Plater: a printer plates generator and optimizer

[gregwar 1]

Hello everyone!

Today I'm introducing a brand new tool we're working on: Plater

This software is actually a plate builder and generator, it can be used to create printing plates quickly, and optimizing the place took by the parts on the plate.

You can give it a few STL files, with quantities and orientation, and some settings like your plate dimension and part spacing. It will then try to place your part and optimize so that it generates the least plates as possible, and output the plates in STL format.

You can also release the plater.conf file, a tiny text file that lists which stl should be printed for your design and the quantity of each, so the end users will be able to generate their own plates with their own settings.

It is open-source, and it uses somes parts of CuraEngine (ping @daid), you can find the sources here:

https://github.com/RobotsWar/Plater

We also released binaries which can be found in the official README of the repo, don't hesitate to leave feedbacks

 

[Dim3nsioneer 557]

Looks interesting on a first glimpse... thanks!

 

[Daid 306]

Note, "plater" is also a tool by Kliment for manual making plates.

Also, if you copied parts from Cura, you cannot re-licence it under CC-by-NC, as AGPL and CC-by-NC are incompatible with each-other.

Other then that, cool stuff! Curious how you solved certain problems, might dive into the code later on =)

 

[gregwar 1]

You are right with the licenses issue...

We'll likely rewrite our own STL system very soon

Actually, we just took like like 100 lines of SimpleModel. We are not fan of GPL-like licenses.

You'll remain in the thanks credits anyway :-) are you ok with that?

[Daid 306]

Sure. I can give you the right to re-license those parts if you want. It's not that special, and I hold the sole copyright on those bits.

 

[gregwar 1]

Ok, thanks daid

I think we're going to refactor the code a little bit to make the project more uniform

We've printed all the 22 parts of a Spider robot in 1 plate (we used the Rep2) and 9h of printing:

(French post) http://www.robotcampus.fr/2014/05/27/plater-spidey-en-une-impression/

I may do the same thing on the UM2 soon ;-)