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Re: [LUG] Cheapish 3d printers for linux

 

Dear Tom,

I think that the situation is even better than Michael suggests! I can't
advise on the hardware aspects, but I have some knowledge of 3D
modelling software that I can share. My apologies if you are already up
on the software side of things, if so hopefully others here may benefit.

As shown on OctoPrint's download page, it is not only available for the
Raspberry Pi but also for many Linux distributions and even Windows/Mac.
To test this I installed OctoPrint on a AMD64 virtual machine running
plain Debian 10 - who knows why OctoPrint requires a Python library
named 'emoji', but it certainly works! The installation succeeded first
time and took about half an hour. I don't have a 3D printer to test it
with, but the web interface running without error is a good sign.

I'll agree that OpenSCAD is an excellent tool for designing models to
print. One designs the models with code, which defines shapes and how
they interact. So you might start with a cube shape, then define a
smaller cube to cut away at the bigger one, thus making a hollow,
lid-less box. This can seem a bit counter-intuitive if you are used to
point-and-click modelling, but its biggest advantage is that, once you
design the model, you can modify parts really easily without starting
from scratch: if you have a screw thread subtracted from a shape, then
you only need to change a few numbers to make that screw hole a
different size.

Then there's the elephant in the room: Blender! Blender is certainly
bigger than the other options, as it is an entire '3D creation suite' -
modelling, rendering, animation etc etc... For just modelling, it is
very useful if you want to create curvy objects for which being smooth
is more important than being absolutely precise.

Upon some inspection, it turns out that Cura is licensed under the LGPL.
Ultimately, therefore, you can use an entirely free (libre) 'stack'
(OctoPrint, Blender/FreeCAD/OpenSCAD, Cura and Linux) for 3D printing!

Best wishes and good luck with your printing,

Sebastian

Freenode: 'seabass'

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