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Cura

The Cura Plugin allows slicing of STL files uploaded to OctoPrint directly via the CuraEngine up to and including version 15.04.x and supersedes the slicing support integrated into OctoPrint so far. It comes bundled with OctoPrint starting with version 1.2.0.

Note

Versions of CuraEngine later than 15.04.x have changed their calling parameters in such a way that the current implementation of OctoPrint's Cura plugin is not compatible to it. For this reason, please use only CuraEngine versions up to and including 15.04 for now, as available in the legacy branch of the CuraEngine repository on Github.

The plugin offers a settings module that allows configuring the path to the CuraEngine executable to use, as well as importing and managing slicing profiles to be used. Please note that the Cura Plugin will use the printer parameters you configured within OctoPrint (meaning bed size and extruder count and offsets) for slicing.

First Steps

Before you can slice from within OctoPrint, you'll need to

  1. :ref:`Install CuraEngine <sec-bundledplugins-cura-installing>`
  2. :ref:`Configure the path to CuraEngine within OctoPrint <sec-bundledplugins-cura-configuring>`
  3. :ref:`Export a slicing profile from Cura and import it within OctoPrint <sec-bundledplugins-cura-profiles>`

Note

OctoPi 0.12.0 and later ships with steps 1 and 2 already done, you only need to supply one or more slicing profiles to get going :)

Installing CuraEngine

You'll need a build of legacy branch of CuraEngine in order to be able to use the Cura OctoPrint plugin. You can find the legacy branch here.

If you previously used the old variant of the Cura integration, you probably still have a fully functional binary lying around in the installation folder of the full install of Cura you used then -- just put the path to that in the plugin settings.

Compiling for Raspbian

Note

A binary of CuraEngine 15.04.06 precompiled on Raspbian Jessie Lite 2016-03-18 is available here. Don't forget to make it executable after copying it to your preferred destination on your Pi (suggestion: /usr/local/bin) with chmod +x cura_engine. Use at your own risk.

Raspbian Jessie

Building on Raspbian Jessie is as easy as:

sudo apt-get -y install gcc-4.7 g++-4.7
git clone -b legacy https://github.com/Ultimaker/CuraEngine.git
cd CuraEngine
make

After this has completed, you'll find your shiny new build of CuraEngine in the build folder (full path for above example: ~/CuraEngine/build/CuraEngine).

Raspbian Wheezy

You'll need to install a new version of gcc and g++ and patch CuraEngine's Makefile (see this post) in order for the compilation to work on current Raspbian builds (e.g. OctoPi):

sudo apt-get -y install gcc-4.7 g++-4.7
git clone -b legacy https://github.com/Ultimaker/CuraEngine.git
cd CuraEngine
wget http://bit.ly/curaengine_makefile_patch -O CuraEngine.patch
patch < CuraEngine.patch
make CXX=g++-4.7

After this has completed, you'll find your shiny new build of CuraEngine in the build folder (full path for above example: ~/CuraEngine/build/CuraEngine).

Configuring the plugin

The Cura plugin needs to be configured with the full path to your copy of the CuraEngine executable that it's supposed to use. You can do this either via the Cura plugin settings dialog or by manually configuring the path to the executable via config.yaml, example:

plugins:
  cura:
    cura_engine: /path/to/CuraEngine

Using Cura Profiles

The Cura Plugin supports importing your existing profiles for Cura up to and including Cura 15.04.x. Newer Cura releases (e.g. 15.06 or 2.x) use a different internal format that will not work with the current version of the Cura Plugin.

You can find downloads of Cura 15.04.x for Windows, Mac and Linux on Ultimaker's download page.

In order to export a slicing profile from the Cura desktop UI, open it, set up your profile, then click on "File" and there on "Save Profile". You can import the .ini-file this creates via the "Import Profile" button in the Cura Settings within OctoPrint.

Source code

The source of the Cura plugin is bundled with OctoPrint and can be found in its source repository under src/octoprint/plugins/cura.