I recently had to test a 3D printer out of the box.
After a few hours looking for the right open-source tools, I found a proper process to make things !
- Draw something with Sketchup (easier, .skt files) or OpenSCAD (funnier, .scad files), or find a model on Thingiverse.com (complete models and very useful scad libraries can be found there).
- Export to STL format.
- Open ReplicatorG
- Generate gcode
- send to the printer (via memory card or USB)
NB 0 : Inkscape, DXF files,
I had no luck with Inkscape and the dxf file format so far. Converting it to a stl file seems complicated (and the inkscape plugin supposed to help doing so did not install here).
I had some troubles trying to import dxf files in an
openscad code, and since I could find a proper tool to edit dxf files so far, this is still in standby.
Sketchup
Be careful : Sketchup NEEDS the STL export plugin.
Using a MacOSX system, I had to chmod the plugin directory, or it wouldn't install
sudo chmod 777 /Library/Application\ Support/Google\ SketchUp\ 8/SketchUp/plugins/
Sketchup is pretty easy to use. Great GUI compared to the other tools I could find. Great tool for creating and visualising 3D models. A lot of tutorials are available.
sketchup http://www.sketchup.com/
sketchup STL plugin https://github.com/SketchUp/sketchup-stl
sketchup developer tools (not tested yet)
https://github.com/SketchUp/sketchup-developer-tools
OpenSCAD
It can import (but doesn't seem to be able to convert) your STL files (and DXF ? cf. NB 0), but it's easy to code in SCAD. OpenSCAD editor allows you to view and export to various formats.
BE CAREFUL : you need to compile the file before converting it to STL. The rendered image is not necesarily coherent with what's in the cache of OpenSCAD, you might have suprises once printing (I was about to print something twice the size I needed it for example, the replicatorg visualisation shown me at the next step was somewhat too big.)
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual
ReplicatorG
Be sure to have the right file description for your printer.
Useful to connect to the printer, or to write to the memory card. You first have to convert the STL file to GCODE, and then you can either print the commands to a memory card (S3G files), or send the commands directly to the printer.
There seems to be a command line interface for replicatorg, but I didn't had time to check it for now.
replicatorg --nogui
replicatorG https://github.com/haldean/ReplicatorG
Thingiverse.com
Nowadays, it seems to be the best platform around for sharing 3D models. A lot of them are freely available, let's hope it stays like that ! The interface even allows you to modify some customizable models, but I found it faster to just download them and recalculate them on my machine.
I suggest you to create an account. At least, it helps me keeping track of the good and interesting stuff (I have to admit there is also plenty of junk in the models... )
