All hardware that impacts slicer settings

[sinful echo]

Hello everyone
I'm working on a project to help beginners but also experienced 3D print enthusiasts to find their perfect slicer settings or at least a great reference to calibrate around. I need some experienced opinions to shape the structure of the database and I would really appreciate to hear your thoughts.

Basicly it's a free platform where users can share and safe slicer profiles. But slicer settings for one user are useless for another user if they don't share the same setup. So my question is:

What minimum data do I have to collect from User 1 (beside his slicer settings) in order that user 2 can successfully use the same slicer settings and get the same result?

Right now the data I collect for FDM printers is:
Printer Brand and Model
Nozzle material and diameter ???/ hotend???
Filament name including the color

And for resin printers:
Printer Brand and Model
Resin name including the color

If I ask for too many specs, users might get overwhelmed. So I try to keep it as simple as possible.
A difficulty here as the swappable hotend/nozzle. For example users might not know about their Nozzle type (Volcano/CHT etc.) but yet it would be required right? But then there also come the hotends in play which contain the nozzle and additional parts. So maybe to keep it simple it would be easier if a user could just choose between: My hotend/nozzle is default / custom and then type in the name of the hotend/nozzle. Does that make sense?

What else could I be missing?

[proud girder]

are you messing with slicers/printers that dont have common defaults? most common slicers and printer combos have decent starting points, past that its calibrating the fine tuning bits like flow and advance, more if you wanna mess with speeds/accels

[sinful echo]

My idea is for every possible printer/filament combination. So it can be both, default or custom. I made the experience that even with a default printer you can follow recommendations of manufacturer of the filament for the slicer settings and still get mediocre results. What if my database could provide you with the fine tuning experience of someone else with the same setup as you have? That could be more than just a starting point but rather an optimized setting profile and you save a lot of time. Does that make sense or do you see a weakness in the idea?

[proud girder]

i see the weakness that every printer would need a profile for every filament, with trusted input of at leas a few submissions to trust, when in reality you can use one profile for 95+% of the same material, and print some 20 grams worth of tests to make sure its good, but im also the type that doesnt trust any profile from the start, and print my tests anyways

[sinful echo]

Even the filament color impacts the settings. Sure that 95+% works fine for one material?
My platform would have a voting system integrated so common profiles quickly would be approved and therefore provide some kind of savety in using them. 20 grams is nothing, I get that. But the time you save if you can skip 5 calibrations (temperature, max vol speed, flow ratio, advanced pressure, and retraction distance) and the knowledge you had to get first to interpret them right is what I think could make it worth. 3D Printers get affordable more and more and many new users arrive with no clue. I am pretty new myself in this topic so feel free to challenge anything I say, I might see things twisted.

[proud girder]

when there are like 300+ slicer settings, changing those 5 are nothing, and even then for most PLA and PETG ive used, they had minor differences that i could either ignore or could spot and know what to change fairly easily, like stringing is wet or retraction, advance is corners, flow is tolerances going bad, max flow should be kept under by some margin of the failure point, so that shouldnt change unless you try some high flow variant

though this is coming from the perspective of ive been printing a long while, ive worked out my kinks so long ago ive forgotten most of them

and yeah there are so many things that can go wrong its pretty hard to make a 100% accurate guide on everything, slicer is the easier side with the default profiles doing most the lifting

[sinful echo]

These 5 settings are what I personally calibrate but of course the setting profiles would include more than just these 5. Would it make sense to you if these slicer setting profiles had mandatory fields to fill out for the most important base values and the rest would consist out of custom rows users could add?
If yes, what are the most important base settings a user would always need to know in your opinion? That might be a tricky question because with your experience you probably know these base values by heart.
Out of the 300+ settings many are related to the print object if I'm not mistaken. Like support, brim, tower etc. I don't want to make settings like these mandatory to fill out obviously.

[proud girder]

offhand? thats quite a list, as well you would have to standardize what the names are for the different slicers

line widths
seam gap
scarf joints if supported
wipe(i think cura calls it coasting)
elephants foot(though thats more zoffset)
ironing(triple check submitted numbers, .05% makes a difference)
bridge flow ratio
speeds for each line type
overhang speeds
acceleration for each/overall
jerk/sqv
supports if applicable
multi material if aplicable(at least purge amounts, though color to color matters too)
basic brims when needed?
basic supports?
retraction dist/speed
temps
max flow
regular flow
cooling
min layer times```

at least for a starting list

[sinful echo]

Good hint with the slicer names! I had in mind to give the user fixed lists to select the settings from and if the term is called different in another slicers it would have the translation right behind it: "Settingname1 / settingname2" or even a third if nessecary. So that at all time all slicer users could understand it.

That's quite a list indeed! So this is the minimum information you would want? Dang! 😄 I don't even know all of these. Coming from orca slicer I might have different names again. Thank you so much for sharing your experience! You made me question my project which is a good thing. Through the conversation I came up with the idea that users get also asked to share some pictures of the print. An obvious feature in retrospect.

[proud girder]

this list is from orca, or my memory of orca mostly, they just happen to be lesser used so might be hidden, but do effect the quality, but why i say the like 5 calibrations get you the 95%, most of the defaults are good enough that most dont need to tweek them anymore

and yeah pictures can spot bad settings usually pretty fast when its the slicer thats wrong, its harder when the hardware is wrong

[sinful echo]

I see it's orca, so no excuse left for me haha. Do you even think there is a demand for my project or do you think it's unnecessary?

[proud girder]

i dont see a point, but i also buy garbage brands since they are cheap and i can make them work good enough, maybe a point of you can somehow divine the most popular brands, but no one can ever seem to agree what ones are best for the price

bambu already kinda does what your doing, with at least their filament and a few others, but they are not even perfect

[sinful echo]

I do the same! Garbage brands for best price^^
Alright, thank you for your honest opinion.