Orca Slicer settings for the Elegoo Centauri Carbon: a starting point

The Elegoo Centauri Carbon ships with its own slicer (a Bambu Studio fork), but plenty of people prefer Orca Slicer for the calibration tools and the more familiar interface. The catch is that Orca does not have an official Centauri Carbon profile yet, so you have to roll your own. Here is the starting point we use on the bench.

Setting up the printer profile in Orca

Open Orca Slicer, go to the printer dropdown, and choose "Add/Remove Printers" then "Custom Printer". You want these basics:

• Printable area: 256 x 256 mm
• Printable height: 256 mm
• Nozzle diameter: 0.4 mm (or whatever you have fitted)
• G-code flavour: Klipper
• Origin: Front left

The Centauri Carbon runs Klipper under the hood, so picking the Klipper flavour matters. Marlin gcode will technically print but you lose the cleaner extrusion commands and you cannot trigger pressure advance properly.

Start and end gcode

Orca's default start gcode for a generic printer will not heat the chamber, will not run the input-shaper macros, and will sometimes leave the bed cold while it homes. We use a stripped-down version of Elegoo's own start sequence:

``` PRINT_START EXTRUDER=[nozzle_temperature_initial_layer] BED=[bed_temperature_initial_layer] ```

That assumes you have left Elegoo's PRINT_START macro on the machine, which you should. Do not rip it out. It handles homing, bed mesh, nozzle wipe, and the chamber preheat. Replace the macro and you will spend a Saturday debugging probing issues.

End gcode can stay short:

``` PRINT_END ```

Same logic. Elegoo's PRINT_END parks the head safely and turns the heaters off in the right order.

Speeds and accelerations

The Centauri Carbon will physically run at the speeds Elegoo advertises, but you do not have to. We dial it back for anything cosmetic.

A sensible starting profile:

• Outer walls: 200 mm/s
• Inner walls: 250 mm/s
• Infill: 300 mm/s
• Travel: 400 mm/s
• First layer: 50 mm/s
• Acceleration: 5000 mm/s² for walls, 10000 mm/s² for infill and travel

Those numbers print noticeably faster than a stock Ender or Bambu A1 and still give clean surfaces. If you want to push it for production parts, raise infill and travel first and leave the outer walls alone.

Retraction for the direct drive

The Centauri Carbon has a short, direct-drive path. Long retractions cause more grinding than stringing. Start here:

• Retraction length: 0.6 mm for PLA and ABS
• Retraction speed: 35 mm/s
• Z-hop: 0.2 mm, only if you see scarring on tall prints
• Wipe before retract: off

PETG wants more. Try 0.8 mm at the same speed. TPU wants almost none; 0.2 mm is plenty. If you are still getting strings with these settings, the answer is usually temperature, not retraction. Drop the nozzle 5 deg C before you add more retraction.

Temperatures we actually use

Stock temperatures on the Elegoo profiles are conservative. For Orca, these are the numbers we print at on the bench:

• PLA: nozzle 215 deg C, bed 60 deg C
• PETG: nozzle 240 deg C, bed 75 deg C
• ABS or ASA: nozzle 250 deg C, bed 100 deg C, chamber heater on
• PLA-CF or PETG-CF: 5 deg C above the plain version of the same material
• TPU 95A: 230 deg C, bed 50 deg C, very low retraction

These are starting points, not gospel. Every spool is a little different, especially if you buy bargain brands.

Calibrate flow and pressure advance before you print anything serious

This is the part most people skip. Orca's built-in calibration tools are the main reason to use it on this machine.

Run them in this order, once per filament:

1. Flow ratio. Single line test first, then the pattern test. Start at 0.98 and adjust. 2. Pressure advance pattern. The Centauri Carbon usually lands somewhere between 0.020 and 0.035 for PLA. PETG sits a little higher. 3. Temperature tower if the filament is new or unbranded. 4. Maximum volumetric flow test if you want to run high-speed infill. Most PLA tops out around 22 mm³/s.

Save each calibrated profile under a name that includes the brand and colour. "Generic PLA" is how you end up with three different rolls behaving identically on screen and very differently in real life.

Layer height and walls

Nothing exotic here. 0.2 mm layer height, three walls, 15 percent gyroid infill is our default for functional parts. For display models we drop to 0.16 mm and bump walls to four. The hardened nozzle on the Centauri Carbon means you can also fit a 0.6 mm nozzle without much fuss, which is handy for big functional prints where wall strength matters more than fine detail.

Orca Slicer vs Elegoo's own slicer

Worth being honest about. Elegoo's slicer is tuned for this printer out of the box. It will give you working prints with zero configuration. Orca will not. You need to do the setup above.

What Orca gives you back is the calibration suite, better tree supports, cleaner organic shapes, and the ability to slice for other printers from the same install. If the Centauri Carbon is your only machine and you are happy with default profiles, stick with Elegoo's slicer. If you are tuning for production parts or you already use Orca on another printer, the manual setup is worth the hour.

When the print still looks wrong

If you have done all of the above and still see ringing, layer shifts, or a textured top surface, the slicer is probably not the problem. The usual suspects on the Centauri Carbon are a loose belt (especially after shipping), a partly clogged nozzle from carbon-filled filament, a worn nozzle after a few kilos of abrasive, or input shaper data that needs re-running after you have added an enclosure mod. These are mechanical fixes, not slicer fixes. No amount of acceleration tuning will save a print from a notched belt.

When to mail it in

If your settings are dialled in and you are still getting bad prints, repeated clogs, layer shifts that come back after every belt tension, or a hot end running cold, send it to us. We will check belts and pulleys, inspect the nozzle and hotend assembly, re-run input shaper, and confirm the Klipper config is sensible. We do not stock every Elegoo spare on the shelf, so message us first with what is going wrong and we will tell you whether parts need ordering before you post the machine. Booking and the mail-in address are on /contact.html.