It’s no secret that the 3D printer community is extremely fragmented. With three models of RepRaps, three printer kits from Makerbot, and hundreds of ‘printers of the week,’ it’s extremely frustrating for beginners to wrap their heads around the pros and cons of each machine. The software for these printers is segmented nearly as much as the hardware itself, but thankfully [Mike] has put up a series of videos so beginners can wrap their head around all the software packages.
[Mike] used Alibre 3D CAD software to generate the .stl files for all his printable objects. These .stl files were converted into printer-readable GCode by the very popular Skeinforge. The GCode is sent over to [Mike]’s SUMPOD with ReplicatorG, an awesome program that serves as the front end to a printer.
Although we’d like to see a tutorial for Sfact, the new hotness in .stl to GCode conversion, [Mike] does a very good job at breaking down the complexity of Skeinforge into manageable bites.
Hitting all of the permutations of software would be nearly impossible, but here’s hoping someone does some nice videos for Slic3r and possibly Pronterface.
I’ll just try to hype my SkeinPyPy a bit here also then. https://github.com/daid/SkeinPyPy/downloads
SkeinPyPy is Skeinforge, but packaged to run with PyPy. PyPy is a faster Python engine, which gives a reduction of time spend slicing. This can save up to 75% of the slicing time. Reducing most slices to minutes. (This is after the 40% speedup introduced in SF46, also thanks to me)
It “solved” one of the major problems of Skeinforge, which is the speed. And I hope to tackle the next huge problem of Skeinforge next. Which is the horrible UI.
I know people are going to say “Slic3r!” and slic3r is nice, but it misses a few features. But it does has it’s promises.
(Oh, and I also forgot, it’s packaged with “Printrun” also known as “Pronterface” which is a good printing interface and doesn’t make you suffer like ReplicatorG)
What are the big issues with RepG? You basically just load a model and press build.
No way to preview the GCode path.
It crashes with a 50MB GCode file.
It doesn’t send GCode fast enough when your printer is faster then a turtle. Causing blobs.
It uses 100MB for a 3D preview and a Skeinforge wrapper.
If something goes wrong with your printer connection there is no diagnostics. You can tick a “show raw data” option, but it only works during printing, so if problems happen before that you are out of luck.
If you start a 2nd instance it disconnects the first instance from the printer. Causing a failed print.
You need that 2nd instance to slice while you print something else.
Do I need to go on?
Don’t forget the ORD Bot.
http://buildlog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=1035&start=90
Check out Slic3r, it runs quite fast and is updated quite frequently.
I run Student Inventor -> Slic3r -> Pronterface -> Makergear Prusa
check out repetier
https://github.com/repetier
I’m just excited for the upcoming NetFabb release!
NetFabb is nice software, but behind on several critical features. The new release will bring it closer to par. Its still not ahead in those features, but I love the UI and slicing time.
Even the most complex models slice in under a minute. Most things take seconds.