Cura Billing Application

[nicholasnooch 0]

Hi all,

I was wondering how others were going about 3D printing as a service. How does one charge for a print? Do people do that manually? I am trying to create a desktop billing application for the Ultimaker 2 that works with the cura software.

I am not sure if cura produces a file with material use and estimated time.

I would the application to gather that data from cura and produce a xls file.

I am not too sure how this will look yet but does anyone have experience blending their own version of cura?

I could really use the help

Cheers

 

[gr5 2,071]

Register on 3dhubs. They use Cura to calculate volume and bill a fixed cost plus volume. You can set the pricing you want. They appear to take very little money themselves - not sure.

The cura engine can be run from the command line. Cura is broken into 2 parts - the GUI and the slicing engine. The slicing engine is I believe a C program (or mabye c++). You can pass it an stl and a profile (profile has all the settings) and it will generate a gcode file. Near the top of the gcode file I think is a comment with the volume.

But I wouldn't do any of this - I would use 3dhubs. They take care of everything (collecting money, working out disputes, advertising, rating your print results...). Also I suppose in theory after you get a relationship with a client you can take future business "on the side". This probably violates 3dhubs policy.

 

[Daid 304]

You could easy do this from a post processing plugin. As this plugin will have access to the print time and material use headers that are added for the UM2 gcode.

 

[jameshs 42]

another vote for 3dhubs

ad honestly it is not worth taking it off-line - those that have asked me to are trying to shave small amounts off an already cheep service and the 3dhubs ecosystem works well for me

 

[nallath 1,117]

And take care to look into the licence of cura beforehand. In some cases, due to it's infecting AGPL licence, it might force you to open source your software as well. If you're already planning on releasing it as an open source software, you don't need to worry.

 

[gr5 2,071]

due to it's infecting AGPL licence

 

lol. One way to think of it.