Printers, filaments and profiles

A profile is a saved set of settings you can pick from a dropdown instead of re-typing. There are four kinds, and they live in Settings.

	Where	What it holds
Printers	/settings/printers	Bed size, nozzle, firmware, network connection
Filaments	/settings/filaments	Material identity, temperatures, cooling, flow
Print profiles	/settings/profiles	Layer height, walls, infill — everything in the Process tab
Labels	/settings/labels	Tags for organising the three above

Adding a printer

Settings → Printers → Add printer gives you three routes:

Detect it. If it's a Klipper machine on your network, paste its address (mainsailos.local, or an IP) and press Detect. This is by far the least error-prone option, and usually there is nothing left to fill in.

Your printer's own configuration answers most of the setup, so the slicer reads it rather than asking you: build volume and kinematics, nozzle and filament diameter, the machine's velocity and acceleration limits, pressure advance, how hot its hotend and bed are allowed to get, and whether it has firmware retraction or can cancel individual objects. It also works out which start and end macros your printer uses (PRINT_START or Klippain's START_PRINT) and writes the matching G-code. The first screen lists every value it read, each one beside the section of printer.cfg it came from, so you can check it against your own config without leaving the page.

The printer is ready to add from that first screen — press Add as-is. Anything the configuration can't settle is put to you afterwards as one short question per screen, and none of them are required.

Each question names what it is about, says why we leaned the way we did, and shows the config section behind it. A machine with two generic fans is asked about each fan separately, by name, because Klipper cannot say whether a given one cools prints, filters the air, or vents the electronics bay — and the safe answer differs per fan. Every answer is an ordinary setting afterwards, so changing your mind never means running this again.

Telling us a fan blows on the part does more than switch it on. It joins the part-cooling fan on the layer-time curve and gains the boosts that only make sense for a second fan: extra airflow over bridges and on very short layers, a ceiling so the two together cannot overdo it, and a limit on how much the speed may change from one layer to the next, which is what stops a fan slamming from off to full and shocking the part.

The full table of a machine's fans — which ones it has, what each is called in printer.cfg, and the speed curve for each — lives under Fans in the printer's own settings, because that is a description of your hardware rather than of a spool. What the material contributes is its cooling ceiling, which stays on the filament and is one of the settings a single printer can correct for itself.

When detection can't tell everything

A printer that answers slowly may not return its full configuration. You still get its build volume and connection — listed without a config section, because nothing named one — and the first screen says which settings are still carrying defaults, with a link to fill them in by hand. Machines the slicer doesn't recognise leave the vendor and model blank for you to name.

Pick it from the catalog. A library of common machines, pre-filled.

Enter it manually. Bed shape and size, nozzle, kinematics, firmware flavour, origin offset, and optionally a connection.

Some settings are on the printer rather than a print profile because they describe the machine, not the print:

• Preferred print angle — many CoreXY machines lay parts down best at 45°. Auto-arrange uses it.
• Gantry clearance height and radius — how much room the printhead needs. Used to warn you about sequential printing.
• Can cancel individual objects — whether the firmware supports it. Detection turns this on by itself when your Klipper config has the [exclude_object] module.

Adding a filament

Settings → Filaments → Add filament. Pick a vendor preset or start from scratch, then give it a name, a colour and a material — that is the whole flow. Choosing the material sets the nozzle and bed temperatures and how hard the part fan runs, and everything else lives in the filament's own settings, where it is grouped and searchable.

The colour is used in the model view if you turn on Settings → 3D View → Colour models by filament — handy when you have several spools and want to see which is which.

Fan curves

The Cooling group ends with a fan table. Each row is one physical fan and the curve it follows: a minimum and maximum speed, and the two layer times they sit between. Layers that print quickly get the maximum, slow ones the minimum, and anything between is interpolated.

With no rows the filament uses the printer's part-cooling fan at the engine's defaults, which is what most spools want. Add a row when you need a second fan driven — a chamber fan for ABS, or an auxiliary one for a big PLA part. On Klipper you can also give a row the object's own name from printer.cfg (rscs, exhaust_filter); leave it blank for the default name for that role.

Adding a print profile

Settings → Processes → Add profile. Pick a tuned preset or start from scratch, then name it and set a layer height. Walls, infill, speeds and supports are all in the profile's own settings afterwards — the same page that holds every other process parameter, grouped and searchable, rather than a shorter copy of it inside the wizard.

Three profiles come built in, and they are a scale rather than three unrelated recipes — all 0.20 mm, differing in how hard they drive the machine:

Preset	Walls / infill	For
Standard	120 mm/s	Anything. Slow enough that it cannot embarrass a machine you have not commissioned.
High Speed	200 mm/s	A well-built CoreXY with a high-flow hotend.
Maximum	300 mm/s	The top of the sensible range — a tuned machine at 30 000 mm/s².

