GitHub Open Source Friday, 18 Mar 2021

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: OctoPrint provides a snappy web interface for controlling consumer 3D printers - Open Source Friday

Description

OctoPrint provides a snappy web interface for controlling consumer 3D printers. It is Free Software and released under the GNU Affero General Public License V3.

Join @bdougieYO and @foosel in learning OctoPrint can be the web interface to your 3D printer!

0:00 - Start
0:23 - Intro
2:44 - What is OctoPrint?
8:32 - Crowdfunding Open Source
10:59 - Demo of the Web interface
14:58 - Plugins
18:36 - What printer works with this out of box?
21:52 - Thoughts on the 3D printer market
28:13 - Demo of the Plugin Architecture
38:52 - Using OctoPrint with Lazer cutters
41:42 - 3D Print examples from the community
48:30 - STL files in GitHub
54:04 - GitHub Stars

As always, feel free to leave us a comment below and don't forget to subscribe: http://bit.ly/subgithub

Thanks!

Connect with us.
Facebook: http://fb.com/github
Twitter: http://twitter.com/github
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/company/github

About GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Millions of people use GitHub to build amazing things together. For more info, go to http://github.com

A

All right welcome. Welcome everybody welcome to open source friday. uh I am b dougie. uh If you don't know who I am by now. I mean you probably. This is your first time, which is fine, because I think uh your first time here watching a stream on github. You should definitely hit the follow button because we just had a security lab session.

A

If you didn't see that that sort of uh pair programming, they were doing uh definitely check out the the vod as well, uh but today we're not talking about security, we're talking about octoprint and we have a special guest, which is. uh I was going to call you full soul, but um do you do you answer bye?

A

B

Answer my food poodle yeah, I answered by foosel hi, yes,.

A

But I also answered.

B

By uh gina hoyske, which is usually an absolute mouthful for anyone not uh not not raised in germany, to speak to say so, I'm absolutely fine with just being called gina or foosel. Okay,.

A

Excellent, um actually, what's the uh the history behind your your github handle? Oh, that was actually.

B

Like my nickname, even before github existed, though it was like yeah, I I was sitting there at one night and I needed a new nickname and I was heavily into reading. um I don't know if you remember the user-friendly webcomic it had this little thing called the dust puppy like and it was made of a ball of lint and all that and the german word for lint is fossil and then there's also the metasyntactic variable fubar and that kind of like was put together in my head and somehow I ended up with that.

B

A lot of people think it has something to do with. I don't know some kind of sql a dialect and in german it also sounds very much like the word for booze, but uh I don't drink. So that is definitely also.

A

Another connection there what's the word for booze.

B

But with an with a you.

A

You have to really pay attention for the pronunciation.

B

Yeah yeah I mean yep, I mean I was. I was expecting to use this nickname primarily in like more english-speaking areas, so most people would not see the the connection there. uh So I figured okay. This is going to work fine, but when I'm on german events or such and introduce myself by my nick, sometimes people look at me funny and then I always say no not like that stuff, with double o and always in in in smaller case in lower case.

A

Okay- yes, that's uh I'm! Actually I personally prefer the uh the lowercase b as well for my name and then the yo is always capitalized, because I want that to be enunciated, that that is the second part of my first name b, dougie yo, but actually uh thanks for the uh the the the lesson on how to say, booze and and german, but also uh introducing us your your all your names uh but you're here, not to tell us about your name you're here to tell us about um this cool project uh which is octoprint.

A

um So I guess do you want to give us a brief history of octoprint and like where it came from.

B

Yeah sure so, uh first of all what is octoprint. uh It already says it there. It's the snappy web interface for your 3d printer, and it is basically like a cross of a baby monitor and a remote control for your 3d printer.

B

I started this project over eight years ago and back then, when you bought yourself a 3d printer or printed yourself, a 3d printer um yeah, you still had to tether it to your pc, all the time for it to work and do its job and all that the the more these days, more common approach, where you put the files that you want to print on an sd card and insert it into the printer. That was more like the out of more like the the the.

B

uh How do you say um the exception than the rule, and so I had my printer sitting here in my office, uh my shiny new one that I bought in late 2012 and it was producing noise and was producing fumes and producing this this for hours on end and tying up my pc- and I couldn't game on that. I couldn't work on that in the time, and that was when I decided okay, I need a solution for this. I just want to so.

B

The raspberry pi had come out in this year, which is like a tiny computer. This size costs like 40 bucks or something, um and I figured there- must be some way that I can just throw something on one of these things and let that take the place of my pc and talk to the printer and stream the job to it and also, let me monitor it from from afar.

A

B

Turns out there wasn't, so I sat down over my christmas location and implemented such a thing just to.

A

B

Own, what year.

A

B

This uh 2012 late.

A

B

So it's been a while yeah yeah, almost.

A

B

Yeah almost yeah: well, we just passed the eight year mark. So I'm not sure what I will do in in 2022 then, but I will probably find some way to celebrate, but yeah.

B

So I sat down wrote what I needed to write and actually build up on on an existing piece of open source software called cura, which is actually a so-called slicer, so something that you use before you actually print something to turn the 3d model into the stuff that the printer can actually print, but it also had a machine communication layer inside so that you could directly print from cura and cura was written in python. I already knew python, so I figured hey. I understand this language.

B

I can just maybe use this communication layer and then build something on top, and this is how things happened. So I built something I quickly had a web interface.

B

I then also found a way to attach a webcam so that I could actually remotely monitor what was going on on the print bed and then by mid-january, or rather early january, when my vacation ended. I was like okay, that's done.

B

I'm finished that was a nice run now, I'm returning to my world in the corporate uh software development world and figured that was that and then suddenly, all from all across the world, people started messaging me and opening issues on my github repository that I had created for this thing and we're like hey awesome, can you make it do that and I'm having problems with this kind of printer? And maybe can you also implement this and that and whatnot yeah uh too long didn't reach?

B

Suddenly I had a really really really really big open source project on my hands that kept growing and growing and growing, and I reduced my job to 80 to have one week dedicated per week, one day dedicated per week to work on it and that still wasn't enough and yeah at some point said.

