OctoPrint vs direct from printer's SD card

[Bassman59]

I have an Ender 3 Pro. The first batch of prints I did with it were done directly from the printer's SD card. They all seemed to work quite well, I think. I sliced with Cura and used mostly Hatchbox standard PLA.

I set up OctoPrint on a Raspberry Pi 4B for all of the neat features that offers. But I think the prints are "not as good" as from the SD card directly. And maybe I'm just fooling myself.

Does anyone have opinions on this? Web searcher turn up five-year-old anecdotes. I'd like some less ancient anecdotes

Thanks!

[dl6lr]

I set up OctoPrint on a Raspberry Pi 4B for all of the neat features that offers. But I think the prints are "not as good" as from the SD card directly. And maybe I'm just fooling myself.

I assume you are running the same gcode from SD and via octoprint for comparison? Check if your printer experiences stuttering when printing via octoprint. If yes, check the serial rate, I think the default is 115200 for the Ender, I am using 250000 with a usual Arduino MEGA256/RAMPS1.4 running Marlin. And make sure your gcode is clean, some slicers produce lots of very small segments, if your firmware supports arcs, try these (there is a Cura plugin ArcWelder).

[Bassman59]

I set up OctoPrint on a Raspberry Pi 4B for all of the neat features that offers. But I think the prints are "not as good" as from the SD card directly. And maybe I'm just fooling myself.

I assume you are running the same gcode from SD and via octoprint for comparison? Check if your printer experiences stuttering when printing via octoprint. If yes, check the serial rate, I think the default is 115200 for the Ender, I am using 250000 with a usual Arduino MEGA256/RAMPS1.4 running Marlin. And make sure your gcode is clean, some slicers produce lots of very small segments, if your firmware supports arcs, try these (there is a Cura plugin ArcWelder).

Yes, same code.

I don't think there's any stuttering, not even with a long narrow piece. I believe the data rate is 115,200 and I should probably bump up to the max.

For slicing I use either Cura or PrusaSlicer, latest version of each. I tried ArcWelder and it made a mess of a test print, and I'm not sure whether it was just bad luck or what. (These machines are finicky!) But I did notice that both Cura and PrusaSlicer seem to already take advantage of the ability of firmware to draw arcs, as I watched how the extruder moved when doing a circle and it did not seem stuttery at all. Seems to me that the programmers at both Ultimaker and Prusa understand how to do proper arcs. ArcWelder did make the files smaller.

Maybe this is why the anecdotes about OctoPrint being problematic vs SD card are so old ... it's worked itself out.

[dl6lr]

For slicing I use either Cura or PrusaSlicer, latest version of each. I tried ArcWelder and it made a mess of a test print, and I'm not sure whether it was just bad luck or what. (These machines are finicky!) But I did notice that both Cura and PrusaSlicer seem to already take advantage of the ability of firmware to draw arcs, as I watched how the extruder moved when doing a circle and it did not seem stuttery at all. Seems to me that the programmers at both Ultimaker and Prusa understand how to do proper arcs. ArcWelder did make the files smaller.

At least Cura does not support Arcs out of the box, only with postprocessing via ArcWelder. As STL inputs never have arcs in it (they are composed of polygons), the slicer does not produce arcs. And SuperSlicer, a fork of PrusaSlicer, https://github.com/supermerill/SuperSlicer/issues/324 proposes arc support via integrated ArcWelder.

[Bassman59]

For slicing I use either Cura or PrusaSlicer, latest version of each. I tried ArcWelder and it made a mess of a test print, and I'm not sure whether it was just bad luck or what. (These machines are finicky!) But I did notice that both Cura and PrusaSlicer seem to already take advantage of the ability of firmware to draw arcs, as I watched how the extruder moved when doing a circle and it did not seem stuttery at all. Seems to me that the programmers at both Ultimaker and Prusa understand how to do proper arcs. ArcWelder did make the files smaller.

At least Cura does not support Arcs out of the box, only with postprocessing via ArcWelder. As STL inputs never have arcs in it (they are composed of polygons), the slicer does not produce arcs. And SuperSlicer, a fork of PrusaSlicer, https://github.com/supermerill/SuperSlicer/issues/324 proposes arc support via integrated ArcWelder.

Thanks -- I will try the next things I do with ArcWelder enabled and see what happens.