All three hold the outer wall and the top surface back, because those are what the print is judged by and neither is where the time goes. Going fast on the inside is what pays for going slowly on the outside.

They fit whatever nozzle they land on. Bead width and first-layer height are stated as a proportion — 110% of the nozzle, 120% of the layer height — rather than in millimetres, so the same preset lays a 0.44 mm bead on a 0.4 mm nozzle and a 0.66 mm bead on a 0.6 mm one. Type a number over it and it stays a number; the % button on the field switches between the two.

Two things decide whether the fast ones are honest on your machine:

• Your printer profile has to carry the speed. A process asking for 300 mm/s behind a printer that travels at 150 does not get it. The built-in Generic CoreXY 350 mm printer is the matching starting point.
• Flow is the real ceiling, and it belongs to the spool, not the recipe. Set Max Volumetric Speed on the filament — around 24 mm³/s for a modern high-flow hotend — and every speed above is held to what the hotend can melt.

Pressure advance stays where you tuned it

No shipped preset sets it. It is calibrated per machine and per spool and lives in your firmware; a profile that shipped a number would overwrite a calibration it knows nothing about. Same for retraction on a Klipper machine — the CoreXY preset turns firmware retraction on so the printer's own values win.

When one printer disagrees with the others

Most settings are true wherever you print. A few are not: how fast a hotend can melt a material, what pressure advance an extruder needs for it, how much retraction an elastic filament wants out of that particular drive. These belong to a machine and a material together, so no single number on the filament is right across three printers.

You do not set these up in advance, and you never make a second copy of a filament. You correct them where you notice them:

1. On the slice page, change the setting — Max Volumetric Speed, say.
2. Press Sync changes to your profiles.
3. The row offers two scopes. This printer only saves it as that machine's correction for the material you have loaded. Every printer edits the shared filament.

"This printer only" is the default, because it cannot affect anything else you own. Every other spool of the same material inherits the correction automatically, so buying more PLA never costs you a new profile.

They are also managed like anything else, in Settings → Printers. Corrections sits below the machine's own details in every printer's editor: pick a material from the dropdown and a card for it appears, holding every setting that material corrects. Change a value, stop correcting one setting, correct another, or Remove all to drop the material — that one asks twice, since there is no undo behind it. A new correction opens at the value it is a correction of, so you can see what you are adjusting away from.

In the outline the whole thing is one entry with a material under it, not a section per material.

Afterwards, the setting shows where its value came from:

Max volumetric speed   24 mm³/s
⚙ Corrected for Voron 2.4 · PLA

That line is there so a number disagreeing with the filament profile you picked explains itself instead of looking like a fault. It appears only when a correction is actually in play — switch to PETG, or to another printer, and the filament's own value comes back.

Which settings can be corrected this way

Temperatures (nozzle and bed, including first layer), maximum volumetric speed, flow ratio, pressure advance, retraction length and speed, Z hop, and the fan ceiling.

The list is deliberately short. Anything else is true wherever you print it, so it belongs in the printer, filament or print profile that owns it — and offering a per-machine copy of everything would leave you holding two overlapping sets of settings instead of one.

What your machine cannot do

A printer profile records three limits read straight off your machine: Hotend temperature limit, Bed temperature limit and Machine acceleration limit. None of them is a value anything prints at — nothing is tuned here, and none of them is written into your G-code.

The two temperature limits exist because asking for heat a machine cannot reach does not fail. The print simply waits for a temperature that never arrives, and the printer sits hot until you notice. So if you load ABS on a machine whose bed stops at 80 °C, the slicer says so before it writes the file.

The acceleration limit exists for the print-time estimate. A fast print profile asking for 25 000 mm/s² on a printer commissioned at 3 000 is fine — the file carries the higher number, the firmware clamps it, and the part comes out correctly. What is not fine is an ETA calculated as though the machine reached it. The estimate is held to whichever is lower, and a note says so.

Detection fills both in from your printer's own configuration. A machine you entered by hand leaves them at 0, which means "unknown" and warns about nothing.

When a preset asks more than a machine can give

Pick a printer and the filament and print-profile dropdowns say, under any preset that is a stretch for it, what the problem is:

Maximum — 0.20 mm
Asks 300 mm/s; Ender 3 tops out at 150

Generic ABS
Needs 255 °C; this hotend is rated for 240

Nothing is ever disabled. Plenty of printers are configured conservatively and run happily above it, and a print profile asking for speed is exactly what a print profile is for — the machine simply does what it can. The note is there so you find out before the print, not during it.

The temperature ones are worth taking seriously, though: unlike a speed the machine quietly won't reach, a heat target it cannot reach never arrives at all, and the print waits on it indefinitely.

