Control software is IMHO the current weak point for nearly all hobbyist grade 3D printer systems and in particular Open Source ones. This is not for a lack of trying there are many attempts to varying degrees of success. You may have heard that we are developing our own control software as well. Below I will review a few of the current options and explain why I am more or less not happy with them. This by no means says you can't use the other software, you most certainly can if you prefer, in fact we are currently until the H-bot control software is in a more stable state.

Let me first start off with stating what I think control software should be. This piece of software should be simple and elegant providing ideally a button to load models (preferably STL with the control software containing slicing), buttons for print, stopping, and pausing, and a mechanism for placement of the model(s) on the build platform.

The unfortunate truth however is that the needed systems are just not to this point yet. So many other things like temperature, homing and speed controls are needed.

Lets take ReplicatorG as an example. This is probably the most common control software out there. It has integrated SkeinForge for slicing, has some nice buttons to move objects around and generally looks nice with nice 3D views of the build platform and objects. There are problems with it however. The main ones deal with connectivity issues as well as problems with spooling GCode on larger file sets (approx. > 50 MB). Additionally the skeinforge integration is so tight that it lags skeinforge development by over 10 versions!

At the other end of the spectrum is SendG. Technically efficient with no problem with files that can run for days ( I have heard of a run that took 4.5 days!) it is nothing more than a command line entry. Certainly not a problem for those technically inclined but the vast majority don't even know where to begin with this.

In between is PrintRun. A nice efficient gui control. The graphics of the part and build have a little to be desired but are more than sufficient as they are 2d renderings of the above head view. This particular program (at least with the HBot) has issues with jogging, and large file spooling. I have also had some connection problems but they are greatly reduced from ReplicatorGs and generally occur only if something chokes.

Those are the open source solutions. Now the single closed source control software that I know of that can talk with the arduino firmware system is NetFabb. At $200 its not cheap. It includes a nice albeit outdated slicer (Does not handle volumetric calculations) and can in some cases connect to the machine. That said many have enough problems with the connection that they only use Netfabb as a slicer and use other software to send the code to the 3D printer. Development seems to have slowed to a crawl in recent months as well.

So while all these are certainly viable solutions and developers are working on them I would like to at least try to make a smoother experience. For that reason I have started a HBot Control software. I will start a thread shortly on this so that everyone can see the progress as it comes.

Note: First order of business now that I have a prototype is to work out kinks in the Firmware for our design. As such it may be a bit to get that thread started.

 

Nice and informative writeup, Nick. Thanks!