PrusaSlicer
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prusa3d
No Serial/USB facility
Version
Version of Slic3r Prusa Edition used goes here
Use About->About Slic3r for release versions
For -dev versions, use git describe --tag or get the hash value for the version you downloaded
or git rev-parse HEAD
Slic3rPE-1.42.0-beta+win64-full-201903171406
Operating system type + version -
What OS are you using, and state any version #s In case of 3D rendering issues, please attach the content of menu Help -> System Info dialog
Windows 10 Home edition
3D printer brand / version + firmware version (if known) -
What 3D printer brand / version are you printing on, is it a stock model or did you modify the printer, what firmware is running on your printer, version of the firmware #s
Prusa I3Mk2.5s
Behavior
- Describe the problem
-
Steps needed to reproduce the problem
- If this is a command-line slicing issue, include the options used
- Expected Results
-
Actual Results
- Screenshots from Slic3r preview are preferred
In previous versions there was an option to set up the virtual Serial Comm port to allow connection from PC to Printer via USB cable. In the Configuration/Preferences menu there used to be an option to disable / enable the serial port. In the Printer Settings menu there was an option to select a Serial port and speed and do a test connection to the printer.
Neither of these two options are available.
Image one - screenshot of Serial Port enable/disable option
Image two - same menu in most recent version showing the Serial Port option missing
Image three - shows the selection of the Serial Port, speed and test button
Image four - shows that option of selecting Serial Port is not available now
Is this a new feature request?
No - it is a request to reinstate a very useful feature that has been left out of latest version
Project File (.3MF) where problem occurs
Upload a Slic3r PE Project File (.3MF) (Plater -> Export plate as 3MF for Slic3r PE 1.41.2 and older, File -> Save / Save Project for Slic3r PE 1.42.0-alpha and newer)
Problem occurs all the time
By the way - thanks for a fantastic piece of software.
Same problem for my version.
It is really a missing capability of last release 1.42.0-beta + win64
Prusa commented that the USB/Serial connectivity to the printer has been removed from latest versions of Slic3r. I don't really understand why but it is what it is. For Firmware upgrades, the part of Slic3r that does that is still able to connect via USB/Serial so upgrading to a newer firmware won't be a problem.
There are other options but to be honest I am just putting the GCode onto an SD card on my PC and the putting that in the printer. There is a benefit to doing printing this way. If the PC decides to restart, like it did after installing windows updates recently, in the middle of a print job then the file on the SD is unaffected. If I'd had the PC controlling the printer there would have been loud and extreme expletives coming from my workshop after over 20 hours of printing was wasted. Lucky for me I was already using the SD card method.
An alternative is CURA. On the PRUSA site there is a link to the configuration files for Cura for the various things like material, bed size and so on. Seems to work OK and you can use the USB/Serial link to control the printer.
I think if Prusa receive enough requests to reinstate USB/Serial capability they might reconsider - who knows ?
I'd like to request it be reinstated as well - I found it very useful for quickly iterating over various print settings (calibration prints, for example) as opposed to doing the SD card shuffle. Sure, it may not be ideal for lengthy prints but I think the legitimate use case of successive short prints is a valid one.
You can install octoprint as a middle-man between slic3rPE and the printer. "send to printer" will send it to octoprint and it can start the print directly. You need to install an other software, but it's much more powerful and versatile.
The usb/serial feature was very handy don't remove it. forcing people to do things a certain way is kind of messed up.....give your users options instead of taking them away
forcing people to do things a certain way is kind of messed up.....give your users options instead of taking them away
The USB serial feature was kind of messed up too. It wasn't removed in a bad faith to force users to do something, it was removed because we figured we don't have the cycles to fix / polish / finalize / maintain it, and so it was removed rather than keeping an unreliable functionality.
it was removed rather than keeping an unreliable functionality.
That's interesting. I didn't know it was unreliable. It has worked almost perfectly for me. If it ever failed to start a print for whatever reason, I just hit Disconnect, and Connect and it worked fine. That is a lot less hassle than shuffling SD cards around and selecting the file from the menu every time I made a small change and wanted to try again.
