Today I want to talk about Skeinforge and its plugins.
Yesterday I spent a whole afternoon looking inside Skeinforge.
I was not able to use the “SETTINGS VARIABLES” in G-Code through the alteration plugin. Even trying the samples in the remark source code or some samples on the net they didn’t worked.
Basically I wanted to use some profile settings values and transfer them to the generated G-CODE.
The idea was to have a custom “start.gcode” with some actions (as example the following)
just as example
G21; set dimension in mm
G90; use absolute coordinates
M83; use relative mode for extruder
M104 S50;set bed temperature
G28; home
M109 S205; set hot-end temperature
this code would have been added at the start ANY gcode produced by the slicer.
But I didn’t want the fixed M109 and M104 values, but rather the values in the current Skeinforge profile.
Looking at the examples on the net, it seems that something like:
M104 S<setting.chamber.bedTemperature>
should result in the M104 S50 on the generated code.
HOWEVER IT DIDN’T WORK!
It generated the same line of code:
M104 S<setting.chamber.bedTemperature>
not translated, and that line would have been sent to the printer !!!
Well, after having spent several hours even looking at the sources I figured why…
IN ORDER TO WORK THE VARIABLE SETTING REPLACEMENT ALTERATION PLUGIN, YOU SHOULD MEET THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT:
- A) ALTERATION PLUGIN should be ACTIVE
- B) THE ALTERATION STARTCODE FILENAME should be the same you are editing (it may seem stupid, but after having changed the file name in the plugin from “start_PLA.gcode” in “start_test1.gcode” and then in “start_test2.gcode”, after a while I was editing the wrong file)
- C) THE PLUGIN from which you are trying to get the values SHOULD BE ACTIVATED
So, for example, forget to use the following statement:
M104 S<setting.chamber.bedTemperature>
if the “Chamber” plugin is not Activated (the Activated checkbox is blank) !!!
That has the odd effect than you can’t use any settings value from a plugin that you don’t want to activate. If I want to use the Temperature value but I don’t want the effect the plugin produce on the g-code, then I can’t use in my code ANY settings from the temperature plugin, since it is null.
I hope this have clarified the matter once for all of the variable settings in alteration and helped who is using skeinforge.
I will publish the names of the settings if people is interested since they are sometime odd. In fact they are basically the name of the parameter text, without spaces, underscore, : and cutting everything is betwen ().
Not exactly intuitive…