Printing Process Overview - Mass Portal Pharaoh ED User Manual

Printing process overview

Mass Portal 3D printers use process called Fused
Filament Fabrication or FFF — printing objects out of
melted plastic layer by layer.
How it works
Wire of thermoplastic printing material is melted in the 3D printers
printing head, and pushed through a nozzle. This process is
called extrusion. The nozzle moves according to the geometry
of printable object, depositing the melted plastic and drawing
the object layer by layer. When a layer is finished, printing head
moves up a single layer and draws the next layer of melted
plastic upon the previous, that has now somewhat hardened,
untill the object is finished. The layers of plastic bond or melt
together, forming a single finished object.
Slicing and G-code
The movements of the nozzle, the temperature settings of the
printing head and of the printing bed are controlled by computer
instructions called G-code files, that are generated from 3D
drawings or 3D scanned models by software programs called
slicers. The process of generating the G-codes is usually aslo
called slicing. Mass Portal uses the Simplify3D program for slicing
and printer control.
Although G-code is used to control many 3D printers, it generally
must be created for each particular printer. You can store the
generated G-code files for later use on the computer or on SD
card for printing in standalone mode.
Standalone printing and host software
When using the printer in standalone mode, printing G-code
files prepared earlier and stored on the SD card, no computer is
needed to operate the printer. The printing is controlled by the
5-way navigation button and printers LCD screen using built-in
sofware. This can be useful for longer prints when you don't want
to leave your laptop connected to the printer, or when what you
do on the PC might interfere with the printing. In other cases it
makes sense to control the printing process from a computer
using so called host software, because it allows more detailed,
easier and faster control of the printing process that the built-
in software, and also displays printing progress visualization,
temperature graphs and more. We recommend Repetier-Host or
Simplify3D, but there are also other options.
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