I'm sure you weren't acting in bad faith either. Still, it's very disappointing to have a very convenient and crucial (albeit slightly flawed and imperfect) feature go away so suddenly and completely like this. I hope you will reconsider and re-instate USB printing in the future.
On Fri, 17 May 2019, Frak wrote:
I'm sure you weren't acting in bad faith either. Still, it's very disappointing to have a very convenient and crucial (albeit slightly flawed and imperfect) feature go away so suddenly and completely like this. I hope you will reconsider and re-instate USB printing in the future.
The good thing about having the project in git is that it's very easy to pull back in code that was removed, so if anyone is willing to do the needed development, they can pick it up fairly easily.
I'm new here, what were the problems that people were having that got it marked as unreliable?
David Lang
Via USB, I had sometime the necessity to go to the touch pannel of the printer and to do a "confirmation" thing for the print to start... but otherwise, never had any kind of problem in USB.
Still, seeing this option was gone, I installed Octoprint. It took me a week-end and 50 euros to do so... I would have like to avoid this spending, although Octoprint is top.
The card-shuffle is unacceptable in my situation. I won't be using this PrusaSlicer until it's reimplemented. I have had no problem with it from Mac until now.
oh my god this is driving me insane. they have removed this feature for the most ridiculous of reasons. it is NOT ok to make using sd-cards the norm. how are you going to make 3d printing common-place if they insist on this weird sd-card thing?
gcode? exporting? what the hell is that? we don't need to know these things. by removing usb printing you've made it necessarily for people to do technical things. and given them lots of extra steps.
it is an extremely unwise decision to remove USB printing. and why? because it was effort to maintain? it worked fine before.
I have been using the usb connection since I first got my printer, years ago. Never once had a problem transferring models direct from slic3r. Faffing around with SD card is a total nightmare. The thing is that the slic3r still has usb capability cos the firmware updates have to be done that way.
Senseless drop of a useful feature.
On 24 May 2019, at 18:01, pepelevamp [email protected] wrote:
oh my god this is driving me insane. they have removed this feature for the most ridiculous of reasons. it is NOT ok to make using sd-cards the norm. how are you going to make 3d printing common-place if they insist on this weird sd-card thing?
gcode? exporting? what the hell is that? we don't need to know these things. by removing usb printing you've made it necessarily for people to do technical things. and given them lots of extra steps.
it is an extremely unwise decision to remove USB printing. and why? because it was effort to maintain? it worked fine before.
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I haven't used USB since I bought a Duet. :)
On Fri, 24 May 2019 10:01:47 -0700, pepelevamp [email protected] had a flock of green cheek conures squawk out:
oh my god this is driving me insane. they have removed this feature for the most ridiculous of reasons. it is NOT ok to make using sd-cards the norm. how are you going to make 3d printing common-place if they insist on this weird sd-card thing?
gcode? exporting? what the hell is that? we don't need to know these things. by removing usb printing you've made it necessarily for people to do technical things. and given them lots of extra steps.
it is an extremely unwise decision to remove USB printing. and why? because it was effort to maintain? it worked fine before.
From technical standpoint, I don't think the USB Sender GUI was ever re-written from Perl. There are also some problems in the C++ part, it doesn't build against new versions of Boost, for instance. I also remember there being some realiability problems, either during in-house testing or maybe even reported, I don't remember which one.
TL;DR to include the Sender in the current or next release, it would need to be refactored one way or another. No one has had the cycles to do that. Sorry.
Due to the removal in Slic3r/Prusaslicer, I ended up writing a small G-code streamer for Linux in Python. It shouldn't be too hard to adapt for Windows either. It does exactly the same, but being independent from the slicer means you don't lose a print when your slicer crashes yet again. And it shows you the current line in the G-code file it's at, so you can restart it with the next line in case you accidently unplug the USB cable or something (untested)
Find it here: https://gist.github.com/haarp/79d957f5be7e2de437dc41dd1b38eace
@haarp That's an awesome python utility. Thank you for sharing. I had no idea it was so straightforward to write to the printer like that.
So you mean if I know what line I was at, I can start from there and it will continue where I left off? I've lost so many prints midway due to filament change errors that never fully recovered and ended up resetting the printer.
