Teaser: we are rewriting a huge portion of Marlin.

3D Printing
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41

OK, I get the idea that a phone interface is cheaper to implement and probably easier to use than an LCD screen.

But I thought that the idea of getting printers into schools was to foster creativity. In other words, we want to give the students tools that allow them to dream up new designs and then print them. Can you really do CAD on a phone? I assume not… which means that the creative students have access to “real” computers. Which means that they have access to even better screens and keyboards than phones have.

Otherwise, the 3D printer is simply a way to create a local copy of something that someone else designed. That’s not really very creative. Fascinating for a little while, but the luster will wear off.

Now, I guess there’s the special case of bot farms reproducing parts “in quantity” - I guess the cloud server and the phone interface makes sense for them. But how many of these are there? And wouldn’t they belong to a business instead of a school or an individual?

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@Jay_Sinnett I totally agree with the need for all of us, students especially, to learn problem solving and design. I wish every single thing that came off every printer in the world involved brain-engagement from the user!!! But there is definitely value in just printing too.

Anyway, my kids started design w tinkercad- an online tool in a browser. 123d catch is a phone app that lets people scan using their phone… And there is a bunch of 3D sculpting and design app for the iPad and iPhone.

My best scanner is the Stucture scanner which attaches to my iPhone and these phone 3D scanners are getting better and better!

The iPad Pro has a new drawing app (uMake… Look at uMake.xyz) where you use a stylus to actually draw to design- Finally!! That app is getting rave reviews. Interestingly, the iPad pro has a better screen than any Apple computer ever and it has crazy tech to let you draw using pencil pressure, even angle of attack.

Tablets and phones ARE the student computers for kids today. Period. I think we need to meet them where they live and draw them into the world of design, creativity and helping them share what they have done and even collaborate. I think we need every 3D printer to work with any screen.

Fusion 360 is my choice for kids to learn mechanical design and that is a connected cloud app. Autodesk has made a huge move to the small screen and cloud connected apps.

So I think every classroom and business IS connected to the Internet. I also think cloud apps are gaining adoption and used in every school and business. The trend in computing is heavy toward phones and apps. Small screens and touch devices are getting better and better. I don’t see any of this as restricting creativity or serious design.

In fact, I am encouraged that the interface to design will likely not include a mouse and a keyboard… It will be students with a “pencil” in their hand drawing on an (electronic) piece of paper.

I want our printers to fit easily into this emerging toolset… Just take your new fangled pencil and click print to your Printrbot… From anywhere. No keyboard or usb cable required. And while you are chatting with your friends about your design… Take out your phone and send it to your friend without the need for a laptop and logging into email to send the attachment.

So that’s my reasoning why we need to transition 3D printing to mobile devices.

Brook

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I don’t see F360 as a good example of a design package for manufacturing. Carl Bass touched on it a a talk I heard him give when some manufacturing types were asking some of the 2D cad features and some other features from Inventor. It’s good for the hobby or product design crowd but for manufacturing it’s lacking. I’m trying to convert over from Inventor but the lack of some features and the barriers to interoperability with other apps is a huge downside. Many others in the manufacturing sector agree.

Those that are manufacturing or doing prototyping or short batch work aren’t using Printrbots. Some may but at that end of the market I’ve never seen a Printrbot in one of those applications. While there are good things about the Printrbot they don’t have the feature set most need for full scale prototyping.

I don’t see the comparison that Rick made re: machinists vs. machine operators. You didn’t learn how to develop film or set type prior to using your inkjet printer. I too lament that many machine ops aren’t skill in the basics of using whatever machine on which they have been trained but it’s a different world than it was 40 years or so ago when I was learning about machine tools.

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@North_Woods as I mentioned, the Printrbot will work as it always has with open source locally installed software. No change there. But with the wifi add on, the cloud offers more tools than the locally installed software. We won’t force or push the cloud apps, just provide options. On install, we will recommend the cloud app but give links to the locally installed software (Cura/repetier/octoprint) as alternatives if you want to keep in offline and local.
Brook

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@dstevens_lv I realize Printrbot’s in Production environments are not the norm, but speaking for Printrbot, we use fusion 360 in our Priduction environment. We use it for any machines parts, not only for 3D printed prototypes, but for machines parts on our tormach mill, laser cut wood/acrylic, and water jet. Theoretically, it would work for injection molding too, but Brian makes those with inventor- not because it can’t, but b/c he likes it and is most comfortable in that environment. 360 is adding folded metal tools soon which should satisfy our last need for inventor.