B

Thankfully, some company approached me and said: hey: do you want to do this full time, and I was like yes, please and uh so.

A

In 2014, what company was this.

B

uh There was a 3d printer company, or rather it was a it was a you would. You could probably call it a technology company, a spanish technology company. I think they don't exist anymore and they also had 3d printers in there in their portfolio and were interested in simply just growing that that part- and so I said, yeah well sure perfect, and so they hired me full full-time- and I was just here continue to be here in my home office, working on octoprint, full-time and yeah.

B

Then two years later they ran out of money and I had to find another way to continue funding, and that was when I turned to crowdsource crowdfunding.

B

So since, actually, since five years now for five years now, almost to the day um and uh yeah, so octoprint really big project used by many and with one full-time developer, who's actually able to fund her work on it through crowdfunding, which is absolutely amazing and which I never expected would happen. Yeah.

A

A that's amazing and uh santoshi in the chat just mentioned like wow, that what uh that's a dream for many for you to be able to build this project to get adoption, uh it seems, like you, got the I guess, the it's open source but like in the business world product market, fit of like you've, solved a problem that people wanted um and then super awesome that uh the spanish company was able to uh employ your efforts. uh But then you're able to find.

A

I don't know if it was like a perfect transition to do crowdsourcing for the or crowdfunding for the project or was it like was it there was? Was there some friction into being able to move from being paid to then wait for payment to come through through contributors.

B

Well, the friction that was there was primarily rooted in the fact that this is simply not something that is even remotely considered in the german tax code. Okay,.

A

B

I live in germany and the fact that I work and give the fruits of my work away for free yeah.

A

B

People still give me money for it. That is something that simply does not compute in this country. So um we are still trying to figure this out, but we'll get there eventually. How.

A

Does it work with um like, would that does uh germany participate the the vit.

B

Yeah that is really complicated, yeah I this is also something that is still in in the process of being figured out. Let's just say that if I had known how much red tape was associated with doing something like this in germany, I would probably not have done it, but now that I'm doing it, I'm simply holding on for dear life and hope and hoping for the best. I also have a really good um uh tax consultant uh behind me, so.

A

B

Yeah, this is some like the first week that I started with this crowdfunding and started to look into it. I just called her up she's the she's, the wife of a former um fellow student, uh someone I went to university with and I was like I I think I need a text consultant and she was like yep. We got you.

A

B

Yeah, that's uh yeah was really helpful.

A

Yeah so uh I'm curious to learn more about octoprint. um I don't have a 3d printer myself. uh I've almost bought one like every year since they've been out, but I'm like do.

A

I need one more hobby like I've definitely got enough stuff in my garage that I just couldn't really convince the wife that this is something that I should be working on, but um I'm looking forward to seeing what you have in store of octoprim to maybe I can convince myself that maybe my next birthday, I can sort of uh write the check and have a 3d printer sent to my house.

B

Totally, if you do so, please uh give me a call or or ping first, because there's a lot of crap out there that you do.

A

B

Want to buy yeah um okay, so we already heard that it is basically uh a crossover baby monitor and a remote control, which means that, uh maybe you should you I'm just going to show this, maybe on on an actual printer you just have to are you gonna share your screen share.

A

B

So this is octoprint currently with the dark theme actually, which is a plugin developed from the community I'll get to that in a bit. But um basically, what you have here is you have a web interface. You can see the temperatures here of the printer, so 3d printers or rather fdm 3d printers, which is the class of 3d printers that occupants targets you can.

B

You can imagine those are basically like a like, um like a hot glue gun on a 3d gantry, so you can move it in x y and you can also move it up and you can also make it squeeze out glue. It's not glue but molten plastic, but you get the idea, and this is how you build up stuff.

B

So somewhere there there are heating elements. Usually these days you have at least one in the so-called hot end, so the stuff where the weather, molten plastic comes out, and also the heated bed where you build stuff on, because a lot of plastics do not like it when they cool down too fast, and then they start to shrink and start to detach, and so you want to keep them a bit warm and cozy from beneath as well.

B

So you can get an overview over the temperatures here. I can also just quickly maybe heat the hot end up to 80 degrees here and centigrade. I should maybe add for the american crowd here, and um you will now see that the printer is actually now heating up the nozzle. It's still a bit far to the right of the graph here, but you can see it there that it's rising and uh yeah. You also see the printer's operation.

B

You see a bunch of stuff that is currently not filled here, because no print job is running in theory. You can also disconnect from it here and connect to some other other thing, and you have a bunch of files here that you can just select for printing and go ahead with them. Basically, you can also create folders. If you need some need some more structure here and then you also have this tab where you have a webcam embedded, so you can make it move now. I just hold it on the x y axis.

B

I can quickly move the head over. There move the bed over there stuff like this.

A

B

There's also the g-code viewer, which currently still needs to load the file that I just selected there you go and that also allows you to go through the files that you want to print layer by layer and verify that they are actually looking like. You expect them to look.

B

You can also see what is actually going back and forth between the printer and octoprint. So sometimes you need this for debugging stuff, but also just for more power, user level, kind of tasks, for example, and then there's also the time lapse feature because I figured if there is a webcam and I can take snapshots. Why not have it take snapshots every I don't know 10 seconds or so, and then build up time lapses.

B

That actually show the object growing from the bed, and this is also where plugins that I already mentioned come in again, because um brett hawker zhang aka, formal lurker from the community actually took this feature and turned it into something completely and utterly awesome called octolapse, which not only takes a picture every 10 seconds or so but sinks.

B

The the point where the picture is taken with the movement of the head, so that you can make it look like the head is always at the same point and the object is just magically appearing out of thin air or you can make it so that it is, looks like it's just moving in circles and the object is moving out of thin air. So there are some really really artistic and awesome time lapses, that you can create that way and yeah.

B

So this is the basically the core uh of octoprint and and what it allows out of the box. There's also some settings here uh that you can uh that you so so that you can fine tune some stuff, how the serial connection works and all that and you can also install plugins this way.

