I’ve been using Cura as a slicer for my Anycubic Kobra since I got it a few months ago. After a few weeks I discovered octoprint which was amazing as it let me start and monitor print jobs whilst out and about.
Cura has been great for me but I’m growing tired of needing to copy my print profiles from machine to machine on different OSes to slice my STL files. Is anyone aware of any self hosted web based slicers I could use to sidestep this problem?
I would be willing to live without an octoprint plugin and manually download and upload the gcode files to my printer if needed, I just want to be able to slice from wherever I am and kick off the print from wherever I am.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Very fair question and I’ll admit that a part of it genuinely is “because I can!” But that’s not all of the reason. I work across several machines and soon due to reasons that at the same time both make sense and are somewhat frustrating some of the machines I use most frequently are about to be locked down and my ability to instal software removed, so that is part of it. Web apps allow me to sidestep this issue. I’m a bit of a forgetful person that has to act when inspiration hits me or I forget to deal with it. Sometimes that’s probably for the best but other times a moment of inspiration has turned into something wonderful (both in the 3D printing scenario and wider life) Most of my homelab setup is web-based already and I have most of my files synchronised around to allow me easy access no matter where I am or what device I’m on, I also work long days away from home now and then and like the idea of having an idea, processing the stl file and then kicking off a print job so it’s complete by the time I get back home. In the end I guess my big motivator here is due to my own personal failings, I’m an impatient and forgetful person that would rather just get stuff done than improve my memory and patience ;)
Gotcha! I’m curious to hear what others have to say, because a web-based slicer does sound like a neat idea. I could see it being challenging due to the processing power required to slice more complex jobs. And also if you’re anything like me, you often slice a job a half dozen times or more while tweaking settings to get it just right, while flying around the model and checking tricky areas closely. If you’re self-hosting, maybe the processing power is not an issue, but it would require a decently advanced interface to ensure you don’t come home to a pile of spaghetti because you weren’t able to check the slicing job adequately.
The best I can come up with is to remote in to your main slicing machine and do the work that way, but I’m hoping I can learn something from this thread!
So would it not be useful to attack this a different way?
Something that you can upload files to that triggers a job that sends it to a slicing machine, or something like that?
What I mean to say is have you thought of skinning this cat any other way?