Ultimaker Cura: an excellent application to prepare models for 3D printing

Today 3D printers are easier to get Because there are models with quite accessible costs and with which we can venture to know a little more about its operation and be able to encourage ourselves to learn to create our own 3D models.

But for this we need an application that help us with creating them and in this article we are going to talk about a excellent option which has the name of "Ultimaker Cura".

About Ultimaker Cura

This is an application designed for 3D printers, in which you can modify the printing parameters and then transform them to code G. It was created by David Braan, who after a while would work for Ultimaker, a company dedicated to the design and manufacture of 3D printers.

In order for the software to be maintained, it was made available under an LGPLv3 license. The development is hosted on GitHub. The software is used by more than a million users worldwide and is one of the most widely used 3D printing software in 3D printers.

Ultimaker Cura'se characterized by providing a graphical interface to prepare models for 3D printing, which It is adjusted according to the model and the program determines the scenario of the 3D printer during the sequential application of each layer.

In the simplest case, it is enough to import the model in one of the supported formats (STL, OBJ, X3D, 3MF, BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG), select speed and quality settings, and submit the print job.

There are plug-ins for integration with SolidWorks, Siemens NX, Autodesk Inventor, and other CAD systems. The CuraEngine engine is used to translate the 3D model into the 3D printer's instruction set.

Of the main characteristics Ultimaker Cura highlights the following:

• Cross-platform open source software, available completely free of charge
• It has two types of use; recommended mode or use custom mode to configure over 300 settings, for maximum control
• Features configured profiles, which make hardware and material setup simple and fast, and achieve reliable, professional results
• Immediate support for STL, OBJ, X3D and 3MF file formats
• Ability to extend its main functionality with add-ons
• Power ability to manage one or more network capable Ultimaker printers from a single interface

Currently the software is in its version 4.6.1 which is basically an emergency update for version 4.6 and it proposes new standard profiles that automate the adjustment taking into account the use of materials such as polycarbonate, nylon, CPE (polystyrene) and CPE +.

In addition to that the interface provides the display of active scripts for post-processing and added a setting to expand all holes by adding offset on each layer, allowing you to manually increase or decrease holes to compensate for horizontal expansion. In the preview window, the ability to make the auxiliary material transparent is added.

How to install Ultimaker Cura on Linux?

For those who are interested in being able to install this application on their system, they can do so by following the instructions that we share below.

Generally for Linux, the developers of Cura offer us an AppImage file which we can obtain from the official website of the application. The link is this.

Or for those who prefer to use the terminal, they can get the package by typing the following command:

wget https://github.com/Ultimaker/Cura/releases/download/4.6.1/Cura-4.6.1.AppImage

After downloading the package we are going to give you execution permissions. We can do this by secondary clicking on the package and in the context menu we go to the properties option. In the window that was opened, we position ourselves on the permissions tab or in the "permissions" section (this varies a bit between desktop environments) and we will click on the "execution" box.

Or from the terminal we can give the permissions by executing the following command:

sudo chmod x+a Cura-4.6.1.AppImage

And voila, now we can run the installer by double clicking on the file or from the terminal with the command:

./Cura-4.6.1.AppImage

Finally, in the case of Arch Linux or derivatives, We can install the application directly from the Arch Linux repositories (even though the version is an older one). To do this we just have to type:

sudo pacman -S cura