Jump to content

Direct USB Printing


dklassen

Recommended Posts

Posted · Direct USB Printing

printrbot (I believe - maybe I'm wrong) and Ultimaker are open source. MB is closed source. As other's have said "if you can't open it, it isn't yours". You can open your UM without violating the warranty. And the plans and electronics are all published. Schematics? Published. Layout? Published. Inner layers of the circuit board and everything is published. And the slicer and firmware are open source. That's a big big deal.

It's not officially supported to print through USB but it works. Mostly. There is tons of error correction going on so if you print long prints you can get occasional fatal failures where a digit is dropped and Z moves to 1mm instead of 10mm or whatever and wrecks your print. If you play around with different USB cables, different computers, different USB hubs (for a well powered connection) it usually isn't hard to get USB working dependably. Ideally though you should check the logs to see how many failures per second you are getting and not be satisfied until you can print a whole 2 seconds without any checksum errors.

Doesn't simplyfy3D let you output to SD card? It's just so much more reliable! And if your computer reboots because of some obscure quicktime upgrade you don't lose your print.

 

  • Link to post
    Share on other sites

    Posted · Direct USB Printing

    Yep, Printrbot is open source. I have a dedicated Macbook connected to the printer now and it's just much easer than dealing with an SD card. Simplify will let you dump G code on to an SD card but like I said, it seems easer to me just to pump it out the USB port. I haven't done real long prints, maybe 7 hours but never had a problem.

     

  • Link to post
    Share on other sites

    Create an account or sign in to comment

    You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

    Create an account

    Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

    Register a new account

    Sign in

    Already have an account? Sign in here.

    Sign In Now
    • Our picks

      • Introducing the UltiMaker Factor 4
        We are happy to announce the next evolution in the UltiMaker 3D printer lineup: the UltiMaker Factor 4 industrial-grade 3D printer, designed to take manufacturing to new levels of efficiency and reliability. Factor 4 is an end-to-end 3D printing solution for light industrial applications
          • Thanks
          • Like
        • 3 replies
      • UltiMaker Cura 5.7 stable released
        Cura 5.7 is here and it brings a handy new workflow improvement when using Thingiverse and Cura together, as well as additional capabilities for Method series printers, and a powerful way of sharing print settings using new printer-agnostic project files! Read on to find out about all of these improvements and more. 
         
          • Like
        • 26 replies
    ×
    ×
    • Create New...