MatterControl - looking for alpha testers

Hi everyone,

Here at MatterHackers we've been working on some new software, called MatterControl, to help organize (queue) prints, interface with Slic3r, and control your printer. Basically, it is all-in-one print management software. We recognize there is some great software out there already, but we specifically wanted to improve the workflow of managing a complex batch of parts.



We have been using MatterControl internally to manage our print services for the past few months. While there is still much we want to do feature-wise, we figure it is ready to the point where other people in the community might find it useful. With that in mind, we are looking for alpha testers to try it out and let us know how it works with their particular setup. Any assistance or feedback you can give will make the software better for everyone.

Our current version is Windows only, but we are working on Mac and Linux support, and should have them available soon.

We are commited to RepRap and are making everything we can open source. We use agg-sharp for the GUI, imaging back-end, Slic3r for generating tool paths, and a bunch of other open source tools internally. The only thing that is closed is the actual queue interface. We plan to add (optional) integration with our web services and feel this will give our users the best privacy and security.



Any comments you have will be greatly appreciated. We are working hard to make this a great piece of software for RepRap and open source printers.

You can download it here.

You can also read our getting started guide to help after downloading.

Lars Brubaker
MatterHackers

Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 05/02/2013 08:36PM by LarsBrubaker.

Just downloaded. Haven't tried printing anything yet but it looks pretty amazing. Looking forward to trying it out - will let you know if I have any feedback.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/02/2013 12:30AM by rtully.

Glad you are having a good first impression.
Please let us know how it is actually working for you.
We are looking forward to addressing any issues the community finds.

Lars.

I like the look and simplicity.

Will try and print using my M2 later today.

I see the starting guide is a bit different that the actual alpha build.
in areas such as the Adjust Printer and Print Settings (show as Printer Controls and Slice Settings in the guide)

Which version of Slic3r is embedded?
I can't find an area to select another engine either.

any future dev work planned for dual extruder machines?
I see some control fields for dual, but wonder if it is a mature control of them.
Only Extruder 1 exists under the Printer settings, so individual control of Ext 2 is missing?

any fields for implementing your auto z and leveling?

Great work and one of the best GUIs I've seen.

Hey davew_tx,

I'm glad you like the look of MatterControl and thanks for the feedback about the guide, it often gets a bit out of date as we update the software.

We are using the latest Slic3r .9.9. We try to stay on the latest at all times.

We will be integrating our new slicing engine MatterSlice in the next few months. The great new feature is that we can reliably slice non-manifold models, enabling normal 3D artists to make great printable designs.

We do not yet have good support for dual extruders. However, it is coming soon. Slicer has good supports for dual extrusion, we just have to hook up our UI.

Auto bed height and leveling are definitely on the horizon. We are working with several RepRap manufacturers to improve the setup process and this is will be a big part of that.

Thanks again for the feedback. Please let us know here any issues you have. We want to make sure MatterControl is insanely awesome in every way.

Quick couple of questions:
What slicing engine would you like to see integrated?
Do you have dual extruders?
What sorts of tasks do you wish were easier in your control software?

Lars.

I'm developing a lifting head dual, all metal hotend. It is driven by a micro motor and cam arrangement.
The head also has an automatic retracting z-switch for probing the surface in a few places, so I'm going to apply the matrix algebra corrections.

I currently slice and print using Creator or Kisslicer/Printrun. Used Slic3r in the past as well.
I have an M2 and a large custom homebuilt I call Mitus video mitus prints
I think your slicing engine or Slic3r would be enough, so no request for any specific.

I'd like to see controls for the extruder change, with purge box area and wiper brush.
Not really sure the look and needs of this request in terms of GUI fields

Also, maybe a canned calibration part or routine to align the dual heads and determine the proper offsets, in X and Y.
Might need a z offset field, since the z-probe is proud of the extruder tips, keeping the z probing from colliding the tips.
would be cool to have a z test routine that uses the offset you think you have, then prints a road varying the z linearly next to a number scale (previousy printed??) Then you look next to the scale where the road is the best crush, and enter that number for z. (?? kind of like the Stratasys cal routine)

my needs might not fit the majorities, but I think the industry is headed towards dual retracting heads eventually.
The materials are evolving quickly, with lots of materials people getting involved recently.

