Printer WebUI

The Printer WebUI provides a responsive web interface for controlling a 3D printer (RepRap, Ultimaker, ...). It currently allows

• uploading .gcode files to the server and managing them via the UI
• selecting a file for printing, getting the usual stats regarding filament length etc
• starting, pausing and canceling a print job
• while connected to the printer, gaining information regarding the current temperature of both head and bed (if available) in a nice shiny javascript-y temperature graph
• while printing, gaining information regarding the current progress of the print job (height, percentage etc)
• reading the communication log and send arbitrary codes to be executed by the printer
• moving the X, Y and Z axis (jog controls, although very ugly ones right now)
• changing the speed modifiers for inner & outer wall, fill and support

The intended usecase is to run the Printer WebUI on a single-board computer like the Raspberry Pi and a WiFi module, connect the printer to the server and therefore create a WiFi-enabled 3D printer.

Dependencies

Printer WebUI depends on a couple of python modules to do its job. Those are listed in requirements.txt and can be installed using pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Printer WebUI currently only supports Python 2.7.

Usage

Just start the server via

python -m printer_webui.server

By default it binds to all interfaces on port 5000 (so pointing your browser to http://127.0.0.1:5000 will do the trick). If you want to change that, use the additional command line parameters host and port, which accept the host ip to bind to and the numeric port number respectively. If for example you want to the server to only listen on the local interface on port 8080, the command line would be

python -m printer_webui.server --host=127.0.0.1 --port=8080

Alternatively, the host and port on which to bind can be defined via the configuration.

Configuration

The config-file for Printer WebUI is expected at ~/.printerwebui/config.ini for Linux, at %APPDATA%/PrinterWebUI/config.ini for Windows and at ~/Library/Application Support/config.ini for MacOS X. The following example config should explain the available options:

[serial]
# use the following option to define the default serial port, defaults to unset (= AUTO)
port = /dev/ttyACM0
# use the following option to define the default baudrate, defaults to unset (= AUTO)
baudrate = 115200

[server]
# use this option to define the host to which to bind the server, defaults to "0.0.0.0" (= all interfaces)
host = 0.0.0.0
# use this option to define the port to which to bind the server, defaults to 5000
port = 5000

Credits

The Printer WebUI started out as a fork of Cura (https://github.com/daid/Cura) for adding a web interface to its printing functionality. It still uses Cura's communication code for talking to the printer, but has been reorganized to only include those parts of Cura necessary for its targeted usecase.

It also uses the following libraries and frameworks for backend and frontend:

• Flask: http://flask.pocoo.org/
• jQuery: http://jquery.com/
• Bootstrap: http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
• Knockout.js: http://knockoutjs.com/
• Flot: http://www.flotcharts.org/
• jQuery File Upload: http://blueimp.github.com/jQuery-File-Upload/