XYZ Printing daVinci Jr 1.0 + Cura 2.3.1 + ThreeDub

*** Please note this is fairly old “project” but could be useful to pick up from, also not anymore maintained so please feel free to “fork it” and call it your own (CC BY-AY) ***

How to use Cura 2.3.1 with your daVinci Jr
(This is a Mac tutorial. I haven't done this on Windows but should be similar I'd guess.)

Step 1 - Get Cura Running

1. Download and install Cura 2.3.1
2. Download davinci_jr_platform.stl and davinci_jr.def.json
3. Open Cura once and Quit otherwise Mac will complain about corrupted app
4. Copy davinci_jr_platform.stl into /Applications/Cura.app/Contents/Resources/resources/meshes/
5. Copy davinci_jr.def.json into /Applications/Cura.app/Contents/Resources/resources/definitions/

Open Cura and add Jr as your printer.
Step 2 - Get Printing

Cura produces regular plain gcode but Jr needs it's proprietary 3w files.
(3w is encrypted gcode with some modifications.)
There comes ThreeDub in play.

Download ThreeDub from https://gitlab.com/anthem/py-threedub/tree/master (Thanks to @Anthem for the ThreeDub development)

1. Install HomeBrew on your Mac - http://brew.sh/
2. brew install python
3. pip install --upgrade pip
4. pip install pycrypto
5. pip install pyserial

python setup.py install (from downloaded threedub directory)
Done.

Now when you create .gcode with Cura you just need to convert it to .3w file so Jr can work with it.
Simply run command threedub filename.gcode and it will spit out filename.3w file.

Copy it to SD card and enjoy. I'll presume it works via XYZWare's USB printing - never tried.

Known issues/weird behaviour.

Prints are always facing back to front. But prints are fine. If you select Z seam to be at the back - it will be at the back on the print. Seems to be some firmware weirdness.

1. When printing small objects Z seam can be "blobby". It's perfectly fine with small details on larger objects but some weirdness going on with small objects like calibration cube.
   Never figured it out why, couldn't be bothered hence this affected my print quality in 2% of the cases max. I don't have Jr stock board anymore so never tested this but on new Cura they have Acceleration and Jerk settings - these might help.

No time ETA on LCD. It shows 1m left pretty much all the time. Also reported time in Cura quite differs from real Jr printing time.
Why should you want to mess about with this and what are the benefits?!

You have bigger control of print settings etc.

1. You can print faster than 30mm/s (Jr Fast mode)
2. You can set manual temperature for your filament (extremely useful if you are using 3rd party filaments with hacked NFC tags)
3.  
   • loads of other little features...