Dave

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/04/2013 03:33PM by davew_tx.

So, I had a chance to use the MC on my M2.

I know it's operator error, but i have an issue with layer 3 and above.

With the first two layers, i have good control over speed. MC lets me change them, and the M2 moves as expected.

No matter what settings I've tried, from speeds, to infill to? , layer 3 and above slow down to a crawl.

Any idea?

Hey Dave,

That is a very strange problem. I don't think there is even way to tell slic3r to change the speed after the the second layer.

Let's see:

Is this only happening on the one part?
If so, would it be possible to send that part to me?
If not, can you send me the contents of your [userfolder]\AppData\Local\MatterControl\data\gcode\?
Or you can send me both .

My email is larsbrubaker@matterhackers.com.

Thank you, we really appreciate all your feedback so far.

Lars.

OK, I emailed the gcode and the config that I just now made.

Run it and see if it slows to a crawl after at the third layer.

Dave

Hey Dave,

Thanks for sending the gcode. The good thing is that we now have the answer .

Cooling is turned on in the slice settings, which causes the printer to slow down if the layer will take less than 30 seconds. You only have shells printing at these higher layers, so the printer needs to run slowly to print them with cooling.

You can see the change in the speed with this gcode viewer. It looks like it slows down to about 1/2 the speed of the previous layers.

Our goal is to make these types of results more obvious. It should be clear that the printer is doing what it is supposed to be doing.

Lars.

that fixed the slowdown and the gcode viewer is really helpful.
i can see that every layer is near 30 seconds, which is like a governor on the speed.

I'm printing very well.

there is an issue in the crotch area of the Pink Panther lady, after slicing.
I'm doing a zero infill, 3 perimeter vase kind of print.
There are 11 layers with zigzag infill, which doesn't go well, because it is in the air and unsupported.

any idea about that? I don't get the same results with other engines.

I will drill into it tomorrow.

Hi Dave,

Did you have any luck figuring out your crotch problem .

We just put up a new version of MatterControl 0.7.5. It now includes slic3r 0.9.10b (the latest) it may be able to do a better job on your part.

New Features:
Driver installation
Slice settings pre-configuration (for select printers)
Automatic printer port detection
Connection troubleshooting
Calibration assistance
SD Card Export

And many, many small fixes and improvements.

Lars.

My printer can automatically eject parts once finished.

Is matter control capable of continually printing one object after the other without human interaction?

As in:
Execute GCODE1 - send code to printer, monitor printer, let it finish
Execute an ejection GCODE (Not 100% needed becaused ejection code can be added to end of GCODE1 but would be a nice feature)
Execute GCODE2 - etc
Eject
Execute GCODEN ....

You get the idea.

At the moment I am just concatonating many GCODES into one file and printing them. But this removes the ability to dynamically add or remove objects from the queue.
I am considering a small printrun python based script to do this, but it looks like you guys are 90% of the way there and have a nice GUI to boot.

Good work!

Edit: I am getting a 404 on the download link. Will a linux/mono version be available?
Network features to add and remove prints from the queue would make this a pretty perfect solution.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2013 01:25PM by SanjayM.

Hey Sanjay,

We are currently working on a plugin system, and I would love to adopt your specific needs as one of our demonstration plugins.

Once we get the system up and running there will be an SDK with many samples, and now yours will be one of them.

Thanks for the catch on the download link. It's fixed now.

Oh, and yes there will be a Mac and Linux build soon. One of our programmers is working on it at the moment

Lars Brubaker

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/01/2013 06:48PM by LarsBrubaker.