We have one license of inventor and multiple (paid) licenses for fusion 360. It is an excellent tool for 3D printed design and more.

My recommendation for students to use 360 is for a couple of reasons. It can actually do things inventor cannot and is expressly designed to be more suitable for 3D printed designs. It has a mix if parametric 3D modeling for mechanical design and also tools for “push, pull, pinch” tools for organic design. It is free for makers and that is a leg up on the current inventor license of “free for students” then pay dearly for the pro/non-student license ($7300+). I have heard tumors second hand that inventor will adopt the free for makers license.

Brook

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@Brook_Drumm You guys are a typical use case of what F360 was designed to do. There are a bunch of startups in the valley that use it similar to how you use it. The drawbacks in other environments voiced by those were the CAM, advanced modeling and prediction and how it handles assemblies.

My biggest complaint is the limited inter-operability with other tools and formats. I do like the gist of the interface but I don’t see it as a flexible tool that plays well with others in terms of data exchange.

You guys are in a position where you can build the rest of your workflow around the tool and where your tools are compatible more or less with the CAM functionality. A fair amount of the higher level CAM didn’t launch until last month and I’m not certain it’s all been implemented. I think for orgs in the maker/ tech startup area it will be an effective tool. I don’t see it displacing tools (for example Solidworks) in heavier industries.

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I don’t disagree here. Makes sense.

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So if I understand correctly:

The new firmware will have support for ESP8266, which will only connect to your cloud service.

However those of us who wish to continue using usb serial will be able to continue with the tools we know and love/hate?

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Yes. No change for current tools, just embarking on a path to offer an alternative in the cloud. The cloud part is optional

50

Thanks for the response Brook.

I’ve been pretty loyal to PB since I got my simple metal ( I preordered one ). I usually pre-order all the new stuff.

I know it’s not related to this thread, but I’m wondering if you could point me in the right direction.

Since upgrading to the new gear extruder and the (now discontinued) metal ubis hot end, I’ve been under-extruding by at least 25% I’m not sure what’s up with that.

51

Did you recalibrate the e steps? It’s totally different. Can’t remember the new settings from memory :wink:

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The instructions didn’t have any listed

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Any tentative release date?? 1st quarter 2016… 2nd quarter 2016???

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First quarter for sure… I’m hoping January, but really it’s up to Mick… He’s our rockstar programmer doing the work :wink: I just steer the ship and cheer him on.

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Wifi on Ramps/marlin has already been done, and is supported on both repiter and marlin.

http://reprap.org/wiki/RAMPS_WiFi_Adapter

Most of printrbots woes with marlin are down to the use of the functionally challenged 1280 AVR chip, more capable boards based on the 2560/ftdi are simpler to configure and setup and dont need hours of shoehorning to get the firmware to fit into the limited hardware. Given that you can buy a complete dual extruder setup of RAMPS/Mega2560 with graphics display for $40-50, and load Marlin onto it easily I’m not sure I understand where the issue is.

Cloud solutions DO NOT work for most people outside the core western countries, internet access is often slow and spotty in many countries. Where I am I have 3 connections, 1 adsl, 1 cable, and 1 4g mobile. and there are still times when all 3 are inaccessible, my experience is not unusual for this part of the world.

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Marlin code is a programmers nightmare. If left alone, it was facing abandonment due to simple fact that it is a nightmare to program for. Our specific goals aside, cleaning up Marlin is about making it better, not just adding wifi. The new firmware allows the cheapest, lowest powered board to not only do wifi, but become a pleasure to program for. You can always throw more horsepower at a problem or more money for more processing power. But to make it better is to raise the tide, raising all ships. It’s not a waste of time. It is an investment in the future of 3D printing. To enable cheaper printers, more features that improve performance and usability, and clear the way to engage more talented programmers. More horsepower will come, but after we lay the infrastructure of clean, easy to understand code.

It is crazy how many features were either flat broken, abandoned, poorly implemented or just non-existent.

