3D printing with Atelier

During this year's Akademy conference, Lays Rodrigues introduced Atelier, a cross-platform, open-source system that allows users to control their 3D printers. As she stated in her talk abstract, it is "a project with a goal to make the 3D printing world a better place". Akademy is the KDE community's annual conference. This year it took place in Vienna and the program included a number of hardware-related talks as part of the conference portion held during the weekend of August 11 and 12.

When you get a 3D printer, she began, the first interface you can access is the set of menus on the printer's own screen; see, for example, the screen on the left (taken from Rodrigues's slides [PDF]). They can be used to to perform basic operations and check how the printing operation is going, but there are better ways to control the device, Rodrigues explained.

Most of the technology related to 3D printing is open source. It starts with G-Code files that describe the movements and actions of the printer using a kind of a programming language; examples include where to move the head, at what speed, and what temperature to use. Another important part of the ecosystem is the firmware running in the printer itself, most of which is open source too. There are printing host solutions but "the most popular is not open source", she said. This referred to Repetier-Host from the RepRap project, which started the 3D-printing movement. Repetier-Host started as an open-source system, but became closed source in 2014.

The goal set by Rodrigues and her team was to fill the gap of missing open-source 3D printer host software. Their work consists of two modules: AtCore is the core library and Atelier is the user interface. Both of them are open source and can be downloaded, compiled, and tested right now.

The AtCore library's function is to provide an abstraction for the serial communication with the printer and control of it. It provides a generic layer that is independent from the user interface. AtCore can thus work with any interface, "including QML", she added. AtCore uses pure C++ with Qt for performance reasons. Rodrigues gave memory usage when printing as an example: Atelier requires 200MB of memory while other, similar programs may require 2GB. AtCore supports most open-source 3D-printer firmware using a plugin architecture to handle differences between different firmware implementations. Rodrigues showed at one point the list of the supported printer firmware, which corresponds to the list of supported printer models.

The second part of the team's work is the "test client": Atelier. However, it is a full 3D host system, not just a test program. It uses the KDE libraries in addition to Qt — and the AtCore library, of course. Rodrigues ran a demonstration of a number of Atelier features. The configuration she used included a laptop running Atelier and a small embedded system with the printer firmware. The demo included all stages of the printing process.

Working with a 3D printer starts with connecting to the printer itself. Rodrigues highlighted that Atelier is the first printer host that can connect to multiple printers at the same time. Atelier includes a preview mode that displays the object that is to be printed, in 3D. The design can be seen in detail. Rodrigues said that this view requires more work, without listing the details of the improvements her teams plans to do. This feature is based on Qt 3D, she said in response to an audience question. Monitoring the printing process is the second important feature. There are, for example, profiles for different materials. Temperature control is essential "to not burn your house", Rodrigues explained. A 3D printer may cause damage when badly controlled as the temperature is very high. Atelier shows graphs of the main parameters over time.

Today, the basic controls of the printer are done. If a user has custom firmware "we can support it too", because the host software is open source. She suggested that the team could support other printers too if they had one.

While Atelier can be already used successfully to control a 3D printer, it still requires some tweaks, Rodrigues said. The team wanted to launch it officially at Akademy. Now she hopes to do so later this year, without giving a specific date. The Atelier team is currently in contact with companies in Brazil that do not want to pay a license fee on each 3D printer they ship. Their feedback is that they want to control multiple printers from the same host. In addition they want to do it remotely. That is the work her team will focus on next.

The project is two years old. The team started it to develop an open-source solution for 3D printing; Atelier is currently working on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. The Windows port was possible thanks to help from users, Rodrigues added. Atelier adapts to the platform it is running on with different look. Most people use it on Windows, Rodrigues said. "And I can't force them" to change systems, she added. For Linux hosts, Atelier is distributed as an AppImage to allow easy installation. Source code is available from the KDE Git repositories and from the GitHub mirrors of Atelier and AtCore, for those who prefer to compile on their own.

The project has currently more than 100 binary downloads, she concluded, mostly on Windows, then AppImage, and OS X last. The source code repositories count several hundred of commits each for both AtCore and Atelier. The team working on Atelier is currently Rodrigues and three other developers.

A long session of questions followed in the nearly full room. The first question asked about how many printers are supported. Rodrigues explained that most 3D printers have open-source firmware. In practice, that means that they are all supported. Printers with proprietary, closed-source firmware do exist, but they are rare — and those are currently not supported. She added that they could be supported if the vendors donated the printer or paid them to add the support. Then, to clarify, she said that most common printers "you buy in China" are open source and will work with Atelier.

The next person was curious about the camera mode that she enabled for a moment during the demo session. Rodrigues explained that its intended usage is to watch the printer remotely as it prints. It allows you to to be sure that everything is working correctly. She also explained that the industry does not care about a desktop version of the printer host software; instead, they want to drive printers remotely from small, embedded systems.

The last question was about competition to Atelier. Rodrigues explained that the main competing program was open source before, but it is closed source now. She said that she is "not making too much fuss" about Atelier right now. However, her team has contacts with industry and they hope to see Atelier used in the industry in Brazil.