B

So we have a huge uh plugin repository, which I think currently has something like 200 or maybe 240, I'm not entirely sure uh plugins developed by people from the community uh maintained by them completely separate from octoprint and uh yeah all discoverable in the octa print plug-in repository. Let me quickly actually check oh 286 plugins from how many different authors- oh, I thought I had oh 202, so 202 separate like in authors, which is really awesome like there is a there's, a really huge community.

B

Now that builds stuff like automatic upload of your timelapse to youtube or um controlling the gpro pins on a raspberry pi, where you have octoprint running stuff like that. So there is really really nice creativity in this community and they just yeah. So my idea there was just I built a plug-in interface into octoprint that allows to extend it in various ways.

B

So pretty much everything that I could think of is an extension point so to speak, and the community went with that and ran with it and uh has since been turning up really really awesome stuff yeah.

A

I I like that um that you opened up the uh the api to have plugins, because we had. I know you, you know paulus, um who is the creator of home assistant. That was another thing he had to discover with his community and how to sort of like draw the line between building everything versus enabling or starting, not enabling that's, probably empowering uh contributors.

B

A

Able to build their own stuff.

B

Yeah, that is exactly the reason, also why I did it, because I mean, on the one hand, I cannot even think of all the cool stuff that you could beat, but also I cannot maintain all of it. So now I can just tell someone hey. I don't think this is something that everyone who runs octoprint would want to also have bundled, but maybe a small, but but but yeah, but still significant fraction. So why don't you just build it and publish it on the plug-in repository and then everyone wants?

B

It can just pick it and everyone who doesn't want it won't have to yeah facebook's potentially caused by it, or something like that. So yeah, I'm really glad that I put this plugin system in there because it has saved me a ton of grief.

B

I've also used it in the past to when, when I had some bug in a release that I could not easily solve with a hotfix, because, for example, it influenced the software update mechanism which I'm currently showing on screen, then I just could roll out a really small plug-in that fixed the bug. So people could just install the plug-in and afterwards octoprint was patched enough so that they could get to a fixed version. Stuff like that, so this is really powerful.

B

Also plug-ins are an absolute godsend with regards to working around problems with the various really weird printers that have sprung up on the market. Now that yeah do whatever they want. Basically, when it comes to protocol interpretation, so you can just write a plugin that rewrites whatever goes through the serial line transparently for octoprint, so octoprint thinks it's talking to an actual normal behaved printer and the plugin takes care of all the translation.

A

So can we touch on that real, quick uh just about the the market for 3d printers, like what printers work with out-of-the-box work with octoprint like if I wanted to get started today,.

B

uh First of all, only fdm printers right now so there's this other version, or this is other common class of printers. Now, where you use resin that then gets uv hardened. Those are not supported by octoprint but yeah. The majority of printers that are currently sold on the market. The majority of three of fdm 3d printers are, I think, probably supported by octoprint.

B

I cannot say for sure, because uh yeah it all hinges on whether they run a firmware which implements the defactor standard protocol, the proctor, the problem with the de facto standard protocol and 3d printing.

B

There is neither a standard, nor is there a well-defined protocol, but there is something that pretty much everyone roughly does the same, and this is where octoprint depends on, and so there are a bunch of standard firmwares, some of uh which you can also yeah pretty much uses aftermarket add-ons to your printers, which might not play nice with octoprint to begin with uh things like marlin, repetitive, firmware, smoothie, wear, reprap firmware and I'm probably forgetting something now, and I hope someone will not throttle me for that.

B

But so there's a bunch of stuff and and every single one of those are supported and most of the printers that you can get, for example, in the hardware store on amazon, or so they use. One of these.

A

Okay, but I guess my my next question too about that the fdm printers are: are none of the printer suppliers building interfaces for their printers or is it all you're on your own open up a terminal? Good luck.

B

Some of them try to, but usually it doesn't, let's say, end well, at least from what I've seen over the past eight years being a bit more present in the in the in the industry in general. They just tell you these days. They just tell you to slice whatever you want to print, throw it on an sd card and throw the sd card in your printer or throw it on a usb stick and throw that in your printer and something like remote control also is not really.

B

I mean there are exceptions, of course, but uh the majority is still like use an sd card us you use the usb printer and, if you're lucky as a com as a consumer, you actually also have some usb port where you can get the serial access that you.

A

B

Octoprint but yeah, depending on the vendor or under on the manufacturer, that that then can be hit or miss.

B

So we've seen a lot of problems with really cheap printers with marlin, which were off of marlins or one of the firmware versions um like six years or so with bugs still in there that I actually patched myself in marlin since then and yeah it's it's a bit of a of a really fragmented landscape that is really tricky to navigate as something like octoprint, which is by the way the class of software that octoprints is in is called host software host software is the thing that you use to communicate with your printer and yeah.

B

This communication with printers is extremely tricky. If you want to cover most of the market. Okay,.

A

That's fascinating because, like in my mind like I, I think that uh you know as most software or engineer or computer hardware is like, if you wait long enough stuff will improve as the sort of people are involved in the uh the system and like I'm just kind of baffled that it's it's not a solved problem in the industry. So, like I can't name any 3d printer manufacturers, but like let's just just draw a random one that probably doesn't make 3d printers like samsung or something like. I would assume.

A

They know how to do computers so and they know how to do software. Why yeah.

B

So the thing is with 3d printing like we orbit ftm printing, like we have it these days. It's that that all was built from the ground up, like maybe I'm not entirely sure when the patent expired, that all of this was based on. But there was a patent hold by, I think, held by either stratuses or 3d systems, I'm not entirely sure which of the two it was, but that basically had the whole fdm manufacturing process patented, which meant only hobbyists, could even do that if they wanted in the garage and when the patent expired.

B

A lot of people just got got together with an open source spirit and tried to build these first so-called rap rap machines from the ground up, and they just basically put an industry standard file, format called g-code, which is well established in the cnc world and is actually a nist standard.