This effort is definitely lost on users. Programmers are already thanking us for the effort- they know how bad it really was. And manufacturers are currently silent, and may remain so, but what we are bringing to the table WILL be useful to them in ways unrelated to wifi or cloud services. This will definitely bring value to cloud services and third party apps out there already too…, including octoprint, 3dhubs, and the like. This rewrite brings more meaningful two-way communication between the printer and the host software. This can’t be overstated and is the major pain point for host apps.

Not sure where the benefit is for those discouraging the effort we are making- there is no downside for anyone. Ok, maybe the current developers who are working Marlin are offended by my low opinion of Marlin, but if they don’t see the shortcomings of Marlin, they aren’t seasoned programmers. Experienced programmers instantly understand the issues within two minutes of viewing the source code. I’m not a programmer and I can see it.

It’s a labor of love for the 3D printer enthusiasts. The users won’t know or care what we did and that’s fine. But they will enjoy better performance from their printers who use it and better support from us as a side benefit.

Brook

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Im not sure where the idea that marlin has been abanndoned came from, its under very active development, perhaps you are looking in the wrong repo, its no longer hosted in the ErikZam repo and the development branch which is undergoing heavy restructuring can be found on.

https://github.com/MarlinFirmware/MarlinDev

I agree that host interface is problematic, and i have suggested in the past that a json response mode be implemented to simplify parsing of machine state. I guess my mistrust of a rewrite is that perhaps it would be better if the effort was spent on improving the main Marlin Branch, instead of creating a new fork. We also still have fresh in our minds what happened at Makerbot, which colours peoples view of companies that are “rewriting OSS”. I have not seen any discussion at all between the printrbot team and the marlin dev team about the future of the firmware, im sure if that had occured that it would have been warmly accepted. Im going to make the Marlin Dev team aware of this disussion to see if it is not too late to open those discussions.

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@Tim_Hawkins As long as Brook posts what they’ve done I don’t see an issue with it. If the Marlin core team want to implement any of the changes they can take them right from his codebase. I think the new fork should be in a repo right now but until he distributes it he’s not obligated to release the source.

Marlin has become bloated with features not everyone uses (some that only a few use and others that work poorly or not at all) and the implementation of some of those features have been less than optimal.

I’m appreciative of what they’ve done and I’m glad to be able to use it but it’s to the point now where it’s unwieldy and cumbersome. the lack of programming guidelines and standards makes it difficult to maintain. It’s been an absolute pie fight for the last year or so. The RC2 and RC3 releases of the current rev are not buildable out of the box in some pretty normal configs. There are syntax errors, lib conflicts as well as a pretty significant architecture change with the board pin handling between those RCs.

I see it as more of a software engineering management issue. It’s no secret on the IRC that many Reprap firmware hackers are no longer as enthusiastic about Marlin as they once were. For users as long as you can flash something on your board (or have someone else do it) it’s not such an issue. But for manufacturers and kit packagers like myself it’s problematic to the point where implementing current builds can be fraught with peril.

I see the EOL for not only 8 bit standalone controllers but for the current branch of Marlin sooner than anyone might think. Many if not most deltas consume more resources than an 8 bit host can offer and new connectivity and UX/UI features don’t really have any more room on the current platform. I see Brook’s project not going far enough. The sooner the focus is shifted to 32 bit solutions with loadable module parts with the connectivity and UX abstracted the quicker we’ll be able to implement the next generation of interface and feature enhancements.

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Sorry I want more clear- there are features that are in there that do not work and we assume they have been abandoned since they are quite old. Mark itself is indeed very active.

We have written the json feature you spoke of, btw.

Community development is difficult when many parties are involved. And one clear vision or road map with specific milestones is needed to get to a destination quickly. Our programmer is one man who can move extremely fast toward one clear goal. So we opted not to make it a community affair. We don’t pretend to have an understanding of where Marlin wants to go. We just know where we are going and what we needed to get there. So here we go.

We sincerely hope our efforts are helpful in some obvious areas that Marlin could benefit. But we expect to hear that Marlin isn’t interested in all our decisions. No problems there. We don’t need a Swiss Army knife, we just need a very limited, specific tool.

The json feature we have developed should actually make short work of folding back in mcodes and features we flatly discarded. The core is as lightweight as possible so many varieties can coexist if people want to build on out code.