Everyday management

All three lists behave the same:

• Search by name.
• Group by vendor or connection type.
• Filter by label.
• Star one as the default — that's what a new plate starts with.
• Right-click (or long-press on touch) a card for Labels, Duplicate, Edit, Make default, Delete — or Restore defaults on a built-in.

Duplicating and editing beats starting from scratch. Deleting asks first: the trash button turns red and reads Delete?, and a second press deletes.

The top of the editor is the profile itself: its name, which you rename by clicking it and typing, a one-line summary of what it is, and Set default, Duplicate and Delete beside it. A small Saved appears after each change — edits save as you make them; there is no Save button to forget.

Built-ins are yours to edit

The printers, filaments and processes that ship with the app are starting points, not locked templates. Change anything — the name included — and it saves like any other edit. They cannot be deleted, because every fallback resolves to one, so the editor offers Restore defaults instead: it puts the shipped values back (your labels stay). Duplicate one first only if you want to keep the original alongside your version.

Editing a profile reaches every plate that uses it, including plates you sliced weeks ago — that is the point of a profile. The exception is a setting you changed on a particular plate, which stays as you left it. See Changes belong to the plate.

Finding a setting in the editor

These three pages are the one place that shows every parameter the slicer has — nothing folded away, nothing behind an Advanced step. That is what they are for, and it is also what makes them long: a printer's editor runs to sixty settings, a print profile past two hundred.

The outline down the right-hand side is the map. Every section starts folded, so the whole editor fits on screen as a dozen lines. Click one to open it; that only opens it, and never moves the editor — it is the settings listed underneath that take you somewhere. Expand all at the top does the lot.

A line runs down its left edge through a dot for each section, stepping in under an open section's settings and back out below them. The bright stretch of that line is exactly what the editor is showing: it slides as you scroll, grows when more fits on screen, and the dots it covers fill in. The section you are scrolled to is named in the accent colour, and when the outline is longer than the window it scrolls itself to keep the bright stretch in view — until you scroll the outline yourself.

Above it, Filter settings narrows the outline as you type, and Ctrl/Cmd

• F puts the cursor there from anywhere on the page. Matches stay grouped under their own sections, which is the part that helps: typing gap shows you that there is one in Walls, one in Infill, one in Support and two in Speed — where each lives, not just that it exists. It is the fastest way to a setting you can picture but cannot name.

A search ignores the folding. Asking where a setting is and being handed a closed section would be no answer, so every match is listed whatever state its section was in.

It appears when there is room for it, and steps aside when there is not — the editor always gets enough width to lay a setting out on one line first. On a window that is only just too narrow — an iPad held sideways, or a laptop with a wide list column — the Settings section list folds itself to icons to make the room, and opens again when you leave the editor. Press the button beside the word Settings to choose for yourself; the app remembers and stops deciding.

The list column itself is draggable: pull the edge between the list and the editor to give long profile names the width they need. It stays where you put it.

Labels

Labels are a flat set of tags — PLA, prototype, customer-work, whatever suits. Create them in Settings → Labels, assign them to any profile, then use the label bar to filter long lists — selecting more than one widens the list rather than narrowing it, so PLA plus PETG shows both. A card's right-click menu carries a Labels submenu holding the same picker — coloured, searchable, with a tick beside each one already assigned and a row to create a label that does not exist yet. It stays open while you pick, so tagging a shelf of profiles is one pass. On a shared machine with a dozen printers this is the difference between a list and a mess.

Where profiles are stored

This depends on how you run Cold Crabby, and it matters.

Running as	Stored	If you clear your browser
Browser	In the browser only	They're gone
Desktop app	On the machine, next to the engine	Safe
Self-hosted	On the server, synced to every browser	Safe

The foot of the Settings sidebar says which of these applies to your session, and Settings → General → Your library says it in full.

Back them up

Settings → General → Your library → Export profile library downloads everything — printers, filaments, print profiles, labels — as TOML. Two shapes:

• a bundle, one file per profile plus a manifest and README
• one profiles.toml, the same format the command line reads

Printer API keys are stripped from both, so the file is safe to hand to a colleague or commit to a repo.

Advanced — the on-disk library

The desktop app and a self-hosted server keep profiles.toml next to slicer.toml in the platform config directory. A category (printers, filaments, processes, labels) is written whole on every change, last writer wins. In a self-hosted setup a change made in one browser tab nudges the others to refetch, so two people editing don't see stale data. Concatenating a bundle's files in name order reproduces a valid profiles.toml, order intact.

Starting over

Settings → Danger Zone has Reset profiles to defaults, which restores the built-in library. It asks you to type a confirmation first. Because your plates remember their settings as changes to a profile, and those profiles are being replaced, this clears the per-plate changes too. The same page can clear slice history or reset the whole app.