I can't wait to try this at home on Windows. If I get it to work , I'll post an update.
So you mean if I know what line I was at, I can start from there and it will continue where I left off?
Yes, exactly. My script will also continuously print the line number so you know where you stopped.
But I just remembered that the printer resets when you first open the serial port, and I haven't figured out a way to prevent that. So unfortunately you can't continue prints as-is, since the printer needs the setup g-codes again, or at the very least the temperatures.
But I just remembered that the printer resets when you first open the serial port, and I haven't figured out a way to prevent that.
You can't prevent that, sorry. The printers are hard-wired to reset on serial connection. The purpose of that is to ensure that the printer is in a well-defined state upon serial connection.
Even after a reset of the printer, can we just do an initial setup (set temperature but skip the bed leveling) then continue with the print?
I've updated the script to try to avoid the reset if a print is to be resumed. I've also moved it to it's own repo to avoid spamming the PrusaSlicer issue tracker with this topic. It can be found here: https://github.com/haarp/gcode-streamer
I am just starting with my MK3S and I can't believe I can't print directly from the PC. My other printer CEL ROBOX has this option and I worked with it all the time.
I just got my MK3 and I am very disappointed this is missing. I was using an someone else's printers and it was working perfectly with this and now I have this funky thing with sneakernet and sdcards. No loving it.
well-said. me too. me freaking too. it really, really cheeses me off.
On Sat, 25 May 2019 at 05:28, RosieTheRabbit [email protected] wrote:
I have been using the usb connection since I first got my printer, years ago. Never once had a problem transferring models direct from slic3r. Faffing around with SD card is a total nightmare. The thing is that the slic3r still has usb capability cos the firmware updates have to be done that way.
Senseless drop of a useful feature.
On 24 May 2019, at 18:01, pepelevamp [email protected] wrote:
oh my god this is driving me insane. they have removed this feature for the most ridiculous of reasons. it is NOT ok to make using sd-cards the norm. how are you going to make 3d printing common-place if they insist on this weird sd-card thing?
gcode? exporting? what the hell is that? we don't need to know these things. by removing usb printing you've made it necessarily for people to do technical things. and given them lots of extra steps.
it is an extremely unwise decision to remove USB printing. and why? because it was effort to maintain? it worked fine before.
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I send gcode files through dropbox, google drive or direct network connection to a cheap Android tablet which is connected through USB to the MK3S. Then using the GCodePrintr App to print works reliably.
This is incredibly annoying. I hadn't used my printer in a while. Right now I can't print because I have nothing to read/write an SD card with and those crappy little SD to USB readers just keep breaking.
I started using Pronterface that comes with the Prusa Slicer and its ok. The annoying thing is that it is live so you cant turn off the computer while it prints but it does solve the problem
The annoying thing is that it is live so you cant turn off the computer while it prints
so as the USB Sender, no?
The annoying thing is that it is live so you cant turn off the computer while it prints
so as the USB Sender, no?
Before Prusa I had CEL Robox and when you print something on it via USB, the g-code is transmitted to the printer internal memory and you can turn off the computer. The only thing Prusa needed to do is to have an option to write to the SD card directly over the USB connection then all this fuss would be avoided.
Technically Marlin has that capability but from what I recall because you're writing to the SD over SPI it's incredibly slow and not really practical. (as in minutes for even a small file).
Before Prusa I had CEL Robox and when you print something on it via USB, the g-code is transmitted to the printer internal memory and you can turn off the computer. The only thing Prusa needed to do is to have an option to write to the SD card directly over the USB connection then all this fuss would be avoided.
this. this is exactly what i said too. people say that its slow - well, ok let it be slow. the prints take hours to finish. send the first 100kb of gcode before the print starts, and then read in & save the sd-card as the print is going.
i hear the microcontroller has no DMA which kind of sucks. you know what could have solved this problem? an 8mb memory buffer. buying a second computer (raspi) and connecting it to the bus of the printer is no safer than an x86 linux machine talking to it over USB.
we want 3d printing to be normal and easy. this means no floppy disks and removing bullshit like 'export' steps.