Toggle is a user interface (UI) for 3D-printers meant to be run on the printer. It has been designed for Manga Screen, but should be portable to other screens as well. The new version has a very nice (read fancy) way of switching between tabs, so it will be a joy to jog around on your printer. The great thing about thi software is that it is written using the Clutter SDK meaning that all the heavy lifting is one by the GPU of the BeagleBone Black. This is the same GPU that is in the iPhone 4, so it is actually quite capable. That means your delta printer will not start to stutter even though your are showing a model of what you are printing. You show me a 3D printer that can do that!

The new version can be installed for anyone running Kamikaze by writing:

apt-get update
apt-get install toggle

While in a shell, might I also suggest installing the brand new Toggle plugin for OctoPrint:

apt-get install python-octoprint-toggle

There are a lot fewer settings for Toggle than Redeem, but one setting that you need to alter is the api_key. In the video it is shown how to alter it. For reference, here is a minimal local.cfg file:

[System]
api_key = REPLACE_ME

For other settings, look at how the default.cfg looks. For feature requests, add them to the Trello board or to the Toggle repository .

Other things worth mentioning is that Toggle now uses WebSockets instead of SockJS, so it should be a bit faster and more stable. In all honesty there are a couple of bugs that would be great to squash before this release, but at least it is way better than the predecessor. Patches welcome : )

The post Toggle 1.0 Introduction video appeared first on www.iagent.no.

The most important changes from the last image is the native path planner in Redeem. Mathieu Monney has done an incredible job in porting some of the code from Repetier firmware and adapting it to the PRUs on the BBB.Becuse of the, Redeem had to adapt the GPL 3 license. Toggle has also gone through some changes, and has been re-written in Python to ease the development. And finally the beginning of a Web UI has emerged allowing selection of configuration file and seeing the status of Redeem, Toggle and Octoprint. It’s still early for the thing-frontend (Web UI), but the idea is that this will be the start of a great UX for anyone using Replicape for the first time. So now, all the BSP packages (Redeem, Toggle, Octoprint and Thing-frontend) are written in Python for easy and effortless hacking directly on the BeagleBone.

Distribution:
* Yocto 1.6 (2014.06)

Kernel:
* 3.14.14 with Capemgr

BSP-layer:
* Redeem 0.14.3 — The Replicape Daemon (Native path planner)
* Toggle 0.2 — GUI for 3D-printers suitable for embedded platforms. (Now written in Python)
* Octoprint (latest from Git) — The responsive web interface for your 3D printer
* CuraEngine (latest from git) — A fast G-code slicer

Graphics:
* Clutter 1.9.6
* Cogl-1.8.2
* Mx-2.0
* Mash-0.2

The new image has had a few beta-testers, but can still be considered a development image.

At least one guy is happy with this new image. To quote @jamisnemo:

@AgentBrum Oh boy have I fallen in love with Clutter!! Thank you so much for helping me getting this up and running! You are a life saver!!

The post New BBB flasher with kernel 3.14, Native path planner and a web UI appeared first on www.iagent.no.

The video shows the Thing printer, which is a demo-printer for displaying the capabilities of the Replicape and the Manga Screen and also for developing Spline, which is a all-metal remotely cooled dual Bowden extruder that I’m working on. Here is a picture of the final result:

Like I mention in the video, since there is no cooling of the platform, heavy overhangs tend to fall apart. The workaround for this is to add moar fans, so I guess that is the next step!

The post Replicape printing a tree frog appeared first on www.iagent.no.

Clutter is a great SDK for writing hardware accelerated GUI apps for embedded devices. It can run on X and Wayland, but it can also use the framebuffer directly and bypass the overhead of a display manager completely, ideal for embedded devices.

I have spent the last few weeks working on getting Clutter to run on BeagleBone Black and a working recipe is now available. That means that if you have your BeagleBone up and running with Angstrom, you should be able to write “opkg install libclutter-1.0-dev” and everything will magically install, which is the point of a packet distribution system. Right now, there are a few more steps. Look below.

3D integration

One of the great things about Clutter is the tight integration with OpenGL ES 2. This makes it easy to make a 2D/3D app since all actors drawing is handled by the Cogl backend.

Since the back end of Clutter is handled by Cogl, extending the Clutter library by adding custom actors is (normally) fairly straight forward. I say normally since it works fine when writing in C. If you want to use python, the the problem becomes slightly more difficult.. Since the bindings are auto-generated with Gobject instrospection, the loading of vertex buffers have not been optimized and takes a big toll on the main CPU. A workaround is to use Mash. So far We’ve only managed to load a model and not yet gotten the shading to work, so the model that can be seen in the picture above is fairly uninspiring.. But there are still two weeks left until Maker Faire Oslo!

There is also a great library for adding widgets called Mx. An Angstrom package is now available for that as well. Here is a picture showing the widgets: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala/MxSample?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=mx-widget-factory.png

When making a GUI, a handy tool is the ClutterScript. This allows the structure to be defined in a JSON file. There is also an option for styling layout components using CSS.

Getting started with Clutter on BeagleBone Black

The bad news about Clutter is that there are almost no up to date examples, especially if you want to use one of the languages it has bindings for (C++, Python, Vala). This might be because the main page, clutter-project.org is in the process of being moved. The API reference manuals are well made though. I’ve made an effort in trying to correct that, so the thing wiki has been updated with a few hello world examples: http://wiki.thing-printer.com/index.php?title=Clutter_on_BeagleBone#Hello_world_using_Clutter_on_BeagleBone_Black_-_Python_code

Installation currently requires adding a package feed from Thing Printer (this website), upgrading the kernel to 3.12 (which is still fairly unstable) and installing a custom version of the SGX SDK. I’ve tried to upload most of the work that has been done to different repositories, in case anyone wants to fix something that is broken.

All the stuff you should need is gathered on the thing wiki: http://wiki.thing-printer.com/index.php?title=Clutter_on_BeagleBone

The post Writing Clutter apps on BeagleBone Black using Python appeared first on www.iagent.no.