Following is an excerpt from the following article.
How to Get the Perfect Jerk & Acceleration Setting - 3D Printerly.
Adjusting your acceleration and jerk settings has a whole host of issues that it solves, even things that were not known to you as an issue.
It can solve the following:
- Rough print surface
- Removing ringing from prints (curves)
- Can make your printer a lot quieter
- Eliminate the Z-wobble in prints
- Fixing the layer line skips
- Stop your printer from running too violently or shaking too much
- Many print quality issues in general
There are plenty of people who went and adjusted their acceleration and jerk settings and got some of the best print quality they’ve ever had. Sometimes you don’t even realize how good your print quality can be until you actually get it for the first time.
I’d definitely recommend trying this fix out and seeing if it works for you. The worst thing that can happen is it doesn’t work and you just change your settings back, but with some trial and error you should be able to reduce issues and increase print quality.
How Do I Get the Perfect Acceleration & Jerk Settings?
There are certain configurations which are tried and tested in the 3D printing world. This is great because it means you have to do very little testing to get the best settings for yourself.
You can use these settings as a baseline, isolate either acceleration or jerk, then increase or decrease it little by little until you get your desired quality.
Now for the settings.
For your Jerk setting you should try 7mm/s and see how it goes.
Jerk X & Y should be at 7. Acceleration for X, Y, Z should be set to 700.
You can go directly into your menu on your printer, select the control setting, then ‘motion’ you should see your acceleration and jerk settings.
- Vx – 7
- Vy – 7
- Vz – can be left alone
- Amax X – 700
- Amax Y – 700
- Amax Z – can be left alone
If you would rather do it in your slicer, Cura allows you to change these values without flashing your firmware.
You’ll just have to go into Cura settings and click advanced settings, or custom settings to view your jerk and acceleration values.
Usually, you want to do this one by one. It’s good to start off with the jerk setting.
If lowering your jerk makes things too slow, you can up your print speed somewhat to compensate. If just lowering the jerk doesn’t fix your problem, then lower the acceleration and see what difference it makes.
Some people leave the Jerk settings at 0 & have an acceleration of 500 to get good prints. It really depends on your printer and how well-tuned and maintained it is.
Binary Search Method for Getting Good Jerk & Acceleration
The binary search algorithm is commonly used by computers to search programs and it can be used in many applications such as this one here. What it does it give a reliable calibration method by using ranges and averages.
How to use the binary method:
- Establish a value that is too low (L) and one that’s too high (H)
- Work out the middle value (M) of this range: (L+H) / 2
- Try printing at your M value and see the results
- If M is too high, use M as your new H value and vice versa if too low
- Repeat this until you get your desired result
It can take some time but once you find the settings that work best for your printer, it can make the world of a difference. You’ll be able to be proud of your prints and not have weird, wavy lines and artifacts plaguing your print quality.
It’s a good idea to save them as a default profile in your slicing software. So the next time you come to slice your next print, it will be automatically inputted into the settings.
I advise you to write down what the settings were before you change it so you can always change it back in case it doesn’t work. If you forgot to it isn’t a big deal because there should be a default setting to make it go back to the original settings.
These settings do vary from printer to printer because they have different designs, weights and so on. For example, 3D Printer Wiki says to set Jerk to 8 and the Acceleration to 800 for the Wanhao Duplicator i3.
Once you’ve tuned your settings, use this Ghosting Test to analyze the levels of ghosting and whether it’s better or worse.
You want to look for ghosting of sharp edges (on the letters, dimples and corners).
If you have vibrations on your Y-axis, it will be seen on the X side of the cube. If you have vibrations on your X-axis, it will be seen on the Y side of the cube.
Slowly test and adjust to get the settings just right.
Hope this helps, I was doing some personal research and thought you all may take advantage of it as well.
Jason H