Filament profiles - Prusa's or filament co. responsibility?  

RE: Filament profiles - Prusa's or filament co. responsibility?

Just do it yourself. It’s not hard to do and at the end of the day YOU are the end user. Become self reliant and stop expecting other people and organisations to do things for you. 

RE: Filament profiles - Prusa's or filament co. responsibility?

Posted by: @neophyl

Just do it yourself. It’s not hard to do and at the end of the day YOU are the end user. Become self reliant and stop expecting other people and organisations to do things for you. 

Being self-reliant to some extent is positive, but people doing things for other people is the basis of human civilization. I am the end user of my clothes, should I manufacture my own clothes? Should I raise my own cattle? Should I program my own operating system on my computer? I am perfectly fine not being self-reliant with optimizing my own filament profiles, I would rather spend my spare time using my 3D printer than optimizing my 3D printer to be used but then having less time to actually use it. 

RE: Filament profiles - Prusa's or filament co. responsibility?

Talk about false equivalencies. But yes if you can do something yourself you should.  

Any profile provided should be treated as the starting point.  They are not the be all and end all.  While the produced printers are in theory all identical (some more so than others) the environments that they are in are most certainly not.  Tweaking things when 3d printing is a fact of life and if that's too much trouble then I respectfully suggest you find a different method of manufacture.  Preferably one where a finished product is delivered to you.

RE: Filament profiles - Prusa's or filament co. responsibility?

Posted by: @neophyl

While the produced printers are in theory all identical (some more so than others) the environments that they are in are most certainly not.  

Assuming all printers are equal and also assuming you're not printing a model that's very demanding in some way (i.e. extreme overhangs or something): Is there anything other than temperature, humidity, and surface stability / wobblyness that would necessitate variations of print profiles? With some form of temperature control looking to become a standard feature in future printers, I have a hard time seeing end-users needing to spend a lot of time tweaking their filament profiles. 

RE: Filament profiles - Prusa's or filament co. responsibility?

I have a hard time seeing end-users needing to spend a lot of time tweaking their filament profiles

This. Filament quality has dramatically improved over the years. These days I find that Generic profiles work fine most of the time and tweaking profiles has become a thing of the past. If anything, it seems less necessary to tune for specific brands but for specific colors (such as white). 

RE: Filament profiles - Prusa's or filament co. responsibility?

I thought the question was about who's responsibility providing profiles was ? Not how often you have to tweak them.

I'd agree that filament quality has gone up overall, especially on the more mainstream brands.  One reason why I don't tend to use cheap off brand ones much at all.

ALL of my filament profiles for my old MK3 are customised.  I don't use stock ones.  I created my own a long time ago and what I have works.  I also created them in such a way that they can be used by any printer and are not locked to the MK3.  Foxrun will remember those days on the forum with Bob and the rest of us answering such questions as why filament profiles aren't available to all printers.  Ad Nauseum. Still happens.

Similarly I did the same with my Max3 and later my SV08 profiles.  

I'd argue that it is the filament manufacturers job to supply a reasonable amount of technical data on the filaments properties.  Rather than profiles themselves,  which will vary based on the printer/hotend/cooling setup its being used with.  Which most of the good brands do. 
From that data I can judge if its significantly different/similar to a brand I already use that I have tuned and then use that profile as a start.  Often it will just work and no specific filament profile will need to be created.  That comes down to Foxruns assertion that the quality or at least the consistency has gone up.

Occasionally though you do find an outlier and then its not a difficult or long process to tweak it until it performs well.  

Prusa providing profiles tuned for their eco system makes sense.  It helps them sell printers.  Is it their Responsibility though ? maybe to their share holders.

Prusa creating profiles for other printers than their own ?  Simple answer is they don't.  They package user submitted ones.  And the quality of those like anything user submitted is going to vary tremendously.  I somehow doubt that prusa checks those, after all they aren't likely to have the printers available.  So any profile for any printer other than a Prusa should be caveat emptor.

The biggest variable I have to tweak to use a profile between my various printers is actually the amount of cooling.  For simple PLA on my Mk3 the fan is on 100%.  My SV08 though has much better cooling.  I found that even with PLA I was experiencing curling up on certain geometries causing collisions.  Turning the cooling down to 50-60% solved that and I was getting reliable prints.  Similarly with my Max3, with the stock fans the profiles had 100% cooling, when I replaced with some beefier 5025's I had to turn the fans way down.

So yes a profile likely only has to be tuned for a particular set of hardware these days.  It is the manufacturer of that hardware that should, if they are feeling kind or think there's some advantage to it be supplying profiles.  

It is one of the stronger arguments for buying into an ecosystem like Prusa or Bambu.  For those who don't have much experience its a safer option and you get more support.

It always comes down to the end user though.  

RE: Filament profiles - Prusa's or filament co. responsibility?

Foxrun will remember those days on the forum with Bob

Yeah, Bob—I miss him… Those were the days 🙂 

RE: Filament profiles - Prusa's or filament co. responsibility?

I think the real question is how you value your time and what options you have available? Do you have time to buy some filament that its quality is not well tested and you will tune it for yourself or wait for the others to do it - or maybe pay more for the products that are known to be compatible and fine tuned to work with each other better?

I wanted to go really cheap when starting with my 3d print hobby but quickly realized it is not really worth it to do that - exactly because I do not want to spend my time on trying to make the printer to work, I want my printer to be a tool and not a project. Thus I stick to the well supported brands.

There are so many filament manufacturers and filament types that it is just unmaintainable from the printer manufacturer side to support all of that.

At first they usually focus on the most popular brands locally available and make a generic for those as a starting point. Starting from generic profiles for generic materials is enough, and later on to tune it for specific types/brands they use. 

If the quality is still a problem they can start to request branded filament for their printers or make their own and tune for that.

Adding slicers to the mix and we have at least three different softwares for slicing, some of those do not share settings as easily as we would like.

This quickly cretes its own ecosystems of the printer vendor, filament, software, and other compatible ones that we see now, because they adhere to certain standards. Of course new big players can do their own ecosystems... And that's why other do not cooperate with other manufacturers, and its just business as any other.

Prusa went as far as manufacturing their own filaments or went into a close cooperation with the manufacturers - and thus we have a Prusament and Buddy3d brands - and started to make their own slicer software they maintain.

This means the printer manufacturer should provide at most few filament profiles for the softwar of their choice, because above certain threshold this is just not maintainable from their side and thus they should allow for others to submit fine tuned profiles, especially from filament manufacturers, or anyone else if they feel the quality is acceptable ( they could test the samples or just trust the submitter as doing in good faith).

You can find profiles https://github.com/prusa3d/PrusaSlicer-settings though now it is split into separate repos, so treat it as a starting point.

You can submit your own profiles there, you can ask flament manufacturer to upload their profiles for their products there.

For other slicers of course you could ask Prusa to upload profiles for their printers and filaments to other slicing software. And so on..

Yet you cannot force anyone to do it, though. At least you can hope that someone else will make a commit to add profiles for your favourite printer/filament/slicer/other-component  combo...