Cura gripes

General Software
#1

New Lulzbot Mini user here; I’ve been using it for about a week and have made about 20 prints so far. It’s great fun, but Cura (on OS X) is a PITA sometimes.

These are mostly rhetorical questions/statements, but if anyone has advice I’d love to here it. Is there a good place to report these bugs other than the Cura Github repo?

  1. Why do I have to load a model to get to printer control?

  2. Why doesn’t the Print Control window come to the foreground automatically? It does sometimes but mostly does not.

  3. The Print Control window often get’s “stuck” and won’t close. Have to Force Quit Cura. When this happens I usually have to reboot since the original instance of Cura didn’t release the serial port and subsequent launches will fail to connect to the printer…

  4. If you don’t close the Print Control window before loading a new model, it will print the old model you had loaded.

  5. After a long print Cura is often locked up with the OS X “pinwheel of death”. Have to force-quit the app and likely reboot (serial port doesn’t release.)

#2

The Github repo is the perfect place for these questions. Find/post them as an issue here: https://github.com/alephobjects/Cura/issues

Thanks!

#3

I’m also suffering through Cura for OSX. However, I don’t think you need to reboot, when these things happen. What I do is yank the USB from the front of the Mini and plug it back in. After this, Cura will connect.

Another tip, one I recently solved for myself, is that when Cura is started fresh, it won’t let you touch the menus for brim or support in the expert mode. I open the expert settings panel from the menu, click the Cura icon on the dock so it will show, then close it. After this, you can touch those drop-downs (and the print control window will also appear without having to click the Cura dock icon).

Cura for OSX is like a really annoying video game that makes you jump through arbitrary hoops, but it does print stuff at least.