B

They just used this but turned it from a file format into a more or less specified protocol, and so you had a bunch of hobbyists who would hack on this stuff during the weekend and usually just make it work so that it supported their workflow, and this is how things happened, and you can imagine that this led to some quite creative solutions and also quite creative implementations. So this is how we ended up here and yeah.

B

There is just not that much pressure for um for 3d printer vendors now to change that, because let's say you are samsung, samsung is not actually in the field, but this is a good example, because I can just use this without risking of offending anyone. Yeah.

A

B

Let's say: you're a samsung and you you now want to build a 3d printer and you you have. You have an idea about the mechanics already and you have have the 3d gantry and all that and you have to extrude the design that the hot end design and all that- and you know how to put all of this together- maybe for something as low as 200 bucks.

B

And now you have the problem that you also need firmer for that. So what do you do? Do you develop this in-house, or do you maybe just go on github.com firmware, slash, marlin and download that.

A

Yeah yeah, that that makes sense- and I didn't I didn't- realize the patent issue too as well- well, not even an issue, because I think it's expired at this point, but I think that could also slow progression too, as well. Absolutely so.

B

I I have to admit when I started on this eight years ago, uh when I sat down one evening and just figured out uh well, this is a serial connection. It is surely going to be specified somewhere. How hard can it be I'll, just whip up the web interface and be done with it? I did not expect what I would find, namely that there is no standard.

B

There was nothing but a wiki page that I could actually read, and this only defines the commands that you can send and it doesn't define what you get back and things like this, so this turned out to be actually the biggest challenge of developing octoprint, like with all all of the other challenges that I had to face over the years, including the funding situation. By the way the protocol madness is like, I think, one of the things that is most to blame for me now, having gray hair.

B

Well, that in genetics, but um it's yeah, it's it's really insane and frankly some days, I'm surprised anything works at all. Yeah.

A

Wow- and so I real quick uh I wanted to- I want to get back to your demo and maybe we see a hello world, um but I want to understand more of your background too, because you, your approach to the problem, I'm assuming you had experience in the hardware programming side uh to being able to solve this problem with the octoprint.

B

Not hardware, no I'm.

A

B

I'm I'm I mean here only on a hobbyist level myself, so I I did a bit a bit of arduino coding and all that in my day, but um primarily I am, I was actually a a java enterprise developer. Okay,.

A

B

Yeah I used to be a software architect in a huge corporation and ran around in a suit and all that, most of the day, consulting people on how to not do something that they were set on doing because it would fail and them not listening to me and all that and octoprint happened, because I I found myself in this job and really wanting to just code on something fun for a change again.

B

Also, you have a visitor.

A

Yeah I mistakenly forgot to unplug the nintendo switch, so we did.

B

I guess come in.

A

B

Yeah so, uh and- and this is my background- so I when, if you, if you ever find you find the itch to to to just hack around an octoprint, maybe maybe look around into the code and all there- I've done my best over the past eight years to make the hints that I used to be a java developer vanish. But sometimes you still see variable names in camelcase, for example, which are leftovers of that. Okay.

A

Excellent, if you also mentioned that you were a programmer and a suit, uh have you seen the meme on twitter at the moment about not trusting a programmer in a in a suit? I haven't it's a it's, not a great meme, but it's a funny.

B

A

To it, it's a funny thread because uh folks are basically ripping at the shreds, but we can move on from that.

B

Yeah I mean I personally, I prefer hoodie so.

A

Excellent and I don't know what uh anakin's talking about with the um with the mouse, uh but actually let's switch to your screen. We can do a quick demo and I can address my my guest.

B

uh Yeah, so uh where was I right, plugin manager we already did cover? uh I also said uh something about software update mechanism, so octoprint is able to uh just update itself uh it and it actually is using github releases for that, um and it also can do that with plugins. So your your plugin can wire a plug-in hook.

B

Register itself with this software update mechanism and also like octoprint, can provide release channels and all that, so there is like a lot of possibility here to keep your stuff updated and make sure that people actually get notified of new releases and all that- and as far as I know, this is also quiet uh enjoyed by the plug-in authors and also the user base. So.

A

B

A

All the plugins created or also python, as well.

B

Yeah yeah everything is pi, I mean the front end is, is obviously html css javascript, and I must add here that it is eight-year-old front-end technology, because the downside of having a plug-in system means that I cannot just easily swap out a whole technology stack anymore without breaking everything left and right. So uh this is also the reason why octoprint took uh is still also compatible to python 2..

B

I don't know if you know about the whole situation with python 2 versus 3, but basically, when python switched from version two to three, they also did a lot of backwards and compatible changes to the language which were good and where needed, but they still broke a lot of stuff for python two code. So it was a bit of a nightmare to port python. 2 code base over to python 3. python 2 was declared end of life at the first january, 1st 2020 already, so it predates corona.

B

And but of course you cannot just with with a pro with a project that has a user base like octoprint. You cannot just say: okay, uh I'm now stopping to support python 2 as well, because it is no longer supported, because that would break it on everyone's machines out there, and it would also cause a lot of mayhem with plug-ins, because a lot of plug-ins were also be developed by people doing their first stuff. Ever they didn't know about python 2 versus 3, so they just targeted python 2.

B

Now the plug-in was only passed two. So yeah we've had a lot of fun last year, slowly getting people to migrate, yeah.

A

But is there still some plug-ins that are still left out in the uh in the work.

B

Actually, yes, so we we- even we even tracked this now here on the plug-in repository, so we have 286 plug-ins right now and 238 of these are already python. 3 compatible excellent, so 50 54 a bit a bit under 50, are still yeah not, and those are probably can't, probably con, be considered abandoned by now, but uh yeah. So we saw this number this.

B

This 83 of the course of 2020, with a lot of advertising for python, 3 compatibility and also someone writing an update script to move existing octoprint installations over without any downtime, and all that we saw that move from something, like maybe 25 percent. I think to this number and this that was absolutely amazing and exciting- to see how the community really got together and did this yeah.

B

So we also have some stats by now like usage stats, and so you can also now see the top 10 of the money so which plugins are the most popular among the user base and also which are currently being installed like there is no tomorrow. That is also really nice yeah, and so what else is there to see?

