toddmo
commented
2 years ago What I don't understand about this plugin being considered obsolete is that this plugin allows you to slice right from inside Octoprint. Cura doesn't.
With Cura, you have to slice it up outside Octoprint, then send it to Octoprint. So what? The slicing files and jobs aren't integrated into Octoprint. It's another app; it's not integrated like this plugin.
The value of this plugin is never having to leave Octoprint. So how exactly is slicing inside Octoprint obsolete? Explain it to me like I'm 5.
Blackbox2018
jbishop129
jarethmt
john-clark
John-Mc
Garr-Garr
Hey Guys, So I see this plugin was largely abandoned, reason being that modern version of Cura support direct print to Octoprint. This makes sense for a generally normal, single printer, single user setup, which let's be honest, represents a lot of the community. However, as the community grows and 3D printing becomes more mainstream, public demand for on-demand 3D printing services is growing, and more 3D printing businesses are popping up to fill the void. While I can see that for hobbyist use, local Cura + send to Octoprint is fine, I think there's something being largely unexplored here, namly print farms. Consider this.... You start printing, and as more friends and family find out you print, you start getting requests for custom prints. A more come in, you decide, "eh, screw it, I'll buy another 3D printer so I can keep printing". Well, over time, one turns to two, and two turns to four. Before long, you've got a small print farm running. Then, you finally decide to hire someone on to help out. Here's where I see the potential... Right now, more than one user environments are lacking. If you have two users, they probably both have their own workstations (laptops). Right now, there's absolutely no easy way to share Cura profiles between environments, short of export / import. There's no means of serving them up from a central source of truth. You have to export all of your Cura profiles and instruct the new person in how to import them. Then, any changes to profiles on a local machine for small tweaks (first layer height, temps, etc) results in a mismatch on the profiles between your machines, and the best you can do is export / import again to try to get back to sync. One solution would be a "Cura profile server" of sorts where maybe Ultimaker allows you to store your profiles and download them to a different account. Per all of my research so far, however, this doesn't exist, and I can't see any signs of Ultimaker adding it. As a closed source company, we're ultimately at their mercy here, and I'm not sure it'll ever happen. I couldn't see an analog for PrusaSlicer either. So hopefully, you can see the conundrum... We can't share profiles in a multi-user environment and keep them up to date right now in any easy manner. This right here is why I think this plugin still has a VERY valid purpose for a growing community of small hobbyist printers turned local machine shop owner. If this plugin existed, all slicing would be tied to the Octoprint instance, which is directly tied to the printer in question. That means all profiles are actually served up by the machine itself, and if someone makes a tweak to a specific machine to keep it running smoothly, anyone else that wants to slice for that machine later will have the most up to date settings used. This seems like an extraordinarily valuable use case. I'd love to see if I could help out in maintaining this somehow, but unfortunately I'm woefully short on time right now. I'm very familiar with web apps and github, however, and could definitely maintain this plugin IFF there was actually a community here that would value this use case, and would be able to contribute pull requests to further development. I can definitely create a list of "things that need done to get things updated", and help get things on track, and help to manage features as they come in, but I really don't have a lot of time to devote to dev. Really, the point of this issue was to raise a thought as to the long term outlook for this project, and see if anyone else is starting to share any similar sentiments. I figure if anyone else sees this issue and is possibly willing to devote some time to help bring this plugin back to life, it's worth trying to rally them together. So, anyone else that could benefit from this use case, or is this just me?