Hi, I'm Aidan from Core Electronics and today we're going to be taking a bit of a closer look at the user interface of Cura 2 - LulzBot Edition, which is the new software package that has been updated by LulzBot. If you haven't got Cura 2 yet look at our previous video which went through the process of installing Cura 2 - onto a Windows 10 PC, it's not quite as straightforward as you might think.

Once you finish that and upgrade your firmware jump into this tutorial which is titled; Cura 2 LulzBot Overview for Beginners. At the top of the page, you'll find a labelled version of the Cura 2 - user interface and it's a good quick reference guide for the duration of this video. The rest of the things that we're going to do here going to take place in Cura. So, we'll jump over there now.

Okay so, here I am, and I've loaded up Cura 2 from the shortcut on my desktop once it's loaded up I have already installed my LulzBot Mini as the default printer for Cura. So, you can see that the LulzBot Mini bed is there. Really quickly if you right-click you can rotate around the centre of the bed, middle-click lets you pan around and the middle scroll will zoom in and out of your model files. The first thing we've got to do is load up an STL model so to do that we click on the Open File button and we can navigate to our STL file. Now be aware that this is the supported file types for Cura, so if you don't have your STL file or your 3D model file in one of these formats it just simply will not appear in this view, so you may have downloaded it from Thingiverse or another 3D model library online and you'll have to extract it before you open it up. Any case we'll open that one up you'll get a short message down the bottom here and then we'll see the Roctopus or your STL model load into the centre of the bed.

Now at present, I still don't have any of these options available to me and that's because I haven't selected a model. So, I left click on the model I can see there's a Light outline to the model and that means it's selected and I'm currently in the move mode, as you can see here. Over here it tells me the current coordinates at the center of the model and they're at 0,0,0 and I can easily move that model around by holding in the left button on my mouse and just simply moving it around the bed. Beware though, if you do move something sLightly outside of the printer bounce it will throw this error and tell you that it's not fitting inside the build volume. If it is over there you've put it somewhere and you've gotten a bit carried away, you can right-click the model and click on center selected model and it puts it straight back into the middle after it orient's itself again. You can deselect by clicking anywhere around the model as well.

While we've got that model selected we can also drop into this scale option and this allows you to simply scale your model, however large you like it to by clicking and dragging on any of those axes. usually when we're scaling 3D models though we want to do it by a very precise amount the better way to do that is just to simply enter your scaling factor in the here, so if you wanted it to be 10% larger than it normally is you'd simply enter 110% and press Enter. As we've got uniform scaling selected you'll see that it automatically has changed the Y and Z scaling for that one as well. Another handy little tip is if you want to print your model as large as possible simply click on max, scaled max and in that current orientation that is as big as that model can be. Beware though if you do if you can't rotate it or move it in some way it usually will allow you to get a little bit bigger of a print, so that's something that's interesting to know. We can also click reset which drops it straight back to 100%.

Do note, that if you're trying to move the model you need to actually be in the move mode. Trying to scale it, you leave it in the scale mode and so on you can't actually move the model if you're trying to scale it which is simple, but sometimes you forget what mode you're in and you'll be dragging it in and out like that.

Moving into the rotate option we can rotate our model in all 3 axes. You can see that the x-axis is the red axes here, so we can rotate it about the x-axis which is the left-to-right axis in the centre of the model, just like that we've got 360 degrees of rotation there. We can rotate it in the y-axis which is about that axes there, so you can do a spin like that, using the reset button we can drop them back to where it was and finally we can do it around the z-axis which is probably one of the most frequently, just cause allows you to facial model where it needs to be facing. Again, we can reset that and if you were to have your model import at a funny angle you can use the lay flat button which might take a bit of computation time, but it will also lay your model as flat as possible which can be helpful sometimes or it will do its best to do so. Anyway, there we go.

So, it's laid that model flat as far as it can be next thing we'll look at is the mirror mode, so in this mode you have the option of mirroring your print, your STL file in any of the three axes just like with the rotation you could do it in three axes this is the same thing. So, we can click on the green to mirror it in that axes, here are the red and the blue to simply flip your model. So, that's all good. We can reload the models our position and it should revert it back to how it was. So, there you can see are some quick options there in the right-click menu.

Finally, we'll take a look at the multiplier objects, so be aware this is the number of copies that I want to put onto the bed, not including one that's there so one copy it should put two Roctopi on the bed. Now if they can't fit considering where that first model is already located it will do this. Which we saw before when you move something outside the printable area it just goes stripey you like that, meaning can't be printed but be aware you can sometimes move things around and fit them in yourself.

So, now that we've got those few things sorted they're all the ways that we manipulate our models around the bed and there are a few reasons that you would do that. Sometimes it's for part strength and other times it's for support, sometimes it's for surface area of your print that's touching the build plate, it allows for greater adhesion means that your prints aren't going to pop off mid print and cause a failed print there's a ton of reasons and get into those in future videos.

The next thing that you'll need to do when you first load up Cura. You've got we've got two little Roctopi here but to successfully print these models we're going to need to select what film we're using now film and film selection is pretty much based on what you have we've got some PolyLite PLA here which is one of our favourite PLA is made by PolyMaker. So that's our filament of choice today. So, we need to tell our slicer software what filament we are trying to print with and luckily for us PolyLite PLA is supported by LulzBot and so they have their own profile for it so just in the category section on the right of the workspace here, click on all then drop into the material checklist and you can see there's a ton of materials available but we're looking for PolyLite PLA there and finally we select our profile essentially with 3D printing you have speed and/or quality there's a standard print setting for this filament type the standard profile which is a bit of both its quick but it looks good then there's the high detail which is looking it looks far better but it takes a bit longer and the high speed which is the opposite end of that spectrum, so for example; let's do a high-speed print and that's also up so now the printer knows what quality settings, what speed settings and what the filament will be printing with it know what models were printing and how we want those printed now we just have a few more options before we can slice and save our file.