B

um Yeah, a ton of settings that I will probably or should probably not go into yet, but you can pretty much uh customize every aspect of your print jobs here and how they are started, how they are stopped. What happens when they need to get cancelled stuff like this, and you can configure the webcam stuff and you can add users and application keys for party clients, which there are a number by now, also there's a bunch of uh native apps now for android and uh iphone.

B

As far as I know, there is someone even set up something: that's called octofarm, which is like a a service which you can install on yours on your on your network, for example, which you then can wire up a ton of octoprint instances.

B

So if you have one more than one printer and each of one is connected to an octoprint instance, you can just have these all connected to your octofarm and use that to manage them and also to make sure that everything is all right and make sure all of them are actually utilized all the time and such so there's some. Some really awesome creativity going on there yeah.

A

I'm curious: what would um uh what would sort of be the use case for building a plug-in, uh because you mentioned a couple of them passing, but maybe, if folks are interested actually one question. I have for the chat how many of y'all are actually using 3d printers, and if yes, are you using octoprint? uh Do you have any use cases that you're using it with? But I guess going back to your question: gina um yeah. What are the use cases for plugins like what would be the reason to reach for that? That system.

B

Yeah, for example, a lot of people are interested in getting a notification when their print is finished to their messenger system of choice. So this is something that you can do with a plugin. For example, there are plugins for slack for discord for telegram for a bunch of other things. Then I already mentioned that a lot of printers that you have out there are not necessarily well behaved when it comes to the protocol implementation. This is also something that you can solve with a plugin.

B

You might want to make more fancy more fancy. Time lapses, as I already mentioned, there's also now, some uh actually also by brett hawkins. I just remembered there's also an alternative, so something that, let me let me roll back a bit so yeah.

A

B

If you, if you want to um print something yeah, so you have to have a 3d model file that you downloaded somewhere or you designed it yourself, and now you want to print it. So first you have to throw it in this thing called the slicer that I already mentioned, which will slice it up into its layers and also make sure that all the layers are painted. Basically by.

A

B

Thing and the thing with 3d printers is that most of them so far only supported straight lines. So if you have something like a round hull or something, for example, if you print a boat or or or if you printed something like this mouse with the end here, which is a bit rounded or so, then it would not actually print a curve there.

B

But approximate this with very short lines and each of the short lines is a line, an actual line and a command that has to be transmitted to the printer over a serial line and then acknowledged. So this means that this directly limits how fast you can print this, because it limits how fast you can send the stuff that needs to be printed to the printer and now brett sat down and said.

B

Well, I can probably just fit all these line segments with a curve again, because some firmware actually allows you to send just a curve command, and you did that it's called arc welder and it reduces the file size of gcode files by. I don't know how many percent it presents, but it's really significant what he has achieved there and it has made it so much yeah.

B

So the perform has improved the performance of printing stuff with a lot with lots of curves unsupported printers by by so much through this, because yeah, you no longer have to send two million little line segments, but just one curve and are done and yeah so optimizations like that.

B

Then there are also plugins that give you cloud access to octoprint, so octoprint by default is, uh is meant to be run on your local, isolated network. You should not expose it to the public internet, even though some people do it why there are heaters on there. You should not expose something with heating elements that are capable of starting a fire to the public internet. I do my best to secure stuff, but I'm a human.

B

I can make mistakes, so please do not expose octoprint to the public internet user, vpn or use cloud service for that.

A

B

Is something that people use as well and yeah a lot of people also using plugins to get really creative with regards to some hardware that they interface? So there are people who write, for example, plugins that yeah control lead stripes with individually addressable, um with individually addressable, uh led pixels, so to speak, to to plot the progress and to turn red when something failed or to turn green when it's completed and all that or a beeper or they fire up a keyboard or something. So there is a bunch of stuff that you can do yeah.

B

A

Video of my uh my manager actually building a 3d printed pumpkin with the octocat embedded, yeah yeah and uh he's got a um a nice led light and an html plug hdmi plug as well. um So if anybody's interested, it is open sourced and I honestly have no idea of how what sort of services he used, but I know, he's very familiar with the octoprint as well.

B

uh As far as I know, he used octoprint for that he didn't use.

A

B

From the looks of it, though, because it was like that this looked more like the time lapse, that octoprint itself would produce so.

A

B

One from octolapse but yeah so there's a lot of amazing stuff that people build.

A

Yeah yeah- this is uh some good stuff and, like it's, I'm tempted to get a 3d printer to build some of the stuff like that. But I've got so many software projects that I've been working on that I have to finish. Yeah.

B

I know the problem, I mean I got a printer back then as a hobby and then it turned into.

A

B

A

Yeah, that is that, but you.

B

Could also get a laser cutter. There is also a laser cutter that runs octoprint behind oh really, yeah nice really from a from a munich startup and they adjusted octoprints so that it would drive their their laser cutter. So yeah.

A

Oh, that's interesting because um so like there is a laser cutter that um that actually, my wife has, which is the cricut machine which most people might be familiar with. Maybe if you are on pinterest or anything like that, um but that software is awful and they charge you out like out the nose for using it monthly, which is a great way for them to make money. But it's very annoying um because, like we're, not laser cutting stuff like every every week, we're doing like once every three months. So what I'm getting at is like.

A

I'm actually intrigued now about the laser cutter.

B

Yeah I mean you probably can just swap the electronics. If push comes to shelf- and I mean a laser cutter- is pretty much people who do razer cutters will probably now want to want to hurt me for that, but the laser cutter and the 3d printer are in principle. They are both just cnc machines. They have x and y.

B

They also have z, maybe, and in the case of the laser, you control the intensity of the beam and in the case of the com of the 3d printer, you control how much material is extruded at what temperature and that's that so.

A

B

Familiar you they, you can probably use g-code to control both of them, and that also means that you can do some fun stuff uh with tools like octoprint, not not out of the box, because yeah it needs modification. The modification that they did is like specific to this one, but uh yeah with open source. There's a lot of possibilities, as always yeah.

