Using Cura for Pegasus printers.

[seattle_phil]

I recall there were some questions about this earlier. After about the 100th time that Slic3r crashed on me, I decided to give Cura a try. Right now, I'm finishing up a 1 hr print and it looks ok.

It's fairly straightforward for the most part with a few tweaks needed. For the printer definition, I selected custom FDM printer (settings/printer/add printer/custom/custom FDM). For machine settings, see image below. I didn't go for a full 300x300 bed for my Pegasus 12 though may change it later. I ignored the printhead settings.
cura machine settings.jpg
For the print settings, I quickly gave up on their dumb-mode print setup ("Recommended"). It seemed to just make a mess. With Custom print settings, I had to make a couple of changes - defaults are probably why "Recommended" didn't work well.

• Probably the biggest was Retraction Distance in the Mateial section. They had it as 1mm but that resulted in massive starvation. I set it to .25 and that seemed to result in fairly complete layers with no excess. It might still be a little too high.
• They also had Infill Before Walls set (Infill section). I missed it for the first print and got an ugly pattern in the walls from the infill.
• On Z offset. Cura doesn't have it but I tried setting the first layer bigger by the Z offset amount and that seemed to work.
• I used the grid infill pattern. Not sure I like it. Will try others. No honeycomb available - I like that in Slic3r.
• One thing I like about Slic3r is you can set a different nozzle and bed temp for the first layer. That's not available in Cura.

Based on one print, it is possible to get Cura working for Pegasus printers. So far Slic3r (1.2.9) g-code produces a better quality print than Cura but I haven't fussed with it enough. I suspect that walls before infill will help a lot. The Cura print is on the left in the picture below and a slic3r print on the right. The Cura print has layer 1 on top in the picture. You can see that it is pretty rough though is usable. Note that I still have some filament reel binding (evident in both prints) that I am working through.

Q3313201_DxO.jpg