Hi, I'm Aidan from Core Electronics and today we're going to be looking at installing Cura 2, which is the new major software update for LulzBot's slicing software Cura, onto a Windows 10 PC. Will also look at upgrading a printer’s firmware, where we're using the LulzBot Mini, so we'll update the Mini's firmware using Cura 2 and finally, we'll have a quick look at the user interface in Cura 2. So, let's jump into it mostly this is going to be done on the computer.

So, go right ahead to- Cura's LulzBot Edition- Download page, for anyone that doesn't fully know what Cura is, Cura is just a slicing software, that allows you to take a 3D Model turn into a set of machine instructions for your 3d printer to be able to print it. So, there's a bunch of different slices available and for LulzBot they have decided to make their own tailored version of Cura, which is a free and open-source version of that slicing software and essentially, it's tailored specifically to the LulzBot 3D printers and the filaments that are supported by them, which is most filaments available.

So, like I said, we'll head straight over to the LulzBot.com/Cura page. On this page you can see that there are a few download links, just scroll down a little bit we're on the current version is 2.6.66 and we are using Windows, so we'll click on Windows here. Now the download is fine you just go ahead and grab the downloaded version here, you click that little download to where you needed to go. Below that point, there is, a few different instructions for you, so we're going to go through these instructions for Windows 10. If you're using Mac or a Linux operating system go ahead and follow those instructions on that version and then skip ahead to the upgrading to printer firmware section.

So, let's just follow these instructions now I've done this a couple of times now and I'm going to recommend that the first thing we do is uninstall our current version of Cura, so I'm going to go and do that, by going to add or remove programs in Windows 10, scrolling down to Cura 21.08 and just clicking uninstall. So, we're just uninstalling that quickly it shouldn't take too long at all to do that.

Alright so that took about 30 seconds, it's very easy to do the next step is cleaning the case. So that's removed all the information from Cura 21.08, which was the Legacy version of Cura, the old version of Cura. Now we just need to remove the Cached files from that version of Cura, so if we had any printers installed or anything most profiles will still exist and LulzBot just recommends that you clean out the local Cached files for Cura before installing the new version of Cura.

So, it's quite simple you just grab this app data value, head straight over to your windows browser go to that file location find Cura and delete it, that's that one and then for the second one going back to that window. It was local app data, so I'm just going to go here put the % start the end %, which will take me exactly where I want to go and if we just check the path there again it's the Cura LulzBot Folder. So, Cura LulzBot, yeah so we're deleting both of those and that has clearly our Cache. So, now my Cache is cleared, we should be right to just follow through with the typical installation of Cura, like I said you download that, up the top here, you just click that one here.

So, I've already got that downloaded here, go ahead, we download and install it. Now this might take a couple of minutes but we'll go through the process really quickly, you just agree to that agreement, you leave it at the default, if that's what you want to do, just go ahead and just click through it make sure you've got all these boxes ticked if they're not they should be by default and then we'll just go through that install process really quickly. So we'll jump back in, in a second.

Okay so, we ran through that installer and at the end we clicked run Cura 2.6. We waited for the splash screen to load it up, go through its processes of loading all the different packages and now we are met with this printer installation wizard, just like we were with the old version of Cura, so we're just going to go ahead and plug in everything we need to plug in here. So, this is a LulzBot Mini, we've got the option already selected for the LulzBot Mini and we can set the printer name there as well, so we can select that, set whatever we like there and we'll add that print up. Now we are met with this little screen here and this will look familiar as well if you've used Cura Legacy Edition in the past. So go ahead and you can check these out if you want but they're all pre-set for your LulzBot Mini printer if you were using a TAZ 6 or TAZ 5 these would already be set and you can just go ahead and assume a work, so click finish.

Now, this is the new user interface for Cura, the first thing you'll probably notice is this ghosted version of the print bed, that's a representation of what the print bed looks like in real life if you haven't seen it before. You can see it just in here. On the left-hand side we have a few different options, all these options were present on the bottom of the workspace in Cura 1, on the right-hand side we have our like, Quick Print menu, which was actually on the left-hand side of the screen in Cura Legacy Edition, so that's pretty much all we need to know about it for now.

Alrighty, so that's the basic user interface. Now we are going to look at upgrading our firmware. Now you will be prompted to automatically upgrade your firmware the first time you connect any of the LulzBot printers to Cura 2.6 and so I'm just going to go through the process of doing that right now. So if you want to do is just get ahead of the curb there, you can just, left click on the Settings button up in the toolbar, go across and hit the manage printers button. You'll see here that I've got the LulzBot Mini, it's a USB device that's available and it's waiting for a print job. Now, I click on that one, make sure it's activated. If you have multiple printers you actually have to activate to be able to see these options and then click upgrade firmware. While you're waiting here you can click automatically upgrade firmware, it'll start the firmware update there, it will update the firmware and then I'll tell you it's complete.

Now, it is worth mentioning that LulzBot does Outline on their installation guide themselves, it does have a firmware that's standardized for use with all LulzBot Mini 3D printers and contains important bug fixes. So, once your firmware has been updated to 1.1.5.70, which is the Marlin firmware version, that they're putting onto this 3d printer, G-code file sliced with earlier versions of Cura, will no longer be compatible. So, you'll have to resize those G-code files or STL files and create new G-code for the new printer firmware. So, that's something to be very mindful of, especially if you are a LulzBot Mini user we have had success with printing files from Cura Legacy edition on to TAZ 6, so I don't know if that is purely for LulzBot Minis, but for the most part I'd say just update your firmware and then use that slicer to slice the models of your printer.

So, that's the firmware update completed screen there, we'll go back in now we can very easily trust that it is all in working order. So, there are a few quick things that we'll go through then you can mouse over all these buttons and you see what they mean. Currently, we don't have anything loaded on the print bed, so we can't use any of the model manipulation tools, but we'll be covering that in our next video in this series. So, all I'm going to cover now is just basic mouse controls within this window. So the mouse wheel controls zooming, the left mouse button does nothing for your view, the right mouse button spins your view around the center of the bed and if you're holding shift and use the middle mouse button you can pan around that view. So, there are the quick options for using Cura 2.6, in the next video we'll cover off on all the different model manipulation techniques into you for beginners.

Thanks for watching, if you have any questions about this video feel free to leave a comment below and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. Thank you very much.