Progress update for AtCore.

A few days ago we hit a milestone in our development of AtCore. We are now able to properly install the libary for general use. Not only is installing a necessary for a libary that you plan to use within other stuff it also means that we can now focus our attention mostly on Atelier. We have now entered that magical time in development when the real world usage begins to drive its development. Thanks to everyone efforts we are almost ready for the next stage. Patrick has been doing reviews on every pull request. While he has been unable to help with as many commits as he would have liked to. His advice and direction in his reviews has been really helpful and has kept our style and code quality at a high level. Tomaz has been busy fixing up AtCore to be a proper KF5 libary with all the cmake deployment parts to go along with it. Most all of the cmake stuff has been written by Tomaz. Lays has been working on Atelier setup and getting all the non AtCore parts working. Thanks to her effort we are now able to use Atcore from Atelier!

As for me i have been adding stuff to AtCore. Since our last progress update a few new things have been added. Emergency Stop this simply allows you to stop the printer using the emergency stop code.It also cleans up any the command queue. Pause/Resume  when paused we store the current location of the head that that way after resume you can move your print head out of the way to access the model.Pause supports a comma seperated string of commands to be sent after pause. For my printer i use "G91,G0 Z1,G90,G1 X0 Y195" when pause this move my head up 1 mm and then pushes my model out toward the front fo the machine. This is useful if you want to maybe put a nut into printed part or change filament durring print and even to corrrect print defects while printing. We have also started to do lay ground work for more status info being picked out from the serial chatter. Setting of the firmware plugin can be done durring connect to force a specific plugin. A progress bar for printing progress. Some cleanup for autodetection of the plugin. There is still things to add to AtCore but it should provide enough for most use cases already!

I have made a package for Arch Linux on the aur (atcore-git). Other distro packages as well as a proper alpha release tarball will hopefully come in not to long. We are currently working on getting a more defined release plan so that we can get user testing as well as have AtCore deployment ready since its a prerequsite of making Atelier. Currently the package comes with the A test panel “AtCoreTest”. You are encouraged to try it out if you have a 3D printer and report back.Since AtCore will be doing all the communication bug testing here is very important.

Even if you don’t have a printer Installing the package and running the test gui to see that it works and the plugins are shows under the firmware combobox correctly will help us.

For anyone wishing to help with packaging. its simple to get install set up

in the root of the source.

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$(qtpaths –install-prefix) -DCMAKE_LIBARY_PREFIX=lib CMakeLists.txt

make

make install

add -DBUILD_TEST_GUI=ON to build the test gui and set up its install

come join us on freenode in #kde-atelier ;