It would be great if every 3D printer manufacturer could ship a new printer with a robust set of OrcaSlicer profiles but that’s almost never the case and would be even more difficult for Sovol because they are not a large company. The recent version of OrcaSlicer made it easier to share profiles. Maybe we could share the profiles we develop on this forum so each of us doesn’t need to develop a new profile for every filament we want to use.
I print a lot of TPU for my small business, and lately I’ve been printing TPU-LW and I’m getting very good results. Once my Zero arrives, I’ll optimize the profile for the Zero, and I’d gladly share it. The Zero is capable of printing most of the exotic higher temperature filaments. I would like to be able to download a filament profile for the Zero instead of spending hours developing my own.
We could crowd source a rich library of filament profiles that makes it easy to use any filament. We could have the “It Just Works” convenience and ease of use of proprietary manufacturers without all of their closed ecosystem disadvantages if we leverage the power of open source community development.
OrcaSlicer can import Cura profiles. I don’t know if Cura or PrusaSlicer can import OrcaSlicer profiles. Hopefully any profiles could be used by anyone, regardless of their slicer preference.
Maybe Sovol could curate these crowd sourced slicer profiles and submit them to OrcaSlicer as part of the official Zero profiles so all Sovol Zero owners could benefit.
Hello,
You’re asking for something difficult.
There are many suppliers of filaments and many types of filaments for each supplier.
As you say, Sovol is small company and simply provides generic parameters for each type of main filament.
Using these generic parameters, we make our own parameters.
You can also share your profiles on this site.
Cheers
Not sure why this is “something difficult”. What’s difficult is all of us developing a new profile every time we want to try a new filament. It seems much easier for one of us to spend a few hours developing and optimizing a filament profile and then spending another few minutes to upload it so everyone else can use it.
It’s one thing to say that we can share profiles on this site. It’s another thing to actually do it.
Yes, please post on Github or another code sharing website.
I’m still just using the generic PLA profile from Sovol (because I’m still using their PLA), but as I try other materials, I’d be glad to contribute profiles for those materials.
This Sovol forum doesn’t seem to have many members so it may not be the best place to host OrcaSlicer profiles. I’m not on Facebook so I don’t know if files can be shared there, and even if they could I wouldn’t upload or download from there. GitHub is a great place to host files such as this. It doesn’t get much traffic on its own but this forum, the Facebook page and Sovol’s wiki could all link to there so that’s probably the best option. The important part is that there is one and only one place. Random uploads in different places won’t become a standard and will degenerate into chaos when different versions of the same profile are in different places.
PS - I’m still envious of you guys who have your Zero already.
Sovol has a discord server that is fairly active. Be a good place to find volunteers to share.
But I fear the “crowdsource” library is doomed without a full time curator. The crowd has several subsets of users. One such subset is the “Knowitall” (see youtube). This person has set their rotation distance by feel, and put a 10 °C offset on their hotend because they “just know” the thermistor is wrong. Profiles from this group won’t actually work on anyone else’s machine. This is also the group most likely to share their profiles.
Another set is the technician. Their machines are mutinously calibrated. Their profiles are carefully tuned by close examination of multiple prints. They won’t share their profiles because they feel they need to make a couple more tweaks first.
All great points. THOSE are the reasons that crowd sourced Zero slicer configurations is “something difficult”. I have a Microswiss hot end on my SV08 so that would complicate things. I was thinking of some way to allow people to share such distinctions so everyone was properly informed. That way, someone could download the Microswiss profile as a starting point, tweak it to optimize it for the stock Sovol hot end, and upload that. Soon the community would learn some simple rule such as “Add 10 C if using the Microswiss hot end”.
I’ve groused about this online in the past. Nozzle temperature is used as a single parameter that tries to describe several parameters related to temperature, size of the melt zone, and internal hot end flow characteristics. That’s why filament manufacturers specify a wide range of nozzle temperatures instead of a single temperature, and we all need to develop custom profiles for each filament on each printer.
OrcaSlicer developers have made recent changes that should make it easier for filament and printer manufacturers to share profiles that work for a specific filament and printer. Until now, the best we could do is a few generic filament profiles if we’re lucky and everyone spending 1-3 hours developing and fine tuning a profile for a specific filament on their printer with none of that effort benefiting anyone else.
Most people want to print their stuff without engaging in a research project first. For those people, the printer manufacturer should provide optimized profiles for a specific brand of PLA, PETG, TPU and probably ABS. Many printer manufacturers have their own house brand of PLA and PETG, so obviously they should be providing those profiles so It Just Works.
