Running multiple bots from one computer
Aug 7, 2009
In ReplicatorG 005 support was added for controlling multiple MakerBots from the same computer. On Windows and Linux it just involves opening more instances of ReplicatorG and assigning them to their respective serial ports but on a Mac it’s a little bit trickier.
The other day Adam showed me this cool trick for running ReplicatorG from the source in terminal and today I documented it on the ReplicatorG wiki. I’ve been using this trick the past few days to pump out pulleys for batch 5. It’s an awesome feeling to be surrounded by lots of MakerBots all humming away as they print out tons of parts for you. Yay for MakerBot threesomes!
by Will |
Categories: MakerBot News |
GadgetMerc
August 7th, 2009 at 5:28 pm #
Hey,
I have an idea that I think might help you out a bit. What if you made a reprap that had large bed that you could place a few stationary extruders over head. So make the bed large enough to make 12 pulleys then have 12 extruders that are in a fix position. If the next batch you only need 10 then dont power up two of the extruders. That way you only have one reprap running but it can make multiple parts. If you then need to print out somehting larger then just use less extruders but with more spacing between them.
Imagine a reprap with a bed the size of a sheet of plywood printing out 32 pulleys at a time it takes you to currently print one.
Now I know mass production might be out of scope of your goals, but it would be frak’n sweet! If you interested, let me know. I think I have most of the kinks worked out in my head already.
matt
October 1st, 2009 at 1:45 pm #
I’m running an iBook G4 with OSX 10.4 and terminal was not liking the (-n) flag.
It worked after moving to the folder containing ReplicatorG and executing the following code. (thanks Adam!)
./ReplicatorG.app/Contents/MacOS/ReplicatorG