Ok I have been working to bring my makerbot replicator 2 back to life. I have replaced the arms with steal and put in a heated glass plate over the last year. I have just not been able to get cura to fire up with way I want it keeping the the plate and the extruder hat at the same time. I also a person that does not like playing sneakernet (popping the card from pc to machine while testing). So I broke down, grabbed a raspberry pi and went to town loading octoprint to see if it helped. It was the right move. It is still too early to tell if my config is working fully and I have a lot of tuning to due on the startup gcode but it is miles ahead of the makerbot desktop which is end of life. Here is why I like the setup. Cura does great at gcode, but the 3gx driver can be a bit kludgy to setup and hard to debug. Makerbot is a closed system making it even harder to work with (I luckily have a pre version 5 printer). I am not sure who made Octoprint but kudos to them. It is a awesome open source project I am going to look to help fund. The plug ins can be a bit difficult but they are fairly stable. Note I still need to get my start and stop code worked out and my camera and screen setup so there is more work to be done that said I now have access to all the new clicers cura wants to throw at me.
Here are the basic steps so far.
1. Download octoprint and etcher to burn your images.
2. Burn the sim with etcher
3. Setup your wifi by accessing the octopi-wpa-supplicant.txt file in the boot partition (should be able to get to this on windows)
4. Boot it up, ssh into it and reset the password of the Pi - SSH pi@<your pi's ip address> or pi@octopi.local
5. login from a browser the same way - http://<your pi's ip address> SSH IP -l pi or http://octopi.local
6. Setup user
7. Add printer ( look at cura for replicator 2 settings
8. Add cura thumbnail plugin and configure
9. Add gpx plugin and configure - plug in the usb and get it to connect. Note you have to correctly configure GPX for it to connect. I hear it does not auto settings so set it to 11500 for baud. The port scan seemed to work for me.
10. In cura load optiprint
11. For replicator 2 printer add printer into cura and make the g-code flavor reprap
12. Add the following to the start g-code
**** Replicator 2 start.gcode ****
M73 P0 ; enable build progress
G162 X Y F3000 ; home XY maximum
G161 Z F1200 ; home Z minimum
G92 Z-5 ; set Z to -5
G1 Z0 ; move Z to 0
G161 Z F100 ; home Z slowly
M132 X Y Z A B ; recall home offsets
G1 X-145 Y-75 Z30 F9000 ; move to wait position off table
G130 X20 Y20 Z20 A20 B20 ; lower stepper Vrefs while heating
M126 S[fan_speed_pwm]
M104 S[extruder0_temperature] T0
M133 T0 ; stabilize extruder temperature
G130 X127 Y127 Z40 A127 B127 ; default stepper Vrefs
G92 A0 ; zero extruder
G1 Z0.4 ; position nozzle
G1 E25 F300 ; purge nozzle
G1 X-120 Y-70 Z0.15 F1200 ; slow wipe
G1 X-115 Y-65 Z0.5 F1200 ; lift
G92 A0 ; zero extruder
M73 P1 ;@body (notify GPX body has started)
; **** end of start.gcode ****
13. Add in printer end gcode
; **** Replicator 2 end.gcode ****
M73 P100 ; end build progress
G1 Z155 F1000 ; send Z axis to bottom of machine
M104 S0 T0 ; cool down extruder
M127 ; stop blower fan
G162 X Y F3000 ; home XY maximum
M18 ; disable stepper
M72 P1 ; play Ta-Da song
; **** end of end.gcode ****
14. connect optiprint to printer in preferences of printer
15. Give a print a spin.
I have been seeing my head clog up but guessing that is a different issue.
Good luck and may the force be with you as it took some trial and error due to the added heat plate.
I would avoid the gcode format from makerbot as it caused some heat plate problems and long nights.