00:00SPEAKER- Brad, I don't have any tattoos.
00:01SPEAKER- No.
00:02SPEAKER- I know, it's shocking.
00:03SPEAKER- It's I am just flabbergasted, phlegmics.
00:06SPEAKERYou don't seem like much of a tattoo kind of guy, but go on.
00:10SPEAKER- Well, like I'm into the idea conceptually,
00:12SPEAKERbut I've never really liked anything long enough
00:15SPEAKERto feel like I can commit to it
00:17SPEAKERfor that kind of length of time.
00:18SPEAKER- That is obstacle number one is not being able
00:20SPEAKERto decide what I want on my body for the rest of my life.
00:23SPEAKER- Yeah, like I don't, I've never, like I like my kid,
00:26SPEAKERbut you know, it's weird.
00:28SPEAKERI might have put her face on my back.
00:30SPEAKERAnyway, the point is, I'm looking at our show notes,
00:33SPEAKERour show art for the last couple of weeks,
00:35SPEAKERand I think I see something that I like enough maybe
00:38SPEAKERto put on my body for all eternity.
00:40SPEAKER- Hang on, I have to guess now.
00:42SPEAKERAre we talking tech or phos?
00:44SPEAKER- Phos, this is a phos.
00:45SPEAKER- Oh, not tech.
00:46SPEAKERIs it the Blender logo?
00:49SPEAKER- No, it is not the Blender logo.
00:51SPEAKER- Is it the cute little octopus of Octoprint?
00:53SPEAKER- It is not the cute little octopus.
00:55SPEAKERIt is a good octopus, but it is not the Octoprint octopus.
00:58SPEAKER- Wait a minute.
00:59SPEAKER- Yeah, hi.
01:00SPEAKER- Is it the curl logo?
01:02SPEAKER- No, no, not the curl logo.
01:05SPEAKER- Huh, okay, well, there's only so many options here.
01:08SPEAKER- Yeah, that's true.
01:09SPEAKER- I'm guessing it's not this picture of a GitHub repo.
01