Document experimental feature: thumbnails

[davidzwa]

Information to convey

• How are thumbnails extracted? Thumbnails are embedded into gcode files. The resolution of the thumbnails is controlled by slicer settings. Therefore its up to the user to ensure this is correct. The information below should provide some guidance, but it is not possible to cover every scenario as every slicer is different.
  • In prusa slicer the setting is called G-code thumbnails and its default is 16x16/QOI, 313x173/QOI, 440x240/QOI, 480x240/QOI, 640x480/PNG (QOI and PNG) at the moment of writing. This means QOI and PNG are automatically exported.
• How are thumbnails enabled in FDM Monster? Using experimental settings. In the future thumbnails will become a core feature and this documentation will be updated.
• When will this feature be enabled by default? This is to be determined (TBD), based on how stable the feature is. This requires community feedback. Expect this to be definitely before v2, but most likely at v1.9.

Further questions

• No thumbnail appears but I do have thumbnails enabled.
  • Did you make sure the thumbnail is in default PNG format? QOI or JPG formats are not supported at the moment of writing.
  • Please check your gcode. Can you find a line starting with ; thumbnail begin and similar to ; thumbnail begin 16x16 844 and an ending line exactly equal to ; thumbnail end? If this is not present, no thumbnail has been generated when slicing the the 3d print into a gcode file.
  • Is the file format .bgcode? At the moment of writing there is no thumbnail support for .bgcode, only for .gcode. We hope to change this in the future.

Non-supported ❌ and supported ✅ formats

The QOI format is not supported ❌:

;
; thumbnail_QOI begin 16x16 504
; ...
; ...
; thumbnail_QOI end
;

The JPG format is not supported ❌:

;
; thumbnail_JPG begin 16x16 972
; ...
; ...
; thumbnail_JPG end
;

The PNG format is supported ✅:

;
; thumbnail begin 640x480 68180
; ...
; thumbnail end
;
;