Sunday, July 19, 2009
After a long wait, ReplicatorG 0005 is finally available for your printing and simulating enjoyment. Most of the changes have been stability fixes and tinkering under the hood, but there’s also a bunch of changes that should make your life a bit easier (especially if you were using 0004):
* ReplicatorG is now much smarter about serial ports. When you select a machine type that uses a serial port, it will automatically scan all available serial ports to try to detect a working machine.
* You can now explicitly tell ReplicatorG which serial port to use. There’s a “Serial Port” submenu in the “Machine” menu that allows you to select any available port. If you forgot to plug in your serial cable when you started ReplicatorG, you can just select “rescan serial ports” after you plug it in and the port should appear in the list.
* You can now run multiple instances of ReplicatorG on the same machine and have them connect to different serial ports. This means you can now run several 3D printers simultaneously from the same computer! (Pretty handy if you have to, say, print out three dozen pulleys in a hurry.)
* There’s been a little bit of consolidation of the status displays; we’re down to just two separate status bars on the main window now. :)
* The “stop” and “pause/unpause” functionality is now more reliable. However, a word of caution: a stop or pause is not guaranteed to halt the extruder as well; a fix for this will be in the next firmware update.
* There should be far fewer situations where the program blocks; for example, you should be able to exit normally after hitting the reset button on the machine.
You can download ReplicatorG 0005 from googlecode.
Be sure to leave a comment and let me know how 0005 works out for you, and let me know about any changes you’d like to see in 0006.
via the MakerBot Blog
* ReplicatorG is now much smarter about serial ports. When you select a machine type that uses a serial port, it will automatically scan all available serial ports to try to detect a working machine.
* You can now explicitly tell ReplicatorG which serial port to use. There’s a “Serial Port” submenu in the “Machine” menu that allows you to select any available port. If you forgot to plug in your serial cable when you started ReplicatorG, you can just select “rescan serial ports” after you plug it in and the port should appear in the list.
* You can now run multiple instances of ReplicatorG on the same machine and have them connect to different serial ports. This means you can now run several 3D printers simultaneously from the same computer! (Pretty handy if you have to, say, print out three dozen pulleys in a hurry.)
* There’s been a little bit of consolidation of the status displays; we’re down to just two separate status bars on the main window now. :)
* The “stop” and “pause/unpause” functionality is now more reliable. However, a word of caution: a stop or pause is not guaranteed to halt the extruder as well; a fix for this will be in the next firmware update.
* There should be far fewer situations where the program blocks; for example, you should be able to exit normally after hitting the reset button on the machine.
You can download ReplicatorG 0005 from googlecode.
Be sure to leave a comment and let me know how 0005 works out for you, and let me know about any changes you’d like to see in 0006.
via the MakerBot Blog
