FormerLurker

Introducing Arc Welder - Compress Your GCode and Reduce Stutter

Added 2020-05-10 20:34:35 +0000 UTC

If you visit the OctoPrint Forum you may have seen a thread about the new Arc Welder plugin (formerly known as the Anti-Stutter plugin). If you have not heard about it, basically it converts G0/G1 commands into G2/G3 commands. This has three primary benefits:

1. Your GCode will be compressed, resulting in anywhere from 10-90% space savings.

2. If you suffer from bandwidth related stuttering, this plugin has the potential to fix that.

3. In the future when boards become much faster and printing much more accurate, the code produced by Arc Welder may produce an even higher resolution than you would get without it. However, this is pure speculation at the moment.

I have created a repository for Arc Weldersince it isn't yet in the plugin repository. You can install the latest build within the plugin manager using this URL: https://github.com/FormerLurker/ArcWelderPlugin/archive/0.1.0rc1.dev3.zip

Make sure you checkout the readme.md file before you use the Arc Welder plugin. It will answer a lot of your questions.

I've also published a repository containing all of the C++ used to do the conversion. There is a console application as well as an inverse processor (turn G2/G3 into G1) that I've used to test some firmware modifications (based on the current Marlin 2.0 implementation, but developed for the Prusa fork). There is also a modification of the GCode parser and position processor used by Octolapse, which may get worked into Octolapse itself at some point since there have been some improvements. I do NOT have binaries for the command line programs yet, but am planning to implement CI so that binaries are automatically built with every release.

All this relies on your firmware properly implementing G2/G3. I have seen a number of issues with various firmware, so check out the issues if you are having any problems. It may be a while until G2/G3 are fully supported by most firmware. The more people who use it the faster it will happen IMHO.

If you try this out, I'd love to hear about your experiences!