I’d really like to try Asura for the support generation & distortion correction features but I have no Windows machine to run it on.
There’s been talk of Mac/Linux builds of Asura but also of how busy everyone is.
I can see there’s a Peopoly Github org, how about putting the Asura source code there so the community can have a go at Mac/Linux builds if the Peopoly team lacks capacity?
In the same boat using Linux normally - Got access to a Windows machine… having issues getting STL to show, so I definitely second an open source version I could run on Linux
And if it worked as the pictures advertise I’d be happy to fork over 100 USD simply to be able to work in Linux with a tool tweaked for the printer
it is on top our list guys, OSX. aiming for January.
Thanks for the update, but what about open sourcing it? Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow, etc.
Ultimaker/Cura is licensed under the
The Lesser GPL is less infectious, so they’d not be required to copyleft their proprietary components maintained separately from the lGPL elements.
That’s my understanding too. If you build an app that uses a LGPL licensed library you don’t have to release the source of your app, but if you make modifications to the library you have to make those modifications available.
The software ecosystem for the Moai, both printer firmware and Asura could really benefit from the community working on it. But from my impression it seems that Peopoly isn’t really interested in going down that route. It’s their right to keep it this way and I respect that but in my opinion it’s a wasted opportunity that will hurt the product in the long run.
The moment a good and properly open printer comes along I for one will jump ship.
The problem is that the current era is one of underselling and knocking off open source projects. Yes, Josef Prusa has made a go of it with high end open source hardware, but Brooke Drumm shuttered Printrbot. The Moai secret sauce is the g-code conversion to galvo instructions and the underlying firmware correction of optical aberration. Like Formlabs, they are not going to give that competitive advantage up without something to compete against the knock-off sellers. They are a business after all. The Moai project was about bringing g-code to galvo-based SLA printing. Peopoly has done that well. If you want open-source resin printing, then DLP is the current answer. Someday, the Moai may be fully open-source (or will fork into an open source and closed source kit–unlikely at these volumes, this isn’t FDM), but unless you want to help someone build their next house, it is unlikely that you will see a successful open-source galvo-based SLA printer any time soon.
I think their “Linux Kernel” approach is actually better. This way there is central responsibility for the maintenance of the firmware and the controller hardware. I have seen open source projects forked-to-death and quite frankly that was unproductive.
I’m not suggesting they open source the firmware, there are plenty of other threads about that, most of which come to the conclusions outlined above.
Hi all,
We appreciate the interest in both the Asura and Moai firmware. Asura does not put Curaengine code in our source code. We just call Curaengine.exe (a vanilla version of 3.5.1) when it is time to do slicing. It is not ideal, but it keeps many optimizations works we have done in the past thanks to the community so we could add slicing to Asura for our users. This allows consistent output when slicing directly in Cura. The work we did to make Curaengine work for high-resolution printing (with help from the Cura team and the community) was put back into the Cura main branch. Cura 3.5.1 added specific options to help reduce slicing errors when working in high-resolution mode and that likely grew into a feature update in 3.6. Asura was developed independently and only used Curaengine.exe starting 2.0 when we added slicing. We talked to several Open Source Software experts to see how we can use such license and give credits to Cura team.
As for firmware, there is always the balance between team survival and open source. We are working on extending current gcode so that users could add commands like pause, peel, raise the arm when needed without open sourcing the firmware itself. That itself can add a lot of custom applications via gcode. The extension set will not affect how the original gcode would work so most users who just want to print as it is can continue to use CuraEngine to slice.