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It's a fork of OrcaSlicer with a new infill type that creates paired U-shaped vertical channels inside the print, plus G-code that injects molten plastic into those channels to bridge Z layer interfaces with continuous plastic.
Big caveat: I have a junky Ender 3 and haven't gotten a clean physical print yet. Don't expect this to work out of the box! After months of tinkering, I'm releasing the software so the 3DP community can experiment with nozzles, multi-material, weird hardware, and other print parameters I can't. There's around 40 MAGMA-specific settings to fiddle with, plus some general quality-of-life features (e.g. printing thin infill sections as solid, and a "dual infill shell" feature that applies MAGMA only to the outer shell to save print time).
THIS CODE IS ALPHA. Around 50 prints old. The injection G-code is novel. Some printer firmware won't like extruding without movement. In extreme cases it could damage your printer or start a fire. DON'T WALK AWAY WHILE PRINTING.
Why MAGMA? "Lava tubes" is a misnomer. Molten rock is magma underground, lava only after it surfaces. The injected tubes are buried inside the print, so "magma tubes" is the correct term.
Discussion (9 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
You can't use the nozzle to inject that much filament into a large cavity because it will cool and solidify right out of the nozzle. Anyone who has ever cleaned blobs of filament off of a nozzle after a print failure can tell you what happens when you try to pump hot filament into empty space. Filament cools below the melt temperature quickly, especially when it comes into contact with your print.
At least the README admits that it doesn't work:
> What’s NOT yet working: the physical print. On my Ender, same-material plastic injected into freshly-printed cells melts the cell walls before they can seal. The math says this should work; the materials science is the open question.
I like seeing experimentation, but this is a lot of software work dedicated to something that couldn't possibly work. I'm curious about "the math says this should work" combined with the large number of em-dashes and other LLM tells. Was this experiment largely driven by an LLM?
There is some interesting work on the topic of staggered interlocking layers: https://github.com/OrcaSlicer/OrcaSlicer/pull/8181
Reading any of the research on that should make it obvious that you can't "inject" molten plastic into larger cavities, though.
I am a little skeptical on the technique though. FDM printed walls are known to not handle pressure well, especially during printing when its past its glass-transition temperature. This process essentially uses the pressure from the extruder to inject a channel with molten plastic. Will this pressure could cause the walls to delaminate from each other or deform?
And how does this affect plastic that tends to warp significantly during printing? The molten plastic is injected into insulated channels that will not receive any active cooling. You're also parking the nozzle at the injection points, which will cause a lot of uneven cooling at the surface as well. For high-warping plastics like ABS, that could cause a lot of issues.
So I guess the underlying question should be, does this actually work? What is the measured difference in tension strength between parts printed normally vs with MAGMA infills? Specifically when using the same amount of plastic. There's no data or even pictures that indicate this is working.
Would print slow but might be genuinely strong vs normal infill + many walls (weight for weight).
Multi head printers like the U1 or H2D could do even better with high heat deflection temp plastics like carbon ASA or nylon for the inner structure and outer walls and strong low temp PLA for the injection.
The top of cells always melt as I'm using the same material for injection and the rest of the print. Someone with a dual nozzle printer could try something like PLA injection in a polycarbonate part. I added support but don't have a printer capable of that.
It's also possible that different print settings would work. I'm releasing the features to the community as I've run out of patience with doing a hundred hours of test prints.
We need to crowd test the best settings and nozzles, materials, etc to make this work well