A nice to know, if you are 3D printing.

There's a billion little things to figure out, most are slicer settings, that will make a huge difference. Here are a few less known, but super useful tricks:

- For functional parts, you can increase line width slightly(which is normally equal to your nozzle diameter). For example, with a 0.4mm nozzle, it would be set to 0.4mm by default, but by slightly increasing it(by about 10-20%), layers will be "squished" together harder, and layer adhesion will greatly increase. This comes at the cost of overhangs becoming very ugly though.

- There are similar tradeoffs for temperature and cooling, both following this pattern of lower temperatures and more cooling = better looking, hotter and less cooling = stronger but worse looking.

- The "alternate extra wall" option will make the walls and infill bind together much better, but can sometimes introduce weird artifacts in the outer walls

- Increasing wall line count over increasing infill density will result in quicker prints while having the same strength

- The best "all-around" infill is "Cubic Subdivision". "Gyroid" is technically better, but it is a lot slower to print.

- "Z Hop When Retracted" can prevent the nozzle knocking off parts when filament curls up and gets in the way of the nozzle, but slows down prints.

- To reduce stringing, especially with filaments like PETG, tune retraction speed and distance, and use Cura's  "Combing Mode" feature

- There's about a dozen super useful settings for just supports, go through them so you're aware of their existence. Here are a few important but rarely mentioned ones: "Support X/Y Distance", "Support Interface Density", "Support Horizontal Expansion"

- Enable "Remove Empty First Layers" to avoid accidents with models not touching the buildplate, and not noticing.

- Check out tree supports. Most of the time they are not applicable or work a lot worse than "regular" supports, but every once in a while, it's great to have it.

Are the options you list supported by all 3D printers?

The UltiMaker Cura software I am using doesn't align option names to many of the options you suggest. An example would be layer width, I'm thinking that is resolution in this software. I discovered an option for temperatures but it was under a menu called Materials>Printing Temperature or Build Plate Temperature.

I'm thinking of moving to Octoprint software on a Raspberry Pi before investing much more. This will save me having to physically visit the printer to load files and print via the 2 inch screen. I'm thinking it might offer some naming consistency since BIBO printer is not made anymore.

Are the options you list supported by all 3D printers?

The UltiMaker Cura software I am using doesn't align option names to many of the options you suggest. An example would be layer width, I'm thinking that is resolution in this software. I discovered an option for temperatures but it was under a menu called Materials>Printing Temperature or Build Plate Temperature.

I'm thinking of moving to Octoprint software on a Raspberry Pi before investing much more. This will save me having to physically visit the printer to load files and print via the 2 inch screen. I'm thinking it might offer some naming consistency since BIBO printer is not made anymore.

Yes, these are the exact names from Cura(with the exception of layer width, that should've been line width, sorry). I assume you're using the simplified menu.



Click the "Show Custom" button, and it will show the proper settings.
Once there, the "three bar" menu icon in the top right will reveal the "Manage Setting Visibility" button. which will bring up a window where you can select what options you want to see exactly, that list will have everything I mentioned.

Definitely do not turn on everything, there are way too many settings here you'll never need to use. Over time, you'll figure out what you need to adjust, but be aware that there's a lot of things that can be tweaked, and look over this list every once in a while to make sure you know the capabilities of your slicer.

These are all the settings I've enabled over the years, currently configured to print functional PETG parts:


The vast majority of options will be supported on all 3D printers, there's only a few that require firmware support (like acceleration and jerk control, but no need to worry about that - they are only used to speed up prints, while maintaining quality)

A question on settings. I assume settings are print material dependent? 4 rolls of PLA plastic came with the printer. I've have been working black and just figured out how to bring the second extruder online. I'm also assuming the settings are printer dependent. Some printers having better performance than others.

Generally, there's relatively little difference between different rolls of filament that are of the same plastic types. Some people prefer to tune their profiles for each filament spool they have, but I haven't done that, as the improvement is not worth the time and wasted filament in my opinion.

For different plastic types, there will be some differences, mainly temperatures, retraction, cooling, print speed. However, you should be able to make a profile that works quite well for pretty much everything(with the exception of nozzle and bed temperature, those will need to be adjusted for each type of material).

Almost all machine-dependent settings will be because of the extruder motor/gearing/filament path. If you have dual extruders, they should be identical, so no need to individually adjust settings for each extruder.

One thing you should verify is your e-steps. This value tells your printer how much it has to turn the extruder motor to extrude a specific amount of material. Here's a guide that explains it well: https://all3dp.com/2/extruder-calibration-calibrate-e-steps/
I am not familiar with your printer, but measuring and calculating things should be the same as in the guide, but setting the newly calculated e-steps value might differ, you'll have to do some research.