thought this looks really cool. anyone has first hand experience with this? a little steep in price so I’m not sure if it really worth with with my i3…
http://www.matterhackers.com/store/printer-accessories/mattercontrol-touch
It’s a bit silly, isn’t it? When you take in to consideration the minimal amount of time you are spending with the actual using this kind of device, compared to the many, many hours of designing parts and actual printing them, one would be much wiser to spend serious money in better drivers, arm-electronics, precision ball-screws, better you name it.
All of them things that let you print better items.
But it does look sexy, I’ll admit.
I saw it at the 3D print show earlier in the year and thought it looked pretty cool. I almost bought one, but in talking to some folks at the show it sounded as if, at the time, they were still working out some bugs.
I haven’t gone back to revisit it so not sure if everything’s been ironed out.
It is literally a $50 Android tablet, without a battery, and their program added to it. So it’s a $250 slicer & controller app.
You can buy a Windows tablet and run their Windows slicer & controller on it, for a third their asking price. Make sure you get a tablet that can be powered & charging when the USB port is in use.
That’s exactly what I did. Bought a Winbook tablet running full Windows 8.1 with S3D installed on it. It’s connected to all my printers using a USB hub. $100 for the winbook & &150 for the S3D license.
If they sold just the android app, then they might have a winner. Yeah, I use a cheap tablet that runs full windows 8.1. Using my old android phones would be kind of cool.
or you can use a rpi2 as a pc with openscad and octoprint …
I was considering this until I tried out Matter Control (their slicer) and saw how inferior it is. This product is really not worth it.
I was playing around with the desktop version of it and it looks like it has all the nitty gritty options available for tweaking.
Not sure if options available = quality?
@Step_Cia Test it against your default slicer. Matter Control takes a really long time to slice and I found it didn’t produce as good results as Cura did on my Printrbot but the results were still pretty good. Test out a 3DBenchy.
@Adam_Steinmark i find matter control does really long print sequences, cura seems to be the best at breaking the code down into smaller chunks which makes for more direct commands, you end up with more lines of code but its faster for some odd reason
@Matteo_Pascolini your wording was a bit confusing, is Cura or Matter Control faster?
i find cura generates more ‘code’ but is better and faster overall ( for me) I have a SeeMeCNC Rostock max kit that i put together and cura seems to result in a better overall print…
MatterControl is very limited relative to other slicers. It’s also buggy and crashes a lot.
Better to buy a raspberry pi and simplify3d
@Matteo_Pascolini MatterSlice is based on Cura. We’ve made some improvements - things like support material, triangle and hexagon infill patterns, bridging detection, etc - but overall, they are still very similar. It’s not likely that the differences in results are based on the Cura vs. MatterSlice. I’ve got a Max v1 with well over 4000 machine hours on it. I’ve tried pretty much every slicer out there, and you can absolutely get good results with all of them. Not on every print, and some are more consistent than others with certain geometries, but the vast majority of “issues” are settings related - not limitations inherent to the slicing engine.
@Mike_Kelly_Mike_Make can you elaborate on “very limited relative to other slicers”?
to be honest I may have gotten mixed up with slic3r… I used matter control to generate gcode today to make the new pip boy mark 4 parts and i got ‘acceptable’ results (i agree that the operators setting up of the machine is critical to the finish) but I find it sometimes does support and sometimes not… and yes I have looked and my setting is minimal starting at 20 degrees, when I printed the datasette there was no support on the curved bottom sections therefore they came out flat and crappy and not rounded (which is a pain in the ass) … I might try 0 degrees and see if it comes out nice …
If you set it to 45 degrees, it would likely generate support. 20 degrees probably means the opposite of what you’re expecting. 20 degrees means it will print anything up to a 70 degree overhang with no support.
@Taylor_Landry ??? wtf really, thats not very well explained… and yes, then I made a booboo then… 
sigh
There’s more detailed explanation of all the settings here - http://www.matterhackers.com/articles/slice-settings-explained---part-3
Doesn’t have a temp graph. Doesn’t show error codes unless you go 3 menus deep and enable terminal. Doesn’t allow for customizable UI like pronterface in cura. Doesn’t enable G29 autolevel consistently. Can’t keep a consistent UI.
There’s really no reason to use it when Repetier-Host has all the features it doesn’t have. Or Cura.