Using ARCs (G2/G3) with Marlin

Since I'm using Marlin as my firmware, is there any significant benefit to using the Fillet plugin and using the arc capabilities of this firmware. I'm not happy with the way my corners look sometimes, and I was thinking that this plugin might help.

This is touted as an advantage to Marlin. I just don't know what the experience is among users.

One other related question. I notice in Marlin that there is a define: SF_ARC_FIX which indicates that if I use ARC Point (which I think is the preferred approach) that Skeinforge generates incorrect gcode and I should activate this define to compensate. Is this still an issue, or has it been fixed in SF? Can I avoid this whole issue by using Arc Segments? The disadvantage I see to Segments is that it would dramatically increase the size of the gcode.

Thanks

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/06/2012 09:54PM by jbernardis.

A further update on this. I enabled the fillet plugin and chose "segments" which causes SF to simulate the arc with short segments. This resulted in much improved corners in the print.

Encouraged, I changed the option the "point" which generates the preferred point form of the g2 and g3 commands. This caused the extruder to return to home position at every corner. Not exactly what I wanted, but it was the behavior I expected based on reading the code and seeing what the SF_ARC_FIX was trying to do.

So now I tried to enable this flag only to discover that I didn't have the latest version of marlin. I wanted to upgrade, but was overwhelmed by all the changes I would have to make again to configuration.h again, so I just manually made the changes I though were needed for the fix, and the result was that the extruder went wild extruding and retracting. The Z axis never lifted and plastic was oozing out between the head and the bed. So I reverted back to "segments" and quit for the night.

Tomorrow I'll take more care with doing a proper upgrade and see what I get.

Bottom line though is that the segment option improved things, and although the code might be larger, at least the trigonometric calculations are not being made in real printing time.

Jbernardis: I had an email conversation with Enrique about this and he said that his code was in compliance with emc2 specs.
So if anyopne could test that on an emc2 controlled machine?...
And Daid posted a fix for that a while ago but it corrects the movement but produces incorrect extrusion.. (at least when put to sfact)
[github.com]

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/07/2012 04:30AM by ahmetcemturan.

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Manufacturer of low tolerance Filaments PLA, ABS, ASA, PETG, TPU, PA, PVA,
[www.miafilament.com]
[github.com]

Well the jury is still out on my use of this plugin. I've had several stl files crash skeinforge inside this plugin, so for the time being, I disabled it. It's a shame too, because even with the segment setting, I had noticeable improvements in my corners.