gittyeric / autoslicer-prusa

Save Prusaslicer projects and automate the rest

autoslicer-prusa

Never manually slice an STL again! Upon saving your PrusaSlicer project file, generate all gcode permutations you care about and optionally auto-upload to all your printers. Example: update your model in 1 project file and autogenerate gcodes for many profiles like Printer1+PLA, Printer2+PLA, Printer1+PETG, Printer2+PETG. This will also watch ALL your project files and global settings changes and instantly regenerate any affected gcode outputs and sync with printers. Pretty much "hot reload" for fast design prototyping! Hit save in PrusaSlicer and print any gcode version everywhere leveraging just your native PrusaSlicer settings.

How it works

Given a projects folder that has some arbitrary structure, a mirror "gcode" folder will be generated that matches all your project files, but may contain extra gcode outputs under "myProject/gcode/<Printer>/myPart_<Filament>-<PrintSettings>.gcode". This script reads your PrusaSlicer's configuration directory automatically to generate all permutations of gcode you could ever care to generate, here's an example project folder:

<Root Project folder>
- myProject1
  - part1.3mf
  - part2.3mf
- myProject2
  - part1.3mf
  - part2.3mf

and would produce the following output structure:

<Root Project folder>
- gcode
  - myPrinter1
    - myProject1
      - part1-pla-custom1.gcode
      - part1-petg-custom1.gcode
      - part1-petg-custom2.gcode
      ...
    - myProject2
      - part1-pla-custom1.gcode
      - part1-petg-custom1.gcode
      - part1-petg-custom2.gcode
      ...
  - myPrinter2
    - myProject1
      - part1-pla-custom1.gcode
      - part1-petg-custom1.gcode
      - part1-petg-custom2.gcode
      ...
    - myProject2
      - part1-pla-custom1.gcode
      - part1-petg-custom1.gcode
      - part1-petg-custom2.gcode
    ... (More excluded)

Updating your .ini files will regenerate everything and updating a 3mf file only regenerates all gcodes for that part.

Installing

This program requires Node.js (version 16 or higher) running on a Bash-like terminal. Windows users can use a number of Bash-like emulators.

1. Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/gittyeric/autoslicer-prusa

2. With Node.js (version 16 or up should do) and NPM installed, you can install by changing to this repo's directory and running:

npm install

3. You can now run with npm --prusa=<my-prusaslicer-config-location> --project="<my-absolute-projects-folder-location>" start

Where:

<my-prusaslicer-config-location> is the location PrusaSlicer takes you to when navigating to Help -> Show Configuration Folder.

<my-absolute-projects-folder-location> is the folder containing your PrusaSlicer .3mf project files (subfolders will also count).

If you see issues such as "Command not found: prusa-slicer", change prusaSlicerCmd in index.ts to whatever command works for your terminal (ex. prusa-slicer-console or slic3r).

Types of settings

Prusaslicer divides settings into 3 categories: Printer, Print, and Filament settings. All permutations of these 3 you define in Prusaslicer will be auto-generated and/or uploaded. You can restrict uploading so that only generated Gcode intended for certain Printer/Print settings will be sent to compatible printers.

Running forever in Unix systems

The easiest way to install this program to run 24/7 and listen for file changes in a lightweight way is to add the script you are successfully running in step 3 to your crontab with:

crontab -e

Then add an entry to run autoslicer after every reboot:

@reboot cd </path/to/>autoslicer-prusa && npm --prusa=<my-prusaslicer-config-location> --project="<my-absolute-projects-folder-location> start"

Adding new (Printer / Filament / Print Settings) combinations

This script will automatically track any changes or additions to your Printer, Filament or Print Settings profiles and regenerate all your project files accordingly.

Warning! Creating lots of .ini settings produces exponential permutations of gcodes per project file, so only keep the settings you really need in Prusaslicer and aggressively delete unused ones.

Adding new 3mf project files

Simply add a new .3mf file anywhere in your projects folder and it will be immediately sliced against all settings permutations and show up in the gcode/ folder.

(Optional): "Live Reload" upload to printers

Simply save a PrusaSlicer project to auto-upload to all your printers!

Edit index.ts to include the list of SSH addresses to upload to (hint: you should use ssh-copy-id so your printer trusts your local Printer for SSH connections). Whatever address(es) you use to access your printer(s) with ssh (ex. ssh [email protected]), add to the rsyncUploadTargets list. Alternatively, you can specify a comma-separated targets argument on a per-command basis instead of modifying index.ts:

npm --targets="[email protected],[email protected]" --prusa=<my-prusaslicer-config-location> --project="<my-absolute-projects-folder-location>" start

Tagging printers for minimal uploads

In addition to specifying upload targets, you can append a #[tag1][tag2] suffix to ensure that gcodes are only uploaded to printers that support it. Let's say you have Prusa Mk2 and Mk3 Printer settings called mk2 and mk3, but also a generic mk Printer profile that works with both. You can tag the upload targets so that mk3 gcodes never end up on mk2 machines but both can receive mk's with something like:

npm --targets="[email protected]#[mk][mk2],[email protected]#[mk][mk3]" --prusa=<my-prusaslicer-config-location> --project="<my-absolute-projects-folder-location>" start

Restricting Print Settings to only some Printers

If you want to restrict the upload of some Print settings to only upload to some Printer types, you can follow the naming convention of <Printer name>-somePrintSettingsName and any gcode using somePrintSettingsName Print settings will only be uploaded to <Printer name> printers. Extending the example above, creating print settings named mk2-fast and mk3-slow will only upload gcodes with those print settings to mk2 or mk3 printers respectively. If none of your print settings start with a matching printer name, all print settings will be matched to all printers.

Octoprint End-to-end Automation

If you use Octoprint or Linux to run your printer, you can also tie the gcode generation event to auto-upload the file to all your Octoprint bots using it's built-in folder watch feature. By default, Octoprint checks for incoming gcode files (after manually enabling this feature) at /home/pi/.octoprint/watched, so you can use the Live Reaload section above to configure appropriate targets such as [email protected]:/home/pi/.octoprint/watched

Note that massive amounts of files will slow down Octoprint quite a bit (at least when not printing) with plugins like PrintGenius installed.

Resetting all gcode files

If you wind up with lots of stale files on your printers, delete your project directories remotely then delete the gcode folder in your projects folder or run with the --nuke=true option. Autoslicer will then regenerate all gcode files fresh from your current Prusaslicer profiles and project files.