Solidoodle and FedoraI've recently been figuring out how to use cura with the solidoodle. The Fedora Linux project has lots of 3d software available in the repos where it is simple to download (and can keep you up to date and automatically fetches any dependencies as well). What it doesn't have in the repos is any of the solidoodle specific tweaks provided in the software packages from solidoodle. So the question is, how to merge the solidoodle tweaks with the Fedora software packages? The consensus favorite software for running the printer seems to be RepetierHost. The two slicer's it can use are slic3r and skeinforge. You can install all of these and any dependencies they require by running: sudo yum install RepetierHost slic3r skeinforge Since solidoodle doesn't provide a linux install package for RepetierHost, there isn't an easy way to get all the settings pre-configured. What I did was install the solidoodle RepetierHost bundle on a Windows XP virtual machine, then poke around looking for where the configuration information for everything was stashed. I found the Windows Repetier Host settings in the nasty old registry at HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\repetierSolidoodle. You can use the Windows regedit.exe tool to make a copy of that registry tree in a text file you can poke around in (though if you transfer it to linux, you may need to use iconv to convert it from UTF-16LE to UTF-8 before it is actually readable.) Back on linux, the mono code has a registry look-alike which stores the same information in a directory tree plus values.xml files. The directory with the equivalent information as the Windows registry is found at ~/.mono/registry/CurrentUser/software/repetier After some considerable poking around, I was able to get the two in sync (keys with path name values and wot-not are obviously going to be different), and my copy of that mono registry tree can be downloaded (as a bzip2ed tar file): repetier.tar.bz2. Note that I didn't copy the Solidoodle 3 printer settings since I have a Solidoodle 2, but if you have a solidoodle 3, at least you know where to find the info now :-). Also note that there are probably paths in some of the keys you will want defined differently, or settings I may have changed since copying them from Windows, so I wouldn't necessarily just plug this into your home directory without looking at it. The other programs don't appear to use the registry (thank God for small favors). I found a C:\Documents and Settings\Tom\.skeinforge directory I used to replace my ~/.skeinforge directory (downloadable as skeinforge.tar.bz2), and I found a C:\Documents and Settings\Tom\Application Data\Slic3r directory I used to replace my ~/.Slic3r directory (downloadable as Slic3r.tar.bz2). (That was on Windows XP - the path to per-user settings is hidden much more effectively on Windows 7 and 8, but it is somewhere under a per-user directory). Anyway, that gets all these Fedora provided programs tweaked with the solidoodle provided settings. Another bit of magic you can use under Fedora is the Solidoodle UDEV Scripts which (among other things) allows me to set the printer port to /dev/solidoodle and have that always be a symlink to the right tty port. Other software you might want to install from the Fedora repos:
netfabb Basic isn't in the repos, but it runs fine on Fedora, and if you download the rpm version, you can get yum to install it and automatically pick up any dependencies it needs as well (which might be extensive if you are running 64 bit since the provided rpm is for 32 bit systems). Go back to my main Solidoodle page. |