Multi-Extruder/Multi-Material Support Coming Soon

I've gotten a lot of feedback recently on the newest dev release, including feature requests, bug reports, and the like.  One showstopper was a failure of the automatic slicer settings extraction for PrusaSlicer when multi-material mode was enabled.  This was a big problem, basically preventing my favorite feature from working for anyone with an MMU1/MMU2.

Further investigation showed problems with Simplify3D with multiple extruders enabled.  Cura was basically reporting extruder 0 settings for everything, which was expected, but not ideal.  That meant only 1 of the 3 supported slicers worked when multiple extruders/material were configured.  Not good at all.  I decided something had to be done.

Octolapse has never really supported multiple extruders/materials, though it could be made to work with some fiddling.  However, print quality suffered in situations where different materials with different properties were configured differently.  For example, if one extruder was optimized for PLA and another for TPU, the user was forced to make a compromise by enter settings for only one of the materials into into Octolapse.

With the addition of Automatic Settings Detection (starting in v0.4), one huge problem was solved:  incorrect settings entry into the printer profile.  However, another problem was created, since automatic settings extraction was failing for multi-extruder/multi-material printers.  There wasn't any good way to even make a guess as to what settings would be best to use in that case.

And now the good news.  This problem has been solved in a recent devel branch commit.  Now multi-material/multi-extruder support has been added for both manual settings entry AND automatic settings extraction.  The gcode that Octolapse generates will now use the proper retraction length/speed and z-lift heights on a per-extruder basis.  This should provide yet another quality boost for anyone who has been using materials with different settings.

This feature is relatively untested, so I don't recommend that ANYONE install it yet.  I still have to add extruder offsets so that true multi-extruder printers will be stabilized in the correct position for each snapshot.  Also, a setting for single-material mode (when using manual settings entry) needs to be added to Slic3rPE/PrusaSlicer, and I've not figured out the best way to do that yet.  Rest assured that I will be finishing, testing, and debugging this new feature over the next week or two.  I will include this in v0.4.0rc1.dev3.

I'm feeling pretty good about the rest of Octolapse.  I've been improving the built-in help, cleaning up minor issues, and working out the kinks in the new profile repository.  There are also some mysterious issues with the Raspberry Pi cameras that I can't seem to pin down, but only for a minority of users.  I'm also still hearing about some stringing issues with some Creality 3D printers (Ender3 and CR-10 in particular), but I've been able to improve things quite a bit there.  

I know this version has taken WAY longer than I'd hoped, and I've been pushing back release time and time again.  However, it's such a huge upgrade that I need to be extra sure everything is working as well as it can prior to release day.

Thanks again to everyone who has been supporting me, I couldn't have gotten this far without you!  Also, please visit the Octolapse discord if you have not done so.  I LOVE chatting with patrons!  Until next time!