April 11, 2025

3D Printing - how to do it

My printer is an Ender 3D Pro. It is made by Creality. If you need to look for it in the Cura menus, look for Creality, not Ender.

I now print pretty much exclusively with PETG. I use a 245 degree nozzle temperature and a 70 degree bed temperature and this works well. I set these in Cura using the hard to find Material menu in print settings. The default 215/60 does not work with PETG.

I am currently using blue Hatchbox PETG.

Starting with an STL file

You have either downloaded this from somewhere or had OpenSCAD spit it out.

Use cura to go from stl to gcode. I run cura on Fedora.

There was some bug in the cura distributed by Fedora. I dug around and found an old version (Cura 5.3.1) and set it up as "cura2". This no longer works as it requires old libraries.

Under Fedora 44 if I just type "cura" I currently get 5.4.0. It takes forever to load the STL file because it is stupidly checking every USB interface known to man trying to find a printer. There is a workaround for this that I set up once, but it seems to have reverted to this ugly behavior. Either wait it out or find my workaround. Note that when you start Cura it tells you there is a much newer version (5.13.0) available.

The fix is simple. It apparently got reinstalled when I did a Fedora 43 to 44 upgrade: 

su
cd /usr/lib/cura/plugins
rm -rf USBPrinting

Before you start Cura, pull the SD card from the printer (it goes upside down into the Creality), and plug it into your card reader. This saves time later, because Cura finds it and now defaults to saving to it.

Do not use File -- New Project (this clears settings). Use File open to bring in your STL file. Then doublecheck settings: 

Creality Ender-3 Pro, Generic PETG, 0.4 nozzle
50 percent infill, 245/80 temperatures, 0.2mm layers
Push the big blue "slice" button at the lower right. Your object won't appear until you do this. The blue button then changes to "Save to Disk". If you plug in the card reader, it now seems to notice this and change to "Save to removeable media" which is nice. It invents some filename, but so far it has been easy to find whatever it puts on the SD card.

The printer

I have a nice HICTOP build surface that seems to work fine with PETG, so I don't fool around with hair spray, masking tape, or any of that. Just get the temperatures right. I dust the bed off, then wipe it down with a paper towel and alcohol and am good to go.

The SD (TF) card goes upside down into the slot. Then push the big knob to get a list of the files on the card. Find the one you want and away you go.

I have detailed notes in Readme files for some of my projects that may be helpful.

I just downloaded an STL file from Thingaverse for a Moen faucet aerator removal tool. I did nothing special at all to print it (other than dusting the printer off and correcting print temperatures in Cura). It is printing as I type this. I am surprised that it only uses 15 percent infill. We will see if the final product is strong enough to work.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org