My daughter makes handcrafted little dolls and sells them. We thought it would be fun to 3d print little boxes with her business information on them. As a part of the box, I designed a box lid that contains a QR code that people can scan that takes them to her online store.

It was more difficult than I, at first, thought it would be. Mainly, I didn’t realize my settings were so far off. The most important setting that I needed to tune were retraction settings. My retraction settings are “pretty good,” but in this case I needed them to be perfect. You see, the little nubs that are left on the parts get picked up by the camera and messes up the QR code, so I had to clean them all up by hand. Fortunately, I had the foresight to create the box in pieces, with the plan to glue the QR code to the rest of the box instead of creating it all at once. 

Learn from my mistake, run a retraction tower and update your settings. This should be done each time you change filament types.

Someone asked how to change some settings halfway through a print. If you use Cura, this is pretty easy to do.

Cura is pretty powerful, right out of the box. It’s my go to software for print slicing. I’ve tried others, but I always come back to Cura because of the capability that it provides.

However, sometimes even Cura doesn’t have the functionality that’s needed. Thankfully, many people in the community have created different extensions that offer capability for the gaps in Cura’s capabilities.

One of these is the Post Processing Script extension. One of the options inside of the extension is to change a setting at a specific Z height. You have the ability to change speed, retraction settings, temperature, etc. If you haven’t experimented with it, it’s definitely worth checking out.