Remaining time display on the Creality CR-6 SE

With the upcoming CR-6 Community Firmware release 6 (as of this writing in prerelease) it will be possible for supporting Octoprint plugins or slicers to directly inject the remaining time so the firmware understands it. This short article will show you how you can use it!

How it looks

The amount of time remaining can either be calculated by the slicer, or by a host like Octoprint that feeds commands to the printer. It would show up like this, when printing:

If you don’t have any commands that tell the remaining time to the firmware then no time indication will be shown

The advantages are that you can free up your yellow M117 message for other things, like information about the current layer being printed.

How to get the firmware to show the remaining time

So, how do you get the firmware to show this? There are two options: Through the slicer, or through an Octoprint plugin.

Slicer settings

When it comes to slicers, this is only possible in PrusaSlicer and its derivative SuperSlicer at the moment.

PrusaSlicer

Within the printer settings, the “General tab”, “Firmware” section, find this option:

Don’t forget to save the changes to your printer profile after you’re done

When you have set this, PrusaSlicer will emit a M73 P[percentage] R[remaining time in minutes] in the gcode. The firmware will pick it up and show it on the display.

To improve time estimation accuracy, you must let PrusaSlicer be in control of the accelerations, within the printer settings in the “Machine limits” tab:

The amount of time remaining will be more accurate if PrusaSlicer is in full control of the kinematics

Now you’re using the “time remaining” feature, you can use something like this in your “After layer change G-code” in PrusaSlicer to show the current layer:

M117 printing layer {layer_num+1}/[total_layer_count]

Cura

Are you a Cura user? This will probably be possible in Cura 4.9!

Octoprint settings

When using Octoprint you can use either of these two plugins:

• Detailed Progress v0.2.8 or higher or
• M73 Progress

For the Detailed progress plugin you must wait for my contribution to be merged and published as version 0.2.8 - until then you can download my fork of it by clicking “Code” then “Download ZIP” and uploading that ZIP into Octoprint. You may need to remove the current installed plugin first, and restart Octoprint afterwards.

The option as shown in the Detailed Progress plugin

For the M73 Progress plugin you must enable “Output time left” in the settings.

To make the time estimates even more accurate, you can also install the PrintTimeGenius plugin.

Conclusion

I hope this helps anyone looking for getting the remaining time on the print screen!

To download the CR-6 community firmware, go to the home page on Github. If you like to support the developers you can check the credits section of the README.