Hi John and Community.

CAD & CAM Tool Chain ChiliPeppr
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Hi John and Community.

I look at the statistics you recently published about Chillipeppr usage to be quite fascinating. Quite the counterpoint to other comments Ive read that express concerns about not having an offline version of Chillipeppr.

I have read explanation that John has posted about how to set up an offline version of Chillipeppr, but Im left asking myself the question why?

(Just so you know I manage a software offering in a very conservative industry that is undergoing a shift - moving to the cloud and what we call the Industrial Internet of things IIoT)

The biggest justification for this conservative industry to move to cloud based solutions is the “Total Cost of ownership”

Lower upgrade cost
Lower deployment cost.
Lower obsolescence / Cost of ownership cost (Dying PCs and operating system)
Platform independence

Now overlay the fact that software does not have a license cost - (I don’t want to says its FREE as it diminishes perceived valued and that all users should be contributing to improvements or help others is support forums)

Motivated collaborators can expand the value of the solution by providing new workspaces, widgets and features (and presumably maintenance and bug resolution). This ultimately means that you end up with a Gcode loading solution that is evergreen in nature.

So I guess what Im really to trying to say is that I cant see a downside. Johns recent video on Job recovery was also quite nifty (although personally Im not at a point yet to know whether this allows for a recovery strategy from all modes of failure).

Im not saying that Mach3 or universal GCode sender aren’t a good fit for someone, just not me, and perhaps if I were a business whose software is business critical in order to meet a lengthy back log of orders, I can see why you might want an “on premiss” solution.

My prediction however, is it won’t be too long before the broader machining community figures out that the pro’s far outways the con’s of the entire approach and that more proprietary approaches will no longer be sustainable.

Onward and upward…

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When I had to choose to make ChiliPeppr an online vs offline solution, I went with online given all the thought process you just described above. The cloud is such a part of our lives that it will be everywhere and will be reliable. So, it was a risk, but worth it. The biggest benefit gained is that ChiliPeppr does not need to get weighed down by supporting multiple old versions as it progresses. That creates such a drag on an open source project that it can fold in upon itself. I always believed that over time it would be the best model and I do think the usage is showing that it’s the right approach.

However, ChiliPeppr is open source, and so the community can do whatever it wants with it including creating an offline version. Attempts have been made like pistolero’s version at https://github.com/pistolero/chilipeppr-offline but it doesn’t seem many folks went that direction.