I get this problem:
[imageshack.us]

Fresh install - never tried before so no residual settings etc.

Hey Lesani,

I don't have a computer that has this issue on it but I'm hoping I have addressed it with this new test.
[dl.dropboxusercontent.com]

If you have a chance to download and run the version above, I would love to know if it fixes your bug.

I believe the problem may have to do with if we are copying gl texture data into a new image or an existing one.

In OpenTK there may be a problem with GL.TexSubImage2D on your card.

Thanks in advance.

Lars.

HI, Lars.

I have the same problem than Lesani. Installing the version you posted doesn't solves the problem.

LarsBrubaker Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hey Lesani,
>
> I don't have a computer that has this issue on it
> but I'm hoping I have addressed it with this new
> test.
> [dl.dropboxusercontent.com]
> rControlSetup.exe
>
> If you have a chance to download and run the
> version above, I would love to know if it fixes
> your bug.
>
> I believe the problem may have to do with if we
> are copying gl texture data into a new image or an
> existing one.
>
> In OpenTK there may be a problem with
> GL.TexSubImage2D on your card.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Lars.

What type of video card are you using? We would love to get to the bottom of this issue.

Lars.

I have and -old- Nvidia 6600GT AGP. The drivers are up to date.

I got the same results with a Nvidia Quadro 570.

We have fixed the rendering bug!

The new version will be out ASAP but no later than October 8th.

If you want to test it now, you can
download a test build.

Thanks, It works fine now!

Thanks for the feedback.

The released version has been updated and now includes this fix. Updating to the latest, or downloading a new installer should fix this problem for everyone.

You can get it here.

Any chance you could let people change feed rates on the z axis? I can't manually move or use the auto bed level because the z axis speed is too fast for my Prusa. Z axis works fine on homing.

Brian

@sonex128

Thanks for the feedback, these are the types of problems we love to hear about (so we can fix them). We should be able to get that out in the next build within the next two weeks.

Hello, this thread seems old, so I hope it's not too old for posting a question...

I just downloaded, installed and started MatterControlSetup-1.2.0.deb on my ubuntu-14.04, quite fresh installed machine.
It required mono, so I installed mono-complete as suggested on the command-line.
First, I was asked me to enter info about my serial connection and my printer. I dont have the printer attached to the machine where I want to slice. I have a weak CPU machine connected to it, where I just use pronterface to do tell the printer (mendel90) to print from the SD card. Then I have my strong CPU machine for modelling and slicing, which is computationally expensive. But I entered the standard settings to make it happy.
I played around with the GUI and loaded an STL. Looked nice.

I looked at the "about" section, and clicked on the auto update button. It tried to download but nothing happened. For a while my gnome session went unresponsive, and the finally I could select File -> Exit in the menu.

Next time I started it, the GUI popped up and then disappeared immediately, with this message:

Unhandled Exception:
System.IO.IOException: Felaktig filidentifierare
at System.IO.Ports.SerialPortStream.ThrowIOException () [0x00000] in :0
at System.IO.Ports.SerialPortStream.Dispose (Boolean disposing) [0x00000] in :0
at System.IO.Ports.SerialPortStream.Finalize () [0x00000] in :0

So, it seems to be something with my printer not being connected that triggers it.
I couldn't find any file in my home dir related to MatterControl, like for instance .mattercontrol or anything new in my file tree (.config) that could have with this to do, so I couldn't reset my configuration, if there were any.
I uninstalled both MatterControl and mono, re-installed both and tried again. Same thing.

Maybe it is this bug:
[github.com]

I aslo wonder why you chose the .net framework for an open source project?

Sorry if this is not strictly belonging to the topic of this thread.
Best regards,
David

Hi dawa,

Try deleting your MatterControl.db file in ~/.local/share/MatterControl. The Linux version is still in beta and the update mechanism is somewhat broken at the moment. Eventually we hope to get updates going through apt.

Thanks! I'll try that!