New Sailfish documentation available

[Dan Newman]

[This is a repeat of information posted to the jetty-firmware forum.]

Great news for Sailfish users: the Sailfish Reference Manual which my daughter wrote with
community support is now available

PDF: http://www.sailfishfirmware.com/doc/sailfish.pdf
HTML (online): http://www.sailfishfirmware.com/doc/sailfish.html

In keeping with the community funding and spirit of the endeavor, the documentation is
licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License,

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The sources to the docs are at github,

https://github.com/jetty840/Sailfish-documentation

Deepest thanks to the companies and individuals who contributed to making this possible,
and to Ryan Carlyle for providing editing assistance.

Dan

[Steve Johnstone]

Hi Dan, 

Absolutely fantastic!

I’m total humbled by the generosity of you and all those involved in the development and continued support of the Sailfish firmware.

Your daughter Laurel has done an amazing job with the new reference manual. Part of what I do is write manuals and although I've only skimmed through it, I do fully appreciate the hard work that goes into producing a document of this quality.

Thanks all!

Steve

[Scott Wells]

Amazing! Many thanks!

[Dan Newman]

On 12/08/2014, 2:32 AM, Steve Johnstone wrote:
>
>
> Hi Dan,
>
> Absolutely fantastic!
>
> I’m total humbled by the generosity of you and all those involved in the
> development and continued support of the Sailfish firmware.
>
> Your daughter Laurel has done an amazing job with the new reference manual.
> Part of what I do is write manuals and although I've only skimmed through
> it, I do fully appreciate the hard work that goes into producing a document
> of this quality.

Steve,

Thank you for the thoughtful message. It is appreciated. Put a smile on
Laurel's face this morning. And thanks to the Sailfish community for
supporting the effort and making the documentation happen. It is a living
document and I'm sure Laurel will continue to update it.

Regards,
Dan

[Derry]

Many thanks to you and your team. The manual is very educational beyond sailfish documentation.

Prior to this, I only heard about JKN as a commonly dropped terms around the forum. Didn't know it's meaning until I have read the manual.

Thumbs up to the team !

[Bruce]

+1 on thanks for the Sailfish documentation, I also produce these sort of manuals for the company I am employed by and appreciate the amount of work that goes into them. 

:-) any chance she could do one for Simplify 3D (just kidding).

Thank you 

[John Borlaug]

Thank You very much Laurel and Ryan for explaining to an old geezer, all the new definitions! Now I do have one question: is this pic of the "about Rep G"@ 0040-28 the one I need to be running?- I know I can do 30, ( I'm on my Mac, now-( Lion)

[Dan Newman]

On 29/04/2015 9:01 PM, 'John Borlaug' via Makerbot Users wrote:
> Thank You very much Laurel and Ryan for explaining to an old geezer, all
> the new definitions! Now I do have one question: is this pic of the "about
> Rep G"@ 0040-28 the one I need to be running?- I know I can do 30, ( I'm on
> my Mac, now-( Lion)

You're quite welcome John.

Please always use the latest RepG 40rXX - Sailfish available from the Sailfish Thing
at thingiverse.com. In this case, r30 was pushed out to deal with changes at
yolasite.com. Without r30 (or later), you cannot download new firmware from
yolasite.com. (Indeed, since makerbot.com also uses the Cloudflare caching
service, you probably can no longer use MBI's abandoned RepG to download firmware
anymore. It was a change in Cloudflare which yolasite.com uses that necessitated
the change in RepG in order to pull new firmware files from jettyfirmware.yolasite.com.)

Dan

[John Borlaug]

Understand- Thanks Dan- so the prliminary (00)40 is a 'nuthin to me' then? an up loading (all) Thanks again!

On Sunday, August 10, 2014 at 10:53:12 AM UTC-5, dnewman wrote:

[tramalot]

his daughter spent hours on this,  kids need/deserve fun money even if it's 10 bucks... sorry to be me... search there is was a link

[John Borlaug]

It's still there, and upon my ( hopeful) employment @ walmart, shall be inciting a trip to the ice cream parlor- or whatever!:D

On Sunday, August 10, 2014 at 10:53:12 AM UTC-5, dnewman wrote:

[Jetguy]

Posting this update due to a recent change in the Sailfish Firmware hosting of hex files. Dan Newman of the Sailfish firmware team posted this after noting there was a problem with the previous hosting location:

My employer, Polar 3D (polar3d.com) has kindly agreed to host the firmware in their Amazon S3
repository!  It's all uploaded now and available.   In RepG you can point your the Firmware Update URL
to

    http://s3.amazonaws.com/sailfish-firmware.polar3d.com/release/firmware.xml

That setting is in the Advanced section of the Preferences tab.