A

For sure and um yeah it's it's very tempting it's like having the superpower but needed to keep it constrained because of time constraints. I like seeing my family and apparently my family likes coming in when the the camera's live too as well, so they like seeing me as well um obviously excellent yeah.

B

I I know the problem, I mean you, you might see that I have a. I have an oscilloscope there. I have a. I have a power supply there. I have soldering iron, but I really use this all to also all too rarely because of all the other stuff that I already do so yeah.

B

It's it's a problem of too too much awesome stuff to play with and too little time, as always in our lives. I guess yeah.

A

Yeah excellent and uh speaking, of which I asked folks who are in the chat if they are using 3d printers and it sounds like anakin, just got a 3d printer and is getting octokit running as we speak. uh Actually.

B

Dr kit was something else yes advocated completely different octoprint.

A

Is what he's getting running um actually just recently, as well as santoshi who's been in the chat? Answering questions uh also um loves the community and loves the plugins as well.

B

Yeah, I'm also really happy with the community. I gotta say like all in all: they are an utterly awesome bunch and it also surprises me all the time what what yeah, what what stuff they come up with.

B

So we have I I about two years ago, or so I created a community forum uh because before that it was all spread across various groups and discussion boards and whatnot, and I wanted one central hub where people could go and meet people like them and using the same stuff like them and all that, and we also have a showcase category in there, where people can just show not only what they built with octoprint.

B

So if they build some awesome, plug-ins or some awesome, automations or something, for example, you can also integrate octoprint right into home assistant. So you have a connection to paulus there as well, um but uh also what they printed with octoprint, for example- and there are some amazing things there from from from uh keyboards to uh to some display units for home automation systems and all that all just with printed cases and with. I also remember something with for beekeeping, but I can't remember the details right now so yeah.

B

It's absolutely amazing what people get get up to uh in.

A

B

Spare time like yeah octo screen is also successful. There are a bunch of people now who write, there's octoscreen, there's octodash, there's also something else that I forgot the name right now, I'm awfully sorry to the author. um My head is just too full with names all the time and those are like when you want to put a small screen right next to your printer, but with which you can control octoprint directly and.

A

B

There's a ton of stuff there.

A

That use case of um like thick, like small part printing, to fix, like one-off things like I actually have a keycap on my keyboard, that's missing. I know I could probably buy a keycap and replace it, but also folks who are printing keycaps and to replace on their the keyboard. If you want to have like a nice cool design or something.

B

A

For your brand, I know people have been commenting on my pizza slice behind me, but I wouldn't mind printing some, uh some pizza slices on my for my keycaps.

B

I mean I printed the the the case for my num block here, which I also built myself. Oh no,.

A

So not entirely.

B

Myself this was an open source design and I had the pcbs made and all that and then but yeah in the end, I just put it into the printed enclosure because I have a printer. So why not.

A

How how about the um the? um What do you call the stuff that you put in the printer? It's not you know filament. Yes, that's what I was trying to, because it's not resin. It's uh filament yeah, it's filament! So how about the the cost around filament? Is that easy to come by.

B

Yeah absolutely so, when I started out, this was still a nightmare because I had to actually order it in the netherlands, because I could not get get any my hands on it in in in germany and all that. But by now you can just get this stuff off amazon uh or ebay or such and uh yeah. The usual price point.

B

These days is something like uh I'm going to say euros now, but you could probably just translated 101 into us dollars, which is like 20 20 year, 20 euros, maybe four kilogram of this stuff which lasts you a long time like. Let me maybe quickly I'll, be right back.

B

uh So this is a bit more expensive stuff, but um this is like the size that you get when you buy a one kilogram spool, and this really holds a while- and this is like 175 uh 1.75 millimeter diameter. These days, when I started it was all still double the size, basically um and really really really trivially to come by. There are also people who print with trimmer line from the hardware store by the way.

A

Oh, what's that.

B

Trimmer line that that is the stuff that you use when you have a. How do you say when you, when you have to when a wheat whacker, when you have a weed.

A

B

And they, the stuff that you put on there, is actually just nylon filament, pretty much and when, um when all this stuff started like 10 years or more ago, people that there was no filament, so it started with. With uh with uh with trimmer line, then usual filament came and about I'm, maybe a month or so ago there was like an uproar in the 3d printing community, someone tried to print with trimmer line and it worked and it was like yeah. I know this is how it started.

B

A

It's all coming.

B

Back, we are, we are already in the retro phase, apparently.

A

Yeah yeah, that's that's amazing, but yeah uh do what you got to do as well to to solve a problem, and if this trimmer line is what's available for a couple bucks at the hardware store like so be it there. We go.

B

Hey, you probably can already buy filament at most hardware stores so because you also can buy printers at a lot of hardware stores these days- and I just saw in this in in the chat that jacob asks uh prince only come out to a few dollars for smaller prints and yep. That's it so prints are really expensive. What com? What can really add up is the number of prints that you do.

B

For example, if you're prototyping a design- and it takes a long while to get it right, then yeah, but it's not like you're losing hundreds of dollars or something it's more like suddenly.

A

B

Not no longer just two dollars, but now it's 10. so.

A

Yeah but that's the the beauty of if there's already a solve problem or in the showcases or the examples. um This sounds like there's a community. So if you are looking for key caps or to build up your number block, um it's a solve problem. So perhaps those are open source. Then you could just leverage those those um blueprints. I guess do you call them blueprints um for models, okay or.

B

Just stl, because that's the file extension and people just say like do you have an stl or something github actually shows stls in the repository browser. Yes,.

A

That is uh something that was actually a tip on our recent change, log, um which I don't know if folks are familiar if you're here and you have not been following our our actual youtube account- and uh I mentioned this- wasn't going to be a github um uh showcase. But let me see if I could find a sto.

B

If you, if you switch to my screen, I have one okay, it just needs to load, which I hope it will do now. It isn't that big actually.

A

Hello, it's only when you're looking at it yeah.

B

Apparently that maybe we should look back and look away again.

A

B

Maybe let me let's see.

A

Example there we go.

