Idea: Slic3r as Service

Hi everyone,

more and more people are trying to control RepRaps from small and not so powerfull computer, like Raspberry, BeagleBoard and more recently the PcDuino. These are cheap computers to buy and run (very low power consumption), which can run Pronterface, but have a hard time to run slicing software, like Slic3r.

So, it seems that there is some run for a version of Slic3r running in a server, accessed via APIs.
Does that make sense? Has anyone else thought about this? What would be the next step to get this going, if the community expresse interest?

In addition, it is possible to buy cheap android tablets for around $100 bucks this days. I would love having a touche screen plugged to the printer, to just browse, download, slice and send the print job. Slic3r as a service would help in makling this possible.

Thought?

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Cheers,
Franklin Dattein

the only issue with slicer as a service is the power, they would have to pay bills none the less. i think a better route is to change the program to fit the hardware, or see if there is a way it can utilize the gpu on more of that hardware.

i know it is partly a hardware issue, i just can't remember off the top of my head.

i would like to see just how long it takes to slice something on a pcduino, dose a 30 sec slice turn into a 4 min slice, i think that would be tolerable. 10min or more and i think it will not work so well.

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[mike-mack.blogspot.com]

That is a very good point. However, these days it isn't that difficult to get a free server in exchange for a banner of the hosting company, specially for a popular open source project, like Slic3r.
It could even start in a free PaaS, like Appfog, and stay there until more power is required...

oh no doubt there are lots of things a guy could do, but personally i see enough adds i just dont want to see any more.

but i think this could be a service provided some how, even for a small monthly fee.

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[mike-mack.blogspot.com]

I think the problem is that slic3r does need a lot of processing power, but perhaps more importantly a decent amount of ram. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a free service that lets you use the 1gb or so of ram you need for some jobs, even if you use a swapfile. Personally I think that even on a raspberry pi, printing is almost always going to take longer than slicing - even if the slicing takes 2 hours the resulting print will usually take that long, so it is easier just to maintain a print queue so you can always be slicing the next thing while you print the previous one.

Otherwise, why don't you try and install slic3r on a free instance of amazon web services? That should be pretty easy to do, and you can work out whether the speed increase exists/is worth the extra hassle.

I suppose another option would be to try and make gcode a bit more portable: you could generate gcode for each file on thingiverse once, at reasonable infill, layer heights etc, then write a script to correct things like temperature, retract settings for your particular printer. I don't know if this would be practical, but you might be able to insert placeholder lines for retract, homing, start position, temperature settings, extrusion multiplier, and fill them in later.

i am not the best at programing, but i wonder what could be done to help it become less memory intesive.?

i think there is too much too each machine to just give out gcode, i think that would be allot of work to go through and change all the settings reliably on a large scale.

i wonder if what we really need is a better 3d model file format some days.

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[mike-mack.blogspot.com]

the PaaS I mentioned before (AppFog) offer 2GB for free and it runs on top of Amazon AWS.

I have no doubt that would be super simple to run Slic3r in the cloud. My idea lean more towards offering a Slic3r API, via web service, enabling applications developers to build software for RepRap software for Android, RPi, etc.
Therefore, the challenge resides is in developing the Web Services layer, evolving it as Slic3r evolves and keeping the hosting costs free/low.

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Cheers,
Franklin Dattein

makes me wonder why the idea of a home server is not more common, i think there are allot of things that would work well like that.

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[mike-mack.blogspot.com]

I like the model repetier is using. I've not installed it yet, so I don't know the degree of completeness, but they have a repetier server that accepts g code through an http interface and manages a print queue. It is very light weight and so should easily run on a raspberry pi or beagle bone or the like. The GUI is provided by a browser or other client. This way the memory and processor intensive slicing can be done remotely on more powerful computers. It should even be possible for multiple client computers to feed the same server,

Hi guys,

A couple of links which you may find interesting...

[github.com]

[www.hoektronics.com]

Cheers,
Gary

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garyhodgson.com/reprap | reprap.development-tracker.info | thingtracker.net

Long time lurker (seriously, years), finally have something to post. Snagged from my initial release blog post. The framework works with Slic3r initially but support is there to have multiple versions of multiple slicing software all co-existing. Based on the request a given slicer will be spun up and asked to slice the model.

[savorywatt.com]

Slicerhub is a framework to power server based ('cloud!') slicing of 3D models for 3D printing. There will be a publicly addressable RESTful API up and running at Slicerhub.com soon. The project is fully open source under the BSD license. Slicerhub allows much lower powered machines to have models sliced on a much more powerful machine over the web. Imagine having a raspberry pi or other small computer controlling your printer and able to slice large complicated files in the cloud and download the gcode. Or run Slicerhub on your more powerful server at home and keep everything on site.

[github.com]

The blog post also has a link to a design document for how the RESTful API will work.

Cheers,

Savorywatt - Ross Hendrickson

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/11/2013 10:56PM by savorywatt.

great stuff!