I’m Back!!

Hey everyone,

Sorry for the super long delay!  Such are the trials and tribulations of moving apartments haha.  However, I do have good news!  Simplify3d works much better on the Hyrel now.  What was wrong, you might ask?  Well, it all stems from my GCODE being slightly off.

Hyrel was amazing about having me come to their facility and helping me refine the GCODE coming out of Simplify3d to the point where it works very well!  There were a few key problems that prevented things from working as well as they should:

1. Simplify was putting T0, T1, T2, and T3 instructions where it should have been putting T10, T11, T12, and T13 instructions.  But just what are these random T numbers?  Well, they are the sections of GCODE (the underlying language that guides the stepper motors and movement on the Hyrel) that determine which head is currently active.  The 0, 1, 2, and 3 stand for the first, second, third, and fourth heads, respectively.  Also, the difference between 0, 1, 2, 3 and 10, 11, 12, 13 is the capturing of head offsets.  0, 1, 2, and 3 do not capture head offsets while 10, 11, 12, and 13 do (if my understanding is correct 😉 ).
2. A few advanced GCODE options weren’t checked off, which was causing the printer to not adjust the rate at which plastic is pushed out when speeds changed.  That’s why I was previously only able to print at 12mm/s!  Now that those options are checked, my Hyrel is back up and printing 30mm/s like it should.
3. When I inserted instructions to set print resolution on the layer change GCODE, it wasn’t automatically putting in the resolution in as it should.  I fixed that by hard coding a resolution.  Going forward, there will just be different recipes in Simplify for each resolution

Now that those have been fixed, there are still a few things I need to test before Simplify3d works perfectly.

1. Support material at the new speed.  Since speeds have changed, I have to dial my support material in a little better!
2. Right now, I am manually editing parts of the GCODE to make it print correctly.  I’m going to see if there’s some way I can insert those GCODE commands into the start GCODE so that they’ll be automatically taken care of.

Until next time!  Stay tuned

John (aka The Mad Printer)