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02 settings

Christophe Barlieb edited this page May 15, 2026 · 3 revisions

2. Open Settings

Click Settings at the top of the panel. The Settings dialog opens — a landscape three-column layout grouping the parameters by what they conceptually configure.

📷 The Settings dialog open, showing all five groups: Material + Build Volume / Tool + Toolpath / Robot + Extruder.

The five groups

Group What's in it
Clay Material Preset (Porcelain / Stoneware / Earthenware), bead diameter, max overhang angle, min layer-bond ratio, density, water %, shrinkage compensation
Build Volume Width × Depth × Height in mm (centered on world origin)
Tool / Nozzle Nozzle dropdown (T10 / T11 / T12) — placeholder for the planned nozzle expansion (#12)
Toolpath Spiral / Layer mode, Outer Wall Bracing (+ contact-point count and sinusoidal-vs-zigzag pattern), Spiral follows curve normal, layer height, frames per layer, CCW/CW direction
Robot / Extruder Feed rate, max wrist velocity, spindle speed (S-value), RoboDK paths

For every field's meaning, default, units, and effect, see Settings reference.

Click OK to unlock the workflow

The first time you click OK in a Rhino session, the rest of the workflow buttons (1. Slice, 2. Analyze, 3. Send to RoboDK, Run All, Preview Clay Model) unlock. This is a deliberate gate — it prevents you from running with stale defaults you haven't reviewed.

📷 Panel before vs after first Settings → OK, showing the grayed-out buttons becoming active.

Auto-rebuild on settings change

If you've already sliced once and then change settings, closing the dialog with OK re-runs the slice pipeline against the same geometry — no need to click 1. Slice again. Useful for tweaking shrinkage %, layer height, or base count and watching the toolpath regenerate live.

The exception: Layer + Outer Wall Bracing. That mode prompts mid-slice for flip + offset distance, so the auto-rebuild falls back to a "click Slice" message and you trigger it manually.

Import / Export

The dialog has Import… and Export… buttons that round-trip the entire configuration as a JSON file. Useful for:

  • Versioning lab configurations alongside parts
  • Sharing setups between machines
  • Capturing a known-good config before experiments

The exported file mirrors the on-disk settings.json schema — see Settings reference for the structure.

📷 Settings dialog with Import/Export buttons highlighted at the bottom.

Next: 3. Slice.

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