OctoPrint plugin which may be of interest (and what *has* Dan been up to?)

[Daniel Newman]

[Warning, the Octoprint plugins discussed here do not work with Gen 5 MakerBot printers.  And the cloud discussed here is so much more than the one MakerBot just announced.]

Here's some info of what's kept me busy for about a year.  Also, it's an invitation to beta test a new OctoPrint plugin should you be interested.  With the help of some others, I have been rebuilding from scratch Polar 3D's "Polar Cloud".  Rather than go into much detail on what it is, I'll instead have some images below to illustrate.

Here's the "invitation" part which is closely related.

This past month, Mark Walker (GPX maintainer, OctoPrint developer, etc.) and I have been busy developing a plugin to tie OctoPrint to the Polar Cloud.  With OctoPrint and the GPX plugin (by Mark) you have a really nice web interface on your local network with which to control your printer.   But you cannot securely get to it from the anywhere on the Internet.  Enter the Polar Cloud plugin for OctoPrint.  It gives you secure, world-wide access to your printer via OctoPrint.  And with web interfaces that work in any web browser, be it a laptop, desktop, tablet, phone, chrome book, or even one of the new $49 Amazon Fire 7 tablets.  And you can also manage multiple printers, manage queues of print jobs, manage STLs, create print jobs, securely share your printers with others and groups of others, send STLs over from Google Drive, BlocksCAD, (Tinkercad soon).  Integrate with If This Then That (IFTTT) to learn when prints start, finish via text messages, notifications, you name it.  And plenty of other features as well.

The OctoPrint/Polar Cloud plugin is still in beta test.  Before loading it onto your OctoPrint system via OctoPrint's plugin manager, there's a pre-req.  Read the README.md file at the github repo,

https://github.com/markwal/OctoPrint-PolarCloud#enable-polar-cloud-timelapses

There's further info on setting up a Polar Cloud account and getting your PIN code for the OctoPrint / Polar Cloud registration,

https://markwal.github.io/OctoPrint-PolarCloud/

Again, the OctoPrint/Polar Cloud plugin is still in beta test, but it's pretty solid now.  (Polar Cloud itself has been around for 2.5+ years; the complete rewrite from scratch went live in March 2017.)

And now for lots of camera shots.

Each of your printers in the cloud has a "virtual build plate" to which you can load STLs. You get get the STLs from those shared (publicly or privately) within the Polar Cloud, from your local file system, or from Google Drive (if you login using your Google account).  We're also an app in Google Drive so if you right-click an STL file in Google Drive, you can pick "Open With" from the menu and then select the Polar Cloud app to send the STL to your virtual build plate.

In the above, I picked an STL file from a public object in the Polar Cloud.  Once I selected one or more files, I clicked the LOAD button and was taken to the virtual build plate for one of my printers.  (You can switch printers once there if it's not the printer you wanted.)

Then, since there's more room left on the plate and it makes a good example, I grabbed an STL from Google Drive.

All printers have default slicing configurations, but you can also make your own by duplicating an existing one, changing the name, and then editing the settings and saving.  Here I'm looking at my saved configs for this particular type of printer (a Replicator 2 with a heated bed).

There's plenty of slicer settings.  HOWEVER, not to disappoint but the slicer is Cura.  Sorry, no Simplify3D buried in Octoprint yet.

Once you're happy with everything, click PRINT.  A "master" STL is made and saved in the cloud along with your slicer settings.  If you later want to edit the print job, you can reload it back to the virtual build plate.  When you do that you're again working with the individual STL files.  But a really nice thing is that you can go back in your print history, find old print jobs, and requeue them with the exact same STL files and slicer settings.  Even if you later change the STLs stored in the cloud, the old ones will be available.  (I suppose that can also be confusing if you don't expect it.)

Here's the queued print job along with a couple of others.

As mentioned earlier, you can edit queued jobs.  We have a lot of teachers who share their printers with their different classes, allowing students to queue prints to the printers and watch things print.  But the teachers often will edit the queued jobs, combining them and perhaps double checking the slicer settings as well.  This next shot shows some of the things you can do with a queued job.  (You can also move it to another printer, but that's not shown here.)

Let's look at some of my other printers....

And if you don't want to look at the tiles with camera views, you can do a more sterile listing.

Here's one of my Core-XY prints busy printing,

And here's some of that printer's management pages

Users can look at their queued prints and print history across all printers via their "profile" pages,

And lots more I might show, but that's plenty.

Dan

dddd

[Carl]

Looks nice Dan! :-)

Several of my larger clients might be interested in running something like this in the future... but I do not think that any of them would consider it seriously unless it could be run on their own internal servers. 

Are there any plans to make the 'cloud' portion of this development open source?... or is the intention to follow something more along the lines of the 3dprinterOS business model? 

[Daniel Newman]

On 06/07/2017 6:16 PM, Carl wrote:
> Looks nice Dan! :-)
>
> Several of my larger clients might be interested in running something like this in the future... but I do not think that any of them would consider it seriously unless it could be run on their own internal servers.

That's actually of interest to Polar 3D. When I architected version 2 of our cloud,
one of my goals was to be able to run it on a private cloud. And, indeed, at ISTE
in San Antonio, Texas last month we had it all bottled up and running on a small,
standalone PC, entirely disconnected from the Internet. (ISTE == International Society
for Technology in Education.)

> Are there any plans to make the 'cloud' portion of this development open source?...

The web backend and frontend, no, no plans to open source it. The servers the printers talk
to, possibly. And the protocol itself is open. And, indeed, the OctoPrint plugin serves as
a reference implementation. (I have one in Node.js as well.)

> or is the intention to follow something more along the lines of the 3dprinterOS

Actually, we're primarily in the K12 STEM education space if you can believe it. The orginal
Polar Cloud was launched late 2014 (early 2015? Before my time.) It was to make 3D printing
easier in the classroom. Eliminate the need to get a slicer, a computer to run a slicer on,
an attached computer to drive the printer, drivers for the attached computer, etc. No need
for any of those. Moreover, allows students to queue jobs to printers rather than e-mail STL
files or put them in dropbox or Google Drive, leaving the teacher to download each one, figure
out which fit onto the build plate, slice them, then get the gcode to the printer, etc. The
original Polar Cloud worked well and addressed all those issues. However, it wasn't scalable
(the people who wrote it clearly didn't know how to write such). So now we have version 2.0
of the Polar Cloud which we launched in March 2017.

So, no present plans to go the route of 3D PrinterOS and start charging for services to end
users.

Dan

[Ryan Carlyle]

Looks pretty nice.

[Daniel Newman]

On 08/07/2017 11:00 AM, Ryan Carlyle wrote:
> Looks pretty nice.

Thanks.

Plan of record is for v1.0 of the plugin to be released sometime Tuesday barring any bugs
arising beforehand. Mark Walker, who did the majority of the work for the plugin, will know
more. (My only request was that as I'm traveling all day Monday was to not release any sooner
than Tuesday.)

Dan

[Kalani Hausman]

You might try using Amazon Cloud or Microsoft. I would definitely use a cloud to support your needs.

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[Daniel Newman]

On 06/10/2017 7:56 PM, Kalani Hausman wrote:
> You might try using Amazon Cloud or Microsoft. I would definitely use a cloud to support your needs.

This particular 3DP cloud service has been running in AWS since Jan 2015. What I was writing about
was work in OctoPrint to join OctoPrint to that 3DP cloud service.

Dan