B

Okay, for you, it loads, perfect, yeah right now, mine mine is, is not liking it right now, but okay.

A

Okay, you can see stl files directly inline. We've made a lot of changes to um how github interacts with different files. So one thing that we didn't have up until this year was being able to embed videos, uh I'm not sure when sdl's became a thing, but um oh.

B

It's it's been some years. Actually, I think at least five or so because I remember.

A

B

I remember it was I yeah. It was definitely not yet long that I was working on octoprint full time when this made the rounds and was like. Oh that's, awesome, so yeah.

A

Awesome yeah, so this is uh powered with the I can download the stl file. So if you wanted to get an example to print, um you could actually print your 3d model of skyline, um which uh this is basically my contribution graph. So you can see where I was getting ready for some demos towards the end of the year.

A

B

Yeah yeah, it's.

A

Like just a square block of this non-stop coding um but yeah, this is my 2020 contribution graft and uh we've just made it into something that you could print uh for fun, because why not?

A

But I'll drop, that in the chat for folks. Oh perfect, you've got yours on the reddit too, as well.

B

My 2020, with my with my three week gap where I took a vacation which was really needed, so I'm proud of of the gaps. You are proud of the blocks. So yes,.

A

B

Are all proud of something.

A

In 2018 I have a three month gap because that's when my youngest was was born.

B

Oh yeah, absolutely understandable.

A

Excellent, um so we're rounding up towards the end. I wanted to say uh save some time to talk about github stars, but uh did you want to um yeah? Do you have anything else you wanted to share before we round up the conversation.

B

um Only if you use octoprint and aren't yet, then maybe you want to become a member on the community forums because there's a lot of tips. There there's a lot of awesome stuff to see there and we also have a discord server. That I would like to point you to because same thing as the forum, just like instant.

A

Yeah, which is uh I love, that discord is really sort of embracing the open source community. uh I did approach the uh the obs discord. There's like 41 000 people in it.

B

A

Was it was intense, it's a very um fast, moving fast pace, it's like being on live on a very popular streamer, which I saw ninja. This went live. So if you want to see what a chat looks like that, you can't read: uh that's that's what that discord looked like um excuse me.

A

Has a question so feel free to ask your question scarce moves. um If it's about octoprint.

B

That that is a tricky question, um because the thing is, it always depends on what you want right I mean if ultimaker is more like. I would at this point I would more like call them a prosumer brand rather than a consumer brand, because this is like the uh more like the the audience, also that they have chosen for themselves. No name is really hit and miss, so in general, when you want to buy a printer, the first thing that I want would do.

B

If I were you was, I would first of all figure out what I want to use it for, because what printer recommend entirely basic yeah, pretty much entirely depends on what you actually want to use it for an fdm printer, for example, if you want to print miniatures, an ftm printer wouldn't be the entirely wrong choice, because it, the resolution, is just not fine enough for something like your dungeon and dragon's miniatures or warhammer figurines, or something like that.

B

So stuff like this is first of all most important, and then you need to figure out what options you have for that and then I would definitely recommend to go on social, to go on reddit, to go on forums and seek out people who have this thing and what they have to say about it, because I hinted at it. There's a lot of bad stuff out there that does not work is advertised, and especially the really cheap stuff is something that you do not want to necessarily uh get up.

B

With I mean there are printers that are really really cheap, but there are also so inherently insecure that they regularly burn people's homes down, and this is not a joke. Sadly, so.

A

B

There have been cases there have been pictures that I have seen and uh yeah.

A

B

Be careful um as far as understood you can print with two types of famous on the ultimate exactly to solve: rendering you're able to do crazy, prints yeah, but this is not ultimaker specific, so uh you're probably talking about what was it called again you no. I have forgotten what it was called, but pva it's actually pva like the stuff that is in glue. um You can also print pva with other printers. You also have dual nozzle printers or multi-extruder printers other than ultimaker out there.

B

So really just figure out what you need, what you want and then do your market research and don't just go for a specific brand. Also high jv peak.

A

Yeah, you got some friends in the chat, apparently uh excellent, um yeah, that's pretty insightful for folks who weren't catching on. We were just talking about recommendations for 3d printers and uh really it sounds like if you just jump into forms, jump in the reddit uh and start talk about what you're looking to build. um You can probably get some recommendations that way and uh yeah more like fans.

A

Jv peak is a fan, excellent. So speaking of fan, uh I wanted to actually take a look at your get up stars. It's something I've. Always I've tried to round up a lot of the conversations for open source friday on stars, because I find it's always unique. It's kind of like looking at someone's. Like I don't know you go in he's giving like a tour of your house.

A

uh We looked at some of the code that you you put together to actually make the plug-in architecture for for octoprint, but it's also cool to see what you're interested in. uh So you actually have a ton of stars uh which sometimes some folks don't use stars which I I that's fine, but star is a really cool way for you to save projects. For later so give octoprint a star uh if you want to check this out, um but anything you want to talk about and why you why you started any interesting projects here.

B

Yeah, the the top three are actually related to all the stuff that I'm currently doing in my spare time. So um local two year is like a project that I found that partners well with home assistant, so I'm also very much into home automation.

B

uh Most of the stuff here is in some way all the other way connected to my local home assistant instance, and I recently ran into issues with my lights, because those are you or otherwise zigbee based and I am living in a rented apartment, surrounded by neighbors, who do not care about me, trying to run a zigbee mesh here and have their wifi channels all over the place. So I'm currently looking into replacing the lights with wi-fi bulbs with have come really low in price, but most of them are not easily hackable these days anymore.

B

Sadly, so a lot of this, a lot of these that you can um can buy they are, they are on the so-called two-year cloud or smart home or something like that is also another name for it, and you have to use that with a dedicated app and it phones home to some chinese server or something. This is something that I don't want.

B

I want my whole full home completely and utterly isolated from anything in the cloud um and as far as I understood this, this repository, I still have to look into the details, but as far as I understood this, this will basically fake this cloud part. So I just have to set it up once and then I can have this take care of everything. So this sounds like a nice fallback. If I cannot hack the the bulbs that I got uh otherwise.

