Firmware changes in Cura

One of the things I noticed about my printer is that it didn't start its print jobs in the middle of the heat bed. I've done a couple of print jobs where the nozzle actually dripped the filament completely off to the side of the print surface. A temporary solution I came up with was to wait until the nozzle started moving and then immediately select "Pause Print" on the control panel. With the printer paused I could disable the steppers and the manually move the nozzle to a better position over the print bed.

After some digging around I found that someone had already posted a solution to this problem to my printer's group on Thingiverse.com. In Cura, you can change your printer's default settings and someone had posted on the comment board a series of commands to run at the very beginning of the gcode commands. To access this window, click on Settings > Printer > Manage Printers and then "Machine Settings".

Here is the code a user named dmhoyt suggested:

            G21 ;metric values

            G90 ;absolute positioning

            M82 ;set extruder to absolute mode

            G28 X0 Y0 ;move X/Y to min endstops

            G28 Z0 ;move Z to min endstops

            G1 Z15.0 F9000 ;move the head up 15mm

            G1 X37 Y27 ;Move to new print origin

            G92 X0 Y0 Z15.0 ;Set this coordinate to 0,0,15

            G92 E0 ;zero the extruded length

            G1 F200 E3 ;extrude 3mm of feed stock

            G92 E0 ;zero the extruded length again

            G1 F9000

            M117 Printing...

This solved my problem and now my objects print just as they appear in Cura.