MakerBot Industries

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.

One Response so far | Have Your Say!

1. 

   Mike Cook
   August 3rd, 2009 at 6:41 am #

   I have a MacBook Pro running OSX 10.5.6

   I am attempting to use ReplacatorG to send gcode to a CNC controller based on the Arduino. At the moment I am using a modified version of the FiveD_GCode_Interprator. It is not driving a machine but an LCD display that shows the gcode messages it recieves. This works for the control panel and after a fashion for ReplacatorG 0003 (see below), I can see the gcode lines being displayed as I expect. Unfortunately with ReplacatorG 0005 I am having some trouble.

   1) When driving the machine through the Control Panel, the X, Y and Z positions are greyed out and not up dated. These position indicators works when using the Simulator option.

   2) ReplacatorG 0005 scans the serial ports in a reverse order to ReplacatorG 0003 hence the first port on the list is not the last thing you plugged in and so the auto assignment fails. To make mater worse putting the port name in the machines.xml file does not appear to work either when you put in the name reported by the menu. You have to configure it from the menu every time.

   3) Running ‘Build’ under ReplacatorG 0005 just appearers to hang. It says “Running GCode…” but nothing happens even after 30 minutes. Under ReplacatorG 0003 it will send out gcode but only the first time, if you stop the build you can’t start it again, and you have to force quit the application and re launch it before it will go again. At least using ReplacatorG 0005 the pause / stop don’t appear to jam anything up, it is just that it won’t send any instructions either.

   4) Running without a tool definition brings up a string of Java errors but does not appear to stop it from working. I have tried the above with and without an extruder tool definition. The errors without a tool definition are:-
   Exception in thread “Control Panel Update Thread” java.lang.NullPointerException
   at replicatorg.app.ControlPanelWindow.updateStatus(ControlPanelWindow.java:725)
   at replicatorg.app.ControlPanelWindow$UpdateThread.run(ControlPanelWindow.java:974)

   5) The lower portion of the window that shows the response from the controller sometimes appearers to jam up, showing nothing for several commands. Then it will suddenly display all the commands (normally the OK responses) all at once. I have not been able to detect a pattern with this.