Sharing Slicing profiles / prints / gcode

[kreativgeek 0]

So, I'm a webdeveloper by trade and something I use a lot are things like gists and plnkr.co . They make it easy to share small snippets of code or other small parts of code so others can get started easily.

In my experience with 3d printing, the slicing profiles everybody uses involve a little bit of 'magic'. A slicing profile to start with, for instance KISSlicer, was also hard to find.

Daid also talked about sending back profiles/usage logs from Cura to log them so they can learn something about the usage of Cura and/or slicing profiles. But the problem here is that it's a bit weird for a desktop program to be communicating with servers on the internet, some people don't like that :smile:

All these things made me think that it would be a good thing if we had an easy way to share slicing profiles, or even specific profiles for printing out a specific 3d model.

So I created a proof-of-concept of my idea on http://printlogger.kreativgeek.be . It's a simple webapp where you can add a new print/slicing profile/gcode. You simply select the generated gcode file (the settings have to be included in this gcode file, you can enable this in kisslicer settings) and it parses it locally (no gcode is uploaded to the server). Only KISSlicer gcode is currently supported as it's a proof-of-concept. You can then save the information to the server and from then on, you can link to the page from anywhere.

You can see a slicing profile I added at http://printlogger.kreativgeek.be/#/prints/513e45e203c07b0200000001

So, my questions for you are :

 

• Do you think something like this is useful? Or is it unnecessary?
  
• Would it just be about sharing slicing profiles? Or more? Like specific profiles for specific models for specific printers?
  
• I really don't like the name for the project, any suggestions?
  
• Any other feedback
  

I'm curious to hear your opinion on this!

PS: The webapp is hosted on free Heroku hosting, so it could be slow sometimes, sorry for that :smile:

 

[kreativgeek 0]

Yeah, let's hope we all converge to a good slicer sometime.

On the other hand a set of different slicers is good to keep innovation happening, look at other monopolists :-)

 

[Daid 303]

So far there has been too little diversion in "slicer world", everyone with RepRaps is keeping their hopes and sights set on Slic3r.

But we have:

KISSlicer is awesome, but some RepRap people do not like that it's closed source. Making a huge deal out of this caused Jonathan to ignore the RepRap people a bit.

SFACT (not well known along Ultimaker people), is an updated version of Skeinforge. It's a bit like Cura a year ago, when Cura was still called "SkeinPyPy Beta 0.1". But it makes more sense then plain Skeinforge.

Cura, well, we know this one. It's a kickass GUI, but still Skeinforge under the hood. So at the base, it's not that different from SFACT. And still slow.

Makerbot has MircleGrue, which nobody but them seems to touch with a 10 foot pool. But they are also not using it for their "high quality" profile setting. Which is a bit odd.

Slic3r, while most RepRap persons are using this, doesn't slice a lot of models. It needs perfect manifold models. And even then it sometimes crashes or uses up all memory.

So we have 3 major players. KISSlicer, Skeinforge (&friends) and Slic3r. I hope we can add a better engine behind Cura soon to provide a real extra player their, instead of being a "friend of Skeinforge"

[snowygrouch 1]

You can download my Ultimaker setup for KISSLICER from my website.

However I agree with almost all the above from everyone else. I wish we all used the same program

as it would make life soooo much simpler.

As soon as CURA gets a new engine, and it can handle my models I will be glad to defect back from Kisslicer.

Although you have to "pay" for it, I think its work including NetFabb in there.....

Anyway, I would be happy to upload my KS profiles to any facility to share. Although they are pretty similar to those already posted on google-groups...so perhaps not alot of point.

C.

 

[kreativgeek 0]

I'm on the same page about switching back to Cura from KISSlicer once it has a new engine. I never managed to print out good 1mm walls with Cura, they were always in two separate parts.

And i think, most of people's profiles will mostly be the same, it's the small changes that are interesting :-)