Use of GCode for a different printing technique  

Use of GCode for a different printing technique

Hi PrusaCommunity,

I am a researcher from Germany  and need some of your help. We are working with a two photon polymerization printer, which is very precise (resolution ~200 Nanometer). In short we polymerize material in the focal spot of a laser. This spot we call voxel is comparable to a printer nozzle. Imagine it like a needle head moving in a drop of honey. Every point where the needle head was is solid afterwards and the honey can be washed away. That way we get a 3D model. 

So we run our printer with a similar software that also slices STL files. Unfortunately it is not as powerful as FDM printer slicers like PrusaSlicer. But we can use externally sliced gcode (in short where a FDM printer extrudes we polymerize with our laser). Currently we can slice code with the PrusaSlicer and print it. We just simply scale everyting by 1/1000. Unfortunately our voxel looks a bit different to the printer nozzle geometry. See these images, where the black line is our voxel and the image is a cut through in XZ direction. 

Our voxel is much longer in Z than the line one would print with a nozzle. And here is my question:

The PrusaSlicer is giving us errors if we use slices bigger than the nozzle size and no output in form of gcode is given. We use the nozzle size as distance between two voxels (hatching). 

• Is there a way to ignore most of the errors? Command line or something else?
• Are there any hidden or non-obvious parameters we could change to just get a toolpath?

We only care about the general slicing and infill parameters. Extrusion parameters, overlaps, brims and all the other parameters are not important for us due to the different technique.  

Our next step, if there is no easy solution, would be to fork PrusaSlicer and try to make a version for our printing process but this involves a lot of work and time.  

We also printed a Benchy (12µm long) and the octopus to see if his arms would move (they do!).

Thanks for your help!