GregValiant
commented
1 year ago Since UltiMaker employees do most of the work on Cura and since UltiMaker manufactures printers, and since none of their printers are IDEX printers, they aren't going to pay their people to develop support for some other manufacturer's printers when it has absolutely zero benefit for the UltiMaker company. That is just common business sense.
Cura is open source so a member of the community could develop a plug-in (or re-write relevant portions of Cura) to support IDEX printers. From what I've seen - many IDEX printers handle Mirror and Duplicate differently. To do it correctly would require access to one of every IDEX printer model built to insure that they were supported. Another thing to consider is that many of those IDEX printer manufacturers offer their own slicers for their customers (IdeaMaker, FlashPrint, etc.).
Some IDEX machines (ex: Raise3D) are fairly easy to get to work with Cura as "Normal, Mirror, and Duplicate" are handled by M-Code commands in the StartUp. Other printers require a lot more fooling around with Cura to get it to write a compatible gcode. For another set of IDEX printers it's simply impossible as Cura does not generate paths for the U and V axes.
Looking in from the outside, there are only so many software engineers that are intimately familiar with slicing software. It would be my guess that there is at least some communication (if not outright collaboration) between the engineers at Prusa and the engineers at UltiMaker.
5axes
Is your feature request related to a problem?
Terrible support for idex printers
Describe the solution you'd like
Support for idex printers like a Prusa slicer
Describe alternatives you've considered
Look at the prusa slicer
Affected users and/or printers
idex printers
Additional information & file uploads
No response