sorry for the lack of update. i delayed this project... and then tend to forget things often these days. getting old sucks. but, here i am with an doozy update
i took the advice to embiggen the tags slightly and it did VASTLY improve the infill spacing. in my various tests, i did play around with increasing extrusion slightly (to 104%) which also helped close up some gaps but resulted in a bit of stringing and slight over extrusion in some really specific encounters... so i ended up dialing it back. i did increase overlap a tiny bit and it seemed to help as well. just a matter of playing around and seeing what combination works best.
i ended up settling on setting my extrusion up 2%, increasing overlap 10% and increasing the print size 12% and increased the printing speed (apparently this printer seems to perform better at higher speed (infill 100mm/s, internal perimeters 60mm/s, 2500mm acceleration) Turning jerk up to 20mm/s and AND printing external perimeters at the same speed as jerk...effectively turning it off. WEW! this also eliminated some of the weird bulging corners I was getting at right angles.
Apparently it's a nozzle pressure timing thing with the variable speeds they are seem to be trying to use when rounding a corner causes a sight overextrusion as it hits the corner and the molten extrude sort of rolls out the side of the nozzle kinda like a wobbly jello mould when you drive around the corner to grandmas house for christmas dinner. my theory about this is that keeping the speed linear when changing directions around the corner seems to keep the hotend pressure constant instead of spiking up when the nozzle slows down for the last few steps of the corner. but, i digress...
overall the project worked out fairly well. i ended up delaying starting this project because i wanted to upgrade some parts first. (which is also why i haven't updated till now)
I upgraded my Ender 3 pro with a CRtouch bed probe and an additional Z drive motor and lead screw so now it's dual Z drive instead of cantilevered and all setup for auto mesh bed leveling... so...basically an Ender 3 Max Neo (but with a slightly smaller print size and no touch screen)
dual z drive will help if i want to direct drive filament extrusion later.
after a firmware update, and a couple slicer config changes... I can't believe how much these 2 things have changed the quality of the first layers and how much messing around with leveling it eliminates... and the likelihood of success of those attempts to print.
where before i would have to restart about 90% of the prints 3 or 4 times to get good/proper bed adhesion... with these upgrades... I have since printed over 88 projects on the printer (i have a cat container on my desk that i peel off and put the purge lines from the successful prints in) and have maybe only had an issue 3 or 4 times and 1 of them was simply because an error in the configuration. I had changed some parameters then forgot to save them and powered off, thus not having the proper parameters on power up again.
so with this new setup, I started the tag project. I ended up pumping out 28 of the tags in 7 batches of 4 in just a couple days (~8 hours per print), with one big session to finish off. the tags required a filament change part way through so i figure it had to be babysat, but i guess in the firmware update (thanks to marlin) they fixed the filament change gcode.
Before, it would move up away from the build... beep like 4 times... them move back down and continue printing. when it beeped i would menu over and select pause print, and change the filament by opening the extruder drive and ripping out the filament and loading the new one, manually pushing it through to purge, then resume. it was kinda hit or miss and required some timing.
Now, it properly supports M600 command so it pauses and moves out of the way, unloads the filament and waits for you to load new filament. Then it loads and purges the nozzle... giving you the option to purge more, or continue...the whole shebang is basically automagic. so it made it super easy... just wait for the beeping and follow the on screen instructions.
all in all, it's been super fun learning the in's and outs of 3d printing. it's a steep AF learning curve to it, but it's awesome how many people there are that have the same issues, and finding so many people to help. it also helps that this model was so popular that literally 100's of thousands of them are out there.
also thank you guys!
merry christmas/xmas/holidays/etc/etc/etc
and happy new year!