A

Okay, yeah excellent yeah, I'm actually gonna give that a star myself, because I I will be setting up my my house with home assistant um in the next couple weeks. Hopefully um I wanted to get the uh the blue box that is yeah.

B

Yeah yeah the yep.

A

So those are sold out, so I think I'm gonna go with the raspberry pi route, uh so I just gotta order order, one of those and get those set up. I think these.

B

Mine actually runs just on my synology nurse and.

A

Okay, nice works.

B

Fine yeah, so there are options then next seo I'm currently working on a relaunch of my personal uh of my personal uh homepage, and I I, since I'm also re evaluating react as a future ui framework for octoprint, I'm I figured I might as well use something that makes me or allows me to practice react. So I went.

A

B

Gis and just the other day, I was trying to figure out how to do all this open graph stuff so that, if you want to share a blog post of mine, for example, you also actually get this nice little image card and all.

A

That on twitter.

B

And facebook this is where that came in, and I've deployed it on my local development stuff. So currently nothing is online yet but uh yeah I'm getting there. It's something that uh yeah. Whenever I find some some relaxed minutes these days. I just grabbed the laptop and work on it, but yeah it's been taking whole all of march. So far, yeah.

A

What I found is, uh I waited for one division until they got like like six episodes and that was sort of my my chill time trying to figure out what the show was about, but also write some code. So that's that's been. My life hack is like put on a show that I can watch sort of half, watch and half think with code and.

B

A

Able to uh solve some problems that way also.

B

Time I I I do that when my partner plays video games because yeah I enjoy watching those, but sometimes there are down times and all that and then I can.

A

B

Yeah, this is perfect, absolutely perfect, yeah and mega desk is so. I I sit a lot. I sit way too lot. uh So back in early 2016, I got myself an ikea standing desk, an electrical one, yeah.

A

B

Actually, I can just now like press here, and you see that something here changes right.

A

Go go away, bye-bye.

B

uh And uh the problem with the kia standing, that's the behind test that I got is that it has a control unit, but you it does not have something like presets, where you can say.

A

B

Up to standing height drive down to to sitting height, and this was annoying so last year I stumbled over this one thanks to the changelog.com podcast, or rather the newsletter from them and ordered that on tindy and had it lying around here for months now and last week, I finally sat down dug out the repository again, dug out the documentation and replace the controller unit on my desk.

B

And now it's absolutely awesome, because I have these presets and I also got myself a an a serial con, a serial converter, so that I can flash it with new firmware because I hope to maybe be able to modify it a bit more.

A

Awesome yeah, I I remember this repo because someone actually tweeted it um because they sort of they they made their standing desks, work based on their github commits, which was like real. It was like a really silly trivial um task to do, but basically they were to make their their desk go up and down based on like what they were working on, um which was clever but also kind of silly yeah.

B

This is, but this is actually something that I want to achieve, because I saw that this is also the point where I definitely did start this. I saw that they are currently working on getting serious support in this thing, so that I can also.

A

B

Something like an esp32 to it and then wire it up to home assistant. So I could do stuff like I don't know that thing detects. I've had I've sit, I've set I've set too long or something and then it just drives it up.

A

B

Something yeah.

A

It's really nice. It would be nice to connect that to your apple watch when it tells you to uh stand up every hour or whatever. It is absolutely yeah. Excellent and.

B

Also I mean my desk also has a twitter account from back when I was experimenting with with distance measurements and all that through esp8266 modules and back then I had it so that it just measured the distance to ground with an ultra uh sorry. An uh ultrasound right ultrasound is english word with an ultrasound sensor, and then, whenever I switched to standing, it would tweet out. Gina is now standing and whenever it switched to sitting it would treat out. Gina is now sitting.

A

B

Was also something that I could react to the hits then.

A

Yeah and I like jv peak's uh example, where you can control twitch chat to uh control your desk. So oh.

B

Yes, no, no, no! No! No! No! So as an opt-in, it's.

A

Like gina's she's concentrating too much, let's raise her desk up, which would be hilarious but also very annoying yeah work done, but yeah thanks for uh thanks for, uh I guess obliging and going through that uh that little exercise with me, it's always nice, to see what people are working on and seeing what they're starring, because usually the stars correlate with like interest, and we won't even look at my stars because my stars well now.

A

I include your stars, but uh I also have tons of side projects tons of stuff that I'm just like starring for later and we'll yeah.

B

Yeah, I also recently came across across this bookmark manager, called raindrop io and started structuring all the bookmarks that I come across all the time and it's ridiculous what this collection has grown to in just a bit over two weeks, so yeah wow. I.

A

B

Yeah way too much stuff.

A

Yeah, I I always do like a clean up, usually around the holidays. uh I'll do a clean up of all the stuff that I didn't get to and like stuff that actually really I do want to get to those will get rise to the top of the list, but um unfortunately I still haven't touched that list.

A

So it's uh too much stuff, but uh speaking of what um gina thanks for chatting about octoprint, I hope folks, if you have not tried octoprint, if you're into 3d printing, um definitely join the the forums join the discord uh connect there find recommendations for 3d printers and what you're trying to accomplish through the examples. uh I think this is uh an awesome community that you can sort of engage with.

B

And if you like, what you see and are using octoprint, then please consider sponsoring my work. Yes,.

A

Yes, there's lots of options here and, as you talked about earlier, uh you got it the crowdfunding uh train pretty early in this. uh I guess well, early after the other company decided that they didn't have any more money, but regardless everybody support the the work of open source uh just in general and uh yeah, hopefully, we'll we'll see more and more uh releases coming from from gina and octoprint I'll. Do my best excellent? Well, everybody else.

A

uh If you want to follow me I'll be streaming, I always do this wrong I'll be streaming on this channel uh later today, just doing some general open source stuff. So if you just want to watch me struggle through some node in javascript, uh I am your guy uh and then also this. This video will be on youtube and probably by monday, so follow the youtube channel and also uh policies in the chat, hello policy, all right check out his uh his previous stream as well with home assistant and uh everybody stay saucy.