Web & Panel suggestion

A couple of suggestions next time anyone works on the web interface:

Please don't take this as a moan or dig at the people who have freely given their time to produce what has become an extremely professional and highly usable product. It's meant only as suggestions and to provoke feedback from we, the users, to make the interface even more polished as and when any of the generous contributors were considering making changes.

1) How many people need all 3 time estimates? (Filament, layer, file). Personally I only ever bother with the estimate based on filament use. If that's not available for any reason the next best IMO is layer time, and finally file usage is usually the least accurate IME. The three estimates take up quite a bit of space on the page and yet two will likely never be looked at. My suggestion is to show only the (usually) most accurate estimate available, or allow the user to dynamically select which to show (maybe via radio buttons) rather than always showing all 3 estimates.

2) I also miss having the "last layer time" that disappeared in the latest web interface. Some prints have a section that will require a bit of "babying", and if you know how many layers to go before it reaches that place and the approximate current layer time, you can estimate when it will reach that point so as to be on hand at the printer. Sure, I can look at the graph and do the conversion from seconds, but having it displayed in figures is easier. That useful parameter was replaced with a static display of the warm-up time throughout the print - something that I cannot see is likely to be of much interest after the print has started. I think most of us already know how long the warm-up takes for each material we print.

Dave

One thing that I find a little annoying is that at the end of the print all the metrics are gone and "n/a" is displayed...
I 'd love, for example, to see how long the job took to print

Hi Dave,

Quote
dmould
1) How many people need all 3 time estimates? (Filament, layer, file). Personally I only ever bother with the estimate based on filament use. If that's not available for any reason the next best IMO is layer time, and finally file usage is usually the least accurate IME. The three estimates take up quite a bit of space on the page and yet two will likely never be looked at. My suggestion is to show only the (usually) most accurate estimate available, or allow the user to dynamically select which to show (maybe via radio buttons) rather than always showing all 3 estimates.

It's no news that the filament-based estimation is the most accurate one, but if it is unavailable (e.g. because a G-code file was uploaded by Pronterface), the other two estimations should provide at least a rough estimation. I will leave the file-based estimation in there because both RRP's dev and my firmware fork can interface Roland mills, and the G-code for such mills doesn't provide file information that could be used for the other estimations.

I agree there is no real need to display all of them on the web interface, but OTOH they've been there since the first version and I think they fit in there quite nicely. If I add a new interface for naive users, I'll display only one estimated end-time, but I don't want to hide them because this allows us, the devs, to check if the estimations are still working once changes have been made in the firmware. However, if you have a better idea how the occupied space could be used, I could surely consider to change the design again.

Quote
dmould
2) I also miss having the "last layer time" that disappeared in the latest web interface. Some prints have a section that will require a bit of "babying", and if you know how many layers to go before it reaches that place and the approximate current layer time, you can estimate when it will reach that point so as to be on hand at the printer. Sure, I can look at the graph and do the conversion from seconds, but having it displayed in figures is easier. That useful parameter was replaced with a static display of the warm-up time throughout the print - something that I cannot see is likely to be of much interest after the print has started. I think most of us already know how long the warm-up takes for each material we print.

Yes - I see the point. I'll change the behaviour of the web interface in my next version, so the warm-up time is only displayed while the machine is heating up. This way I can free up one cell and put the last layer time in there once again. FYI, when a layer finishes, the last layer time will stay in the "Layer time" cell for two seconds and a CSS3 fade effect is shown, but I realise you don't want to keep an eye on it all the time.


mandrav, this works in DWC v1.07 - I checked this yesterday when I printed a few parts. But I believe DWC doesn't automatically switch over to the print page when a new print is started from PanelDue, so I'll look into this once again.

Quote
chrishamm
mandrav, this works in DWC v1.07 - I checked this yesterday when I printed a few parts. But I believe DWC doesn't automatically switch over to the print page when a new print is started from PanelDue, so I'll look into this once again.

Uhm, I 'm using 1.07 already... Maybe I did something stupid? Will double check.
No PanelDue here. The interface switches to the printing page automatically when starting a new print.

Thanks for your hard work Chris

Quote
chrishamm
It's no news that the filament-based estimation is the most accurate one, but if it is unavailable (e.g. because a G-code file was uploaded by Pronterface), the other two estimations should provide at least a rough estimation. I will leave the file-based estimation in there because both RRP's dev and my firmware fork can interface Roland mills, and the G-code for such mills doesn't provide file information that could be used for the other estimations.

I understand - my suggestion was to have 3 radio buttons so the user can select which estimate to bring up.

Quote
chrishamm
Yes - I see the point. I'll change the behaviour of the web interface in my next version, so the warm-up time is only displayed while the machine is heating up. This way I can free up one cell and put the last layer time in there once again. FYI, when a layer finishes, the last layer time will stay in the "Layer time" cell for two seconds and a CSS3 fade effect is shown, but I realise you don't want to keep an eye on it all the time.

Thanks - that would be great.

Dave

Quote
mandrav

Quote
chrishamm
mandrav, this works in DWC v1.07 - I checked this yesterday when I printed a few parts. But I believe DWC doesn't automatically switch over to the print page when a new print is started from PanelDue, so I'll look into this once again.

Uhm, I 'm using 1.07 already... Maybe I did something stupid? Will double check.
No PanelDue here. The interface switches to the printing page automatically when starting a new print.

Thanks for your hard work Chris

OK, I ran a print job and this is what I got when it ended:
(I do run v1.07 btw)

An AJAX error was reported, so the current session has been terminated.

Please check if your printer is still on and try to connect again.

Error reason: SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 530 of the JSON data

And this was in the log:

Error! The following JSON response could not be parsed: interface.js:993:4
{"status":"P","coords":{"axesHomed":[0,0,0],"extr":[2470.3],"xyz":[-4.12,7.11,59.55]},"currentTool":0,"params":{"atxPower":1,"fanPercent":0.00,"speedFactor":100.00,"extrFactors":[100.00]},"seq":4,"sensors":{"probeValue":1000,"fanRPM":0},"temps":{"heads":{"current":[199.0],"active":[0.0],"standby":[0.0],"state":[2]}},"time":1729.3,"currentLayer":196,"currentLayerTime":0.9,"extrRaw":[2470.3],"fractionPrinted":99.4,"firstLayerDuration":1.3,"firstLayerHeight":0.35,"printDuration":1319.3,"warmUpDuration":1.1,"timesLeft":{"file":inf,"filament":0.0,"layer":0.0}} interface.js:994:4

My guess is that it doesn't like the "file: inf" value so it errors out, clearing all metrics on the print screen (showing "n/a" everywhere) since it couldn't parse the json response.

Firmware Name: 	RepRapFirmware
Firmware Version: 	1.09m-dc42 (2015-12-08)
Web Interface Version: 	HTML: 1.07, JS: 1.07

HTH

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/17/2015 02:36PM by mandrav.

This was reported on the Controllers forum about a week ago. I did a patch to my 1.09m-dc42 release to fix it. The problem is division instructions in the file-based print time estimation code where the divisor is not guaranteed to be nonzero.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/17/2015 05:03PM by dc42.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].