I'll update the documentation sites tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks Much to Polar 3D!

Dan

On Sunday, August 10, 2014 at 11:53:12 AM UTC-4, dnewman wrote:

[TobyCWood]

Wait... I'm confused. 

Which of you now work for Polar3D? Jetguy or Dan? and... didn't both of you post negative opinions about the Polar3D printer design???? I distinctly recall reading REAL negative stuff about the Polar3D approach form Jetguy!

[TobyCWood]

AH! I found the thread! 

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!search/Polar3d/3dprintertipstricksreviews/VuMOdtvNmmY/Y7Eab5Ej-zEJ

And... mysteriously... one comment in the thread was deleted! Conspiracy?! :-0!

[Daniel Newman]

On 08/02/2017 3:02 PM, TobyCWood wrote:
> Wait... I'm confused.
> Which of you now work for Polar3D? Jetguy or Dan?

I do.

> I distinctly recall reading REAL negative stuff about the Polar3D approach form Jetguy!

Wouldn't have been me. Not having had used one back then, I wouldn't have said anything.
And back then, there was still a lot of ongoing development, particularly around dealing
with printing near and at center. There's been a couple of designs out that had never
solved that problem; Polar 3D did however. So, comments made may have been before the
details had all been proven and people were still skeptical.

[Warning: the rest of this likely will come off as a commercial statement.]

But, actually, they work quite well! (Even better now that they have a print cooling fan.)
However, the point behind them isn't to be the bee's knees of 3D printers but rather to be
a good, reliable printer for education. They have a great footprint to build volume which
educators value: they don't take up much room and you can easily lock them away at night.
They also have fewer moving parts which helps reduce the cost.

All the other things we do with the printer add value to educators but are not unique to
using polar coordinates. What adds value? Well, it's a printer for which educators -- anyone
for that matter -- do not need to install any software to use: no slicers, no printer drivers,
no printer control software, no attached laptop or desktop computer required to drive it.
The printer connects to the "cloud" and from there you load STLs, arrange
the build plate, queue (and manage a queue) of jobs to the printer. The printer pulls the STLs
and slicing configs from the cloud, slices, and then prints. It has a camera which feeds
back to the cloud (as well as time lapse video afterwords). Your print history is in the cloud
so you can repeat prints, tweak settings, etc. Queued jobs can be combined, etc. (Think kids
submitting prints and teachers combining them into one print job.) Oh, and the printer stands
up its own local web interface so if you don't like this cloud stuff, you can ignore it and just
use the local web UI, uploading STLs or gcode you sliced elsewhere. You can even print over USB
if you want or use Repetier hosts' TPC/IP printing protocol. But at the end of the day, it's
a printer which eliminates a lot of the hassles teachers otherwise have to deal with.

Oh, and the way we control our printer can be easily adapted to support others. We have in
the field people driving LulzBot TAZ, Ultimakers, and Printrbots. Again, all from our cloud.
We've not released that yet but when we do, it'll likely be somthing you can buy or just
download the SD card image for and assemble yourself. (I'll be sending one of those units
to Jetguy Real Soon Now.) And no, it's in no way, shape, or form based on Octoprint. As
an aside, our Polar Cloud has been out there for well over 1.5 years, cloud.polar3d.com.
What's been keeping me busy is version 2.0 of it. (Along with other software projects
at Polar 3D.)

Dan

[Daniel Newman]

On 08/02/2017 3:27 PM, TobyCWood wrote:
> AH! I found the thread!
> https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!search/Polar3d/3dprintertipstricksreviews/VuMOdtvNmmY/Y7Eab5Ej-zEJ
> And... mysteriously... one comment in the thread was deleted! Conspiracy?! :-0!

Wow, Jetguy wasn't in that thread! I was, but fortunately, I was only commenting on the comment that round models
might benefit. Just as with Deltas, round models don't enjoy any special benefit. They might if they were
expressed as arcs and then sliced with a slicer knowing that the printer could then accept and print arcs (G3/G4).
But everyone's toolchains are all Cartesian.

Dan

[Daniel Newman]

P.S. The printer doesn't use Sailfish. It uses bog-standard, Cartesian Marlin. Not even a Marlin modified
for polar coordinates. All that heavy lifting is done on the embedded Linux system which also handles the
slicing, standalone web UI, and communications with the cloud.

[TobyCWood]

I recall it was a thread that I started  so this would not have been it... I'm not even in that thread... Oh well... So... If these guys want exposure they should send one to us for review on the podcast. I've tried to contact them but get no response.

[Daniel Newman]

Pretty pictures.

Unfortunately, Lord Baelish didn't have anything printing to show. And yes, Lord Baelish
appears to have been printing himself that large castle MakerBot did a couple of years back.

Dan