Makerbot Support?  

RE: Makerbot Support?

Posted by: @reddawg

Since it looks like JP will not be making a dual extruder printer anytime soon, I'm having to fall back on my my ancient Makerbot Replicator2 for some prints where this capability is needed. I want to use the Prusa Slicer which, in theory has Makerbot in the drop-down menu for making a printer configuration. But after I get my files loaded and configure all the options, it will not save/has no option for saving in .X3g file format, which is what the Makerbot requires. Simply changing (by renameing) any slicer generated file to the .X3g format doesn't work. How do I make this work?

Use ReplicatorG to convert the gcode from PrusaSlicer to the X3G format.

Here is short tutorial on how to do it.  Gcode-to-X3g

RE: Makerbot Support?

Any chance we can get Prusaslicer to run a script after file creation to pass the gcode file and parameters to the GPX command line tool? This is basically what Simplify3D does.

No one wants to have to run 2 tools to create the files for the printer

https://github.com/markwal/GPX

RE: Makerbot/GPX Support?

I have a some old Makerbot Replicator 2 printers that despite being 10 years old and heavily modded are still very dependable and accurate - but they require gpx to post process gcode into x3g binary files. This worked on previous versions of PrusaSlicer by simply calling the GPX program in post processing -- in fact I originally wrote GPX with Slic3r post processing support in mind. This has changed since version 2.4 of PrusaSlicer. Its a pain, but I kind of understand the reasoning. Anyway I finally got around to figuring out how to fix this with a simple shell script and though it might be helpful to post here so like minded users can find it.

On my Mac I created the gpx.sh file below and saved it to my user folder ~/bin where I keep the gpx executable and gpx.ini file. I keep all the settings in the gpx.ini file so no parameters are necessary for the call other than the input and output file names. To get PrusaSlicer to automatically generate an x3g file I added ~/bin/gpx.sh to the output options in the print settings tab -- for each of my Replicator 2 print settings.

#!/bin/bash

~/bin/gpx "$1" "${SLIC3R_PP_OUTPUT_NAME/gcode/x3g}"

Obviously you can use a different path than I have. Also run chmod 775 gpx.sh from the command prompt to make this script executable.

All the script does is call gpx with the temporary file name as input and the output name with an .x3g extension. I know its simple, but it took me a while scratching about to figure out why gpx was now broken and the easiest way to fix it.

RE: Makerbot Support?

Buried in the PrusaSlicer config is the option to run an output script on the generated gcode file.  I was unaware of this until it was pointed out to me a couple of months ago.

I have never done this, but it might be an option to look at.

RE: Makerbot Support?

The only output script option I am aware of is Post-processing scripts under the Print Settings tab - unless you know of another one? There had been discussion of a printer output script feature in some of the v2.4 rc2 discussions but I haven't seen mention of it being implemented anywhere.

RE: Makerbot Support?

Hi Henry,

Your solution sounds perfect for me, as I have 7 Replicator 2 machines that are working constantly. I have been using Simplify 3D for years, but the new features of Prusa Slicer look to be better than Simplify. My problem is that I am a little impaired in the area of 'IT' 😏 . Would you be able to do a detailed, simple and methodical step by step, that I can follow to set up my PC?

Thanks in advance,

Tony