Preview mode

[kylegrover]

This is a very lightweight mode that eschews all of the volume conservation math to instead do a simple 'capsule' or rounded capped cylinder of size nozzle_diameter for each extruded segment. It can be triggered with preview_mode: true or by passing a --preview flag. The idea is you would run this before doing your full simulation to get a preview of how it will look.

Also included: STL mesh generation speedup with numpy vectorization.

This branch was built on top of my optimizations branch, recommend to either merge after that one or to rebase/cherry pick the last 3 commits from this one.

$ uv run python volco.py --gcode="examples/gcode_example.gcode" --sim=examples/simulation_settings.json --printer=examples/printer_settings.json --preview
INFO 2025-11-17 20:08:43,967 Processing .gcode ...
INFO 2025-11-17 20:08:43,967 Done processing .gcode!
Number of printed filaments: 4
INFO 2025-11-17 20:08:43,967 Preallocating voxel space z-dimension: base=13, extra=8, safety=2, final=23
INFO 2025-11-17 20:08:43,972 [Mesh]: Using optimized box representation      
INFO 2025-11-17 20:08:44,032 [Mesh]: Exporting STL in binary format to path C:\Users\kyle\projects\gcode\volco\Results_volco\Test_volco.stl...
INFO 2025-11-17 20:08:44,035 [Mesh]: STL exported in binary format!

Total simulation time: 0.07 seconds