The comparison of Printrbot and MakerBot is a flawed analogy. We are open sourcing everything and giving away our work for free. This has been over a year in process and discovery, although the coding is around two months work. This is a free derivative and has no resemblance to anything that should make anyone nervous. My track record speaks for itself. Although I do have a brash, unsettling approach at times, I have a warm heart toward all who have contributed before me and wish to upset no one. But drawing lines in the sand is polarizing, I know. Profitable companies need those lines… They aren’t fighting lines, daring people not to cross, they are goals defining scope and direction and values specific to our company.

Talking about all this is for the purpose of open discussion and to stir up interest, not to piss off anyone. My programmer would prefer I shut up I am sure :wink: he knows the code will speak for itself . We both have a binary approach to software for a profitable company… We do want we want and people vote with their dollars and time and energy.

I really do want the best for the community and other small companies who are also contributing to the community effort. I do challenge the notion that all companies are contributing… It’s just not even close to true. There are a few standouts, but it’s becoming rare, unfortunately. I think this massive rewrite will indeed be seen as a moment of major contribution, but time will tell, you don’t have to take my word for it. And Printrbot has other contributions in the works… A very significant upgrade to Tinyg completely funded by us to name one. That will be perhaps be an even greater contribution to open source 3D printing, since it will make significant leaps forward in several areas and trounce existing performance on arm-based processor boards.

It’s an interesting time for 3D printing and new tools are needed to keep us all from stagnating. We need more performance, better math, more speed, better UI, ux, better slicing, model repair, better modeling tools, and better results. Printrbot will do its parts to push things forward.

Brook

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@dstevens_lv I completely agree.

As far as our efforts not going far enough, I get that you would think that if it’s assumed we are sticking w 8bit avr. But we’re not. We want to give 8 bit AVR systems currently in the wild more life. In my opinion, assuming that 8 bit avrs aren’t adequate is a result of the code that runs on them. If you dedicate them to just moving the machine, it would be years before the speed of machines outpaces even an 8 bit avr. The problem is feature bloat and sub-par code that bogs down the processor. If you offload UI, slicing, LCD interfaces and the like, you get a huge amount of headroom.

The problem w migrating the current code to ARM is you just inherit all these bad practices and the core doesn’t get any better… The computer os world has suffered from this. Bad code is bad code. The programmers I respect make magic happen on seemingly underpowered hardware. Wozniak was one who programmer, dare I say, artist (?), that made a huge leap forward on the same hardware or even less than ibm had. I’m not saying that’s us, btw. Atari had some crazy talented coders that did wonders too.

The bar has been lowered for beginning coders to start coding and lower barriers to entry are good, but sadly, the hardware that runs the code has far outpaced the need for programmers to hone their skills. The Internet has given access to libraries for specific hardware to be readily available, but in many cases it is overkill and does not require coders to understand how things work or to know what exactly they need from it. Memory prices and hard drive space is cheap, so bloated, inelegant code is the norm now. If it works, it’s a pass. For me, this is sad. I don’t think we need more coders, we need more talented coders and less hacks. We need better code instead of the ever-growing mass of crapware out there. One case in point is the iOS App Store. They made it easy for anyone to publish code and we got millions of really bad apps that watered down the cool-aid and make it hard to find the real gems.

Enough soap-boxing.

We hope the Printrbot Marlin reboot will distinguish our company as one who cares about the code. We love elegant things and want to do better. We want to attract better coders and give those large teams at large 3D printing companies a run for their money. They, too, have their own problems… Dragging legacy code and corporate red tape into a tight turn on the road to success is hard. Nimble companies have an advantage.

Of course, if we can attract serious talent to the table to extend functionality and improve performance, UI, ux, etc… We will do well. We are driven to outmaneuver the competition and lead in innovation. This project is one example of that, I hope.

Of course if users don’t see a real-world difference in the final product, then we will have wasted our time.

Getting past this inside-baseball infrastructure development milestone should usher in a more exciting focus on interface, usability and feature rich ecosystem. If we can challenge the deep pocketed companies out there that already have all these tools in place, then maybe this little 3D printing surge will mean something for the Everyman/woman. And maybe open source 3D printing will have made a mark as a rail industry disruptor. That’s the dream.

Brook