Fw: Slic3r, Sailfish and gcode hell...

[Mark Walker]

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From: Ron Moreland <ronmo...@earthlink.net>
Sent: Saturday, April 29, 2017 2:15 PM
Subject: Slic3r, Sailfish and gcode hell...

 

Hi Mark,

I recently installed Sailfish in my FFCP knockoff from Monoprice. Slic3r is my primary gcode generator. What gcode flavor do you set in Slic3r? Sailfish is supposed to be ReplicatorG gcode. I cannot get proper Dual extrusion behavior out of gpx with either -g or -r. With -g, the tool switches work but the bed is heated to the tool temp. With -r the bed temp is fine but the extruders won't switch. Sailfish seems to ignore the M108 directives, but does respond to T0 and T1 calls. I was about to write a Perl script to switch out all the M108’s to T’s. I though I’d contact someone who knows something about this first.

I looked over the source code for gpx. I’m willing to do some digging if you can point me in the right direction.

Do you know the story behind x3g? Why is it used at all? Where is the specification for it.

Thanks,

Ron

[Mark Walker]

For Slic3r, I recommend telling Slic3r that you have a RepRap printer not a Sailfish printer because somebody convinced them to use M108 for Sailfish and then use RepRap flavor in GPX.

The story with x3g is that it used to be s3g which is the 3rd Generation RepRap firmware protocol which MakerBot adopted and extended.  It has some flaws such as that it isn't easily extensible in a backward compatible way.

But in many ways it is ahead of the gcode protocol that Marlin uses today. For one, it specifies precisely the framing, checksum and call response protocol.  Marlin on the other hand just responds however it likes and often without even being asked a question which makes writing a host for it harder than it needs to be.  It was written like it was intended for a human operator to type gcode directly into a terminal window and who cares about automating printing.

The specification for x3g is here: https://github.com/makerbot/s3g/blob/master/doc/s3gProtocol.md

Good luck finding a g-code protocol specification.  There's a wiki but it only talks about what g-code is supposed to do and precious little about the proper format of the responses.

[Daniel Newman]

FYI, in case you've lost the link,

https://github.com/makerbot/s3g/blob/master/doc/s3gProtocol.md

And, of course, the story behind s3g is that it was done by Adrian Bowyer, et al. It was actually
done by the RepRap folks. It was not an invention solely by MakerBot.

Dan