I have been reading a number of articles about a printer control software that

3D Printing
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I have been reading a number of articles about a printer control software that will work with most 3D printers on the market. It is called MatterControl and is downloadable free of charge. It has add-on programs available for it, some of which could cost something. Has anyone out there tried it and if so what are your impressions. Their web site is http://www.mattercontrol.com. An article about it was included on the 3dprinterworld website at http://www.3dprinterworld.com/article/mattercontrol-11-and-image-convertor-released. Any input would be appreciated.

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This looks very interesting!

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I’ve used it with some success and relied on it exclusively for a little while before I got my auto tram correction solution up and running because it has a tram correction (“bed leveling”) function built into it that works quite well (completely manual set up with lots of user input, so not at all automatic).

I never used MatterControl to actually drive the printer mind you, but only used it to slice models with the tram correction in the G-code, which I then saved to sd card for printing (printrbot GO! v.1).

It uses either Slic3r or Cura for slicing, both with slightly dumbed down feature sets, but with most of the important stuff intact. It also has a print qeue type feature so you can load and slice multiple models to prepare for printing, but I didn’t really use this feature either. It worked well for what I used it for.

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It works for me. I briefly used some of the alternative open source programs to run my Airwolf 3DXL printer, but settled on MatterControl since it seems to work fine.

I also bought the new image converter plug-in. I haven’t had much time to play with it as I’m out of town at the moment, but it makes 2D raster image to 3D very easy. The way I plan to use it most of the time is to draw a 2D shape, import it into MatterControl, then export an STL file, which I’ll then use with OpenSCAD designs. It makes creating odd-shaped cutouts or “embossed” printing of text easy. This is still a little awkward, but easier than using Inkscape or other drawing program to convert a vector file to DXF file for importing into OpenSCAD.