So, in the print setup, these are all the quick setup options for 3D printing. Now infill percentage is essentially the amount of plastic that is filled into the center of your model, now to demonstrate that I can go to the layers view, so up in the top of the workspace there are our view layers or I can click on this or I can go to layers. That changes everything to that and I'll change to line type so now we can see the different line types we're currently set to a 20% infill. I'll set it to 0 just to show you the difference, so essentially a 0% infill shows a hollow model so it's just printing the shell of the model nothing in the center. 20%, 20% of the infill will be plastic and the other 80% will be air so we'll have a look at what that looks like there, so you can see that there and there all the different filament extrusions there that are the best virtualization of what's happening and obviously we could go for something like solid a hundred percent infill, which would make your part very strong but also use a lot more filament, so something to be aware of. We found that if you want a really strong part that's not 100% infill, cause it can take a lot longer to print you can go for setting around 70 to 80 percent and it is quite robust and there we go there so that's 100 percent and if we scroll through it you can see that it is alternating those diagonal lines all the way through the print and it would be a completely solid little Roctopus.

The next setting is "Generate Support" now that is something that we need to look at in the solid view mode and we'll rotate down to a low point here. So you can see underneath the eyes of the Roctopus and underneath the palm there are some red marks, now those red marks pretty much highlighting the overhangs in this SQL file essentially the slice is saying be careful of these parts of your model because they are printing without any support underneath them and the basis of FDM printing is that it's printing on a pre-printed material so from the first layer up is always building up upon something if something is overhanging outside of that you need to print support material, which is additional material that holds that little part up and can be removed after the print and the Roctopus does printer that supports.

Finally, we have built plate adhesion so the LulzBot Mini the TAZ6, the TAZ5 all the LulzBot printers come fitted with a borosilicate glass bed with a heater underneath and PEI on top. those two things together allow the filament to stay hot when it's extruded and the PEI allows it to cling to it well and that really helps it build plate adhesion, but there are some filaments that are quite tricky and to take care of those filaments we use build plate adhesion options. So by default we've got the skirt selected and that's just that blue outline that goes around our models it also helps to prime the extruder so extruder will be wiped off clean come to the front of the print bed and then start printing that's good first usually by the end of the skirt you know that you can see that plastic is cleanly extruding and then it can start the prints knowing that that's happening that's important to have and usually we just print with skirts, it's only when we're printing with advance filaments that we probably need to work on a brim or a raft. Speaking of those good brims now.

Essentially a brim will see it comes up in the finishes slicing, it’s just x-ray outlines that emanate from the bottom of your model that first layer, just like this and they increase the surface area of your model so by increasing the surface area you can sometimes or a lot of the time increase how well it adheres to the bed this is probably my second most used build plate adhesion option past skirts and they are quite easy to cut off but they do take some time to remove as well, it's not like they just peel away simply sometimes you have to peel the land and tidied up a bit with a hobby knife or something.

Finally, we've got the rafts, so this is the final option and its board the entire bed printable area in a bit, so we'll delete one of the models and see what happens when we slice with rafts. Okay so with a raft you can't see any difference here it looks normal, but if you look there you can see that there's some extra grey on the model it's like the print is sitting up a bit I'll go to the view mode look at layers and you can see that that is what a raft is so it's essentially a less dense few layers underneath the print that allows it to adhere better to the bed one it increases the surface area and it makes it solid, you also get your print printing on directly onto plastic rather than onto a different media so it works a lot better. So, we're going to go and put on those skirts so just pull skirts back on to our model change back to a solid look that cool little Roctopus there.

Finally, we have selected all of the options that we need so it's a 20% infill it's got supports but they're not actually doing anything, we've got PLA selected at a high speed and it's ready to save the file, at the bottom right of the screen you can see that the model is called LM_Roctopus, so that's the LulzBot Mini_Roctopus which you can edit if you want to by clicking that button if you were using a TAZ 6 it would be LT 6 down there or LT 5 for a TAZ 5. It's simply the name of the printer or the name that you gave that printer, we call it LulzBot Mini if you recall and then the model file name. Underneath that we've got the bounding box volume so if there was a box that went around this print that would be its volume, to the left here we've got the print time that's an estimate it's usually pretty accurate and to the right of it we've got the filament necessary to power print this, so it's 0.84 meters of filament or around six grams of filament which can be handy if you're running low on a reel you can weigh it and see what you've got if you mouse over that time as well you can actually see it a breakdown of all the different types, so that's quite a cool little thing to see.

So we're happy to print that model, all we need to do now is one of two things we can say that to our file, it's a G-code file like I said that's where that slicer does it prepares a g-code file, so I can save that one I could save that directly to an SD card or I can copy it to an SD card and put it into my printer and select it and it will print. The LulzBot Mini doesn't have an SD card slot so we must print tethered. So, to do that we can simply click into our AHS what Mini.

There we go and so our print starting now, that's all it takes to get started with Cura 2.6 it's not too different to Cura 21.08 or any of the legacy versions of Cura. It's quite easy to use, in the future we're going to do a bit of a deeper dive into some of the custom options that we didn't even look at there, they're a bit hidden and it will be quite a good video because it will go through a lot of the new features and cure 2.6 or 2 multiple edition.
Thanks for watching guys, if you have any questions about anything we talked about in this video please leave a comment below and we will get back to you as soon as we can.