Printing TPU on the Sovol SV06

One thing I wanted to try on my Sovol SV06 that my previous printers couldn’t do is TPU. I finally had a project where I needed to print a little TPU “sock” to go around a printed part to give it a little flexibility and grip.

After about 10 failures in a row, I finally figured out a consistent way to print TPU with my SV06. Here’s what worked for me.

Note that I’m using PrusaSlicer, not Cura (or Sovol Cura), so this may not be as useful in another slicer. I’m also printing Polymaker PolyFlex TPU95 – it’s the only TPU I’ve used so far, so I don’t know if this works well for other TPU or if it’s unique to this one.

Start with the “Generic FLEX” filament profile
Change the temp (both initial layer and other layers) setting to 250C (up from the default 240C)
Unscrew the thumbscrew on your extruder tension arm until the washer moves away from the arm
Tighten the thumbscrew on the extruder tension arm until the washer is just flat against the arm
Tighten the thumbscrew about half a turn more to add just a tiny bit of pressure
Cut your filament at an angle (also cut off anything that has been tangled in the extruder gears if your filament isn’t straight)
Set your extruder temp to 240C
Manually load your filament by extruding manually in 5mm increments until you have the filament fully loaded

At that point, you’re ready to print. If I follow this process, I get consistent prints every time. I haven’t tried tuning bridging and printing this hot is likely to give you more stringing depending on your print, but you can print reasonably fast with this temp.

First successful calibration cube w/ TPU

Note that it will print slower than your actual print profile setting. The filament profile has a maximum volumetric flow rate setting that overrides any print speed settings. If you need to print at a lower temperature, you’ll likely want to lower this volumetric setting further as well which will in turn drop your printing speed more.

Syncing PrusaSlicer Configuration

If you’re like me and end up using PrusaSlicer on different computers with non-Prusa machines (I’m using mine primarily with a Sovol SV06), you’ve probably been frustrated that your machine/print/filament settings from one computer aren’t available on your other computers. I hope Prusa adds an official way to opt-in to sync this data in the future, but there is a pretty usable workaround.

The short version is the PrusaSlicer app accepts a parameter “–datadir” which you can set when you launch the app to have all of your configuration written to a specific directory. If that directory is in a directory that gets synced between computers, then your files will also be synced. In my case, I’m using my Mac and I’m syncing to a OneDrive folder. You can do this from Windows and use iCloud/Dropbox/etc – it’s the same idea for all of them.

On my Mac, I have PrusaSlicer installed in the default location:

/Applications/Original\ Prusa\ Drivers/PrusaSlicer.app

I also have OneDrive running under my user directory here:

/Users/adambyram/OneDrive

I created a OneDrive folder under that root folder and called it “PrusaSlicerSettings”.

Then, I opened “Script Editor” (it’s a built-in app on your Mac – hit Command + Space to open Spotlight, type Script Editor and you should see it…just press enter to launch it).

I then put this in as my script (if you’re following along, make sure to update the username to your username path as well as replace the OneDrive path with whatever you want to use):

do shell script "open -n /Applications/Original\\ Prusa\\ Drivers/PrusaSlicer.app --args --datadir /Users/adambyram/OneDrive/PrusaSlicerSettings"

Now, just save the script. When it asks you what type it is, tell it it’s an application and save it with whatever name you want. I saved mine to the Desktop for now and named it “Launch Prusa Slicer”.

After that, close Script Editor, and you’re done. You can double-click your new saved script file and it should launch Prusa Slicer properly. The first time you launch it, you *will* have to set up PrusaSlicer again – it isn’t going to migrate your current settings over to the new location. You can export them and re-import them, recreate them, or do whatever you’d like to do.

On your other computer(s), repeat the same process. In my case, I have a second Mac and then a Windows machine. The second Mac can use the same setup. Since this all happens without PrusaSlicer’s knowledge, you’ll be best off if you only have PrusaSlicer open on one machine at a time so the configuration files aren’t being updated by multiple apps at the same time.

Budget Notify – Part 2

Well, I expected I was going to end up with a series of blog posts on Budget Notify when I originally wrote the Part 1 post. I planning on building out a whole frontend and backend system. At the end of the day though, I found an even better solution to my specific problem, so I went with that.

In short, I scrapped the whole server concept and make the entire process run from my iPhone via Shortcuts. My iPhone automatically runs a set of commands daily that load our budget, see if notifications need to be sent, and if so, send them out via Twilio exactly like the server was doing. I could technically remove Twilio and have my iPhone send the notifications from my own phone number via Messages, but I want to keep Twilio for now.

Debugging the shortcut was the most painful part. Now that I have it setup, it’s trouble free and works great, but I spent several days trying to figure out why certain things weren’t working. The main issue I hit is if you make multiple web requests in the same shortcut, the second web request may never finish. I don’t know if that’s a bug in the Shortcut app or if that is as-designed. The first request works fine, but the second looks like it’s firing, but best I can tell, it never actually makes the request at all and just sits there until it times out.

Given that this solution is working fine, I don’t expect I’ll write the blog post series I originally planned. I may post about how I setup the shortcut in case someone else wants to replicate it (and/or I might share the actual shortcut if I refactor it a bit), but that’s likely as far as this series will go at this point.