What Slicer do we use?

Our 3D printer is a Lulzbot Taz Pro for the Lab, and we use the Cura Lulzbot Edition as our Slicer.

How to get started with Cura Lulzbot Edition

Cura is a free-to-use slicer that requires no special operating system or hardware. From any search engine, you should be able to look up Cura Lulzbot Edition and download the respective software for the operating system on your device (laptop/desktop). It should not take an extended period to download the software after following the instructions provided and installing it on the Cura website (https://lulzbot.com/support/cura).

Once Cura Has been installed and opened, you should see an opening screen asking you to set up the printer. For the case of the Lab, our setup is the Lulzbot Taz Pro with dual head extruders. After setting up the printer on your device, the next important step before printing is ensuring that you have the correct material selected with the corresponding settings.

In order to select the material, you need to view the right-hand menu, which has various options for the settings in Cura. We want to look at the second option from the top of the menu bar. There should be a drop-down menu with a preset list of materials that can be chosen from. In the Lab, we have a few different materials we use for printing, but our most common is the Polylite PLA which Polymaker produces. For more information on the generic settings for PLA please refer to the OpenUAS Website section 3D printer settings tab under the manufacturing section.

* Will show up as PolyLite PLA (Polymaker) in the material section

Suppose the material you are using is not listed. In that case, you can use the information from the material data sheet that gives recommended setting provided by the manufacturer and create a custom material under the custom tab in the drop-down menu. More instructions on how to do that will be located later in the documentation.

I recommend taking a few minutes to review the settings, particularly the temperature settings, to ensure they match the recommended levels from the manufacturer. There are general temperatures for the materials; however, the manufacturer's recommendations tend to work the best to insure the quailty of parts. You can do this by scrolling through the print setup settings, selecting the custom tab, and using the search bar to look up keywords for the desired setting.

* For example, type printing temperature to see the printing temperature-related settings.

This is the standard setup of the Cura Lulzbot edition. From this point, you should be able to open an STL file of a model and print. There are more specialized settings for different types of parts that can be used but are more in depth and will be revised in another document.