PeerPrint

PeerPrint is a framework for sharing 3D printing tasks across a peer-to-peer network of 3D printers.

Mission

PeerPrint's mission is to facilitate coordination of a diverse network of 3D printers to enable efficient, reliable, and scalable 3D printing.

According to the US EPA, industry and transportation contribute over 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

While 3D printing (particularly filament) is not emissions-free, networked printing through peerprint can provide:

• better efficiency (fewer printers that are idle less often)
• eco-friendly material choices, rather than new plastic which is recycled less than 10% of the time.
• lower transportation costs (transporting 1kg of filament uses way fewer boxes, packaging, and transportation volume than tens - or hundreds - of small parts)

More 3D printers coordinating on the same work also means more parallelism in printing, and less disruption when one or more printers develops a problem and stops printing.

Integration

PeerPrint is not intended to be used directly, although it can be for development and monitoring purposes. Instead, it's imported as a dependency of other 3D printing software.

Integration in Octoprint via the Continuous Print plugin is tracked here. There is not currently a guide for integration, but one will emerge as part of that effort.

Development

Installation

Installation for development requires Docker and docker-compose. Install these first, then get the repository with

git clone https://github.com/smartin015/peerprint

Usage

Start the test servers:

docker-compose build && docker-compose run

In a new console, run this to start a debug shell into one of the servers:

docker-compose run cli --volume=./peerprint/networking/testdata/server1/

Type help to see a list of all commands, or see how they're implemented in peerprint/peerprint/server.py in the Shell class.

Testing

See .travis.yml for CI testing configuration

All tests can also be run manually via docker-compose run test

Deploying

python3 -m build
python3 -m twine upload --repository testpypi dist/*