Hi Folks
I was reading a bit about Pronterface and wondered what the thoughts were here on this. It seems this is software on your computer that communicates directly with the printers like Octoprint except through a USB connection. and your able to make firmware changes inside this interface. Does this have to stay connected this way? I though I saw where people were printing directly from this software and not using the printers own memory. is that how it’s supposed to be used?
There are a number of software applications that will allow you to send gcode directly to a printer. The problem is that printers, being real-world devices, have to operate in real-time meaning that when the print head reaches the end of a line they need to get their next instruction. They can’t be left standing there waiting, oozing filament, while the computer feeding them instructions is busy with other tasks which is usually the case with most computers. OctoPi is really just a computer running a single task so it can give the printer it’s full, un-diverted attention. On a Windows machine, for example, if the computer decides to do a CPU intensive task like Windows Update can sometimes be, your print gets ruined.
Laser printers solve this problem by loading your entire document into memory and letting the on-board computer work from that. They don’t care if the data came to them in drips and drabs because the computer user is playing Fortnite and printing is just a background task.
Memory is dirt cheap these days, and for the life of me, I don’t know why laser printers don’t just save files to an internal memory and print from there like laser printers do.
I agree. Going back to print spooling is an era im not interested in. I was more interested in if I can monitor the print and also edit the firmware from a pc while the printer remains autonomous.
So I have cura hooked up now and doing a print from the USB port to the printer. The screen on the printer has no idea it’s printing so cura is running the G code directly to the printer. There doesn’t look like there is a way to make adjustments to what is running in Cura. like I can adjust Z height or temperatures while it prints.
oh well first thing I see when I look back at Cura is the little send gcode box so I guess thats how it would be done.