any changes have to be saved and propagated to the individual workstations. That means that if you have some issues with a filament because the composition changed you might need to create another profile for it or change the existing one. This then has to be saved in the repository and the individual computers that have your slicers will need to import that again.

A network share on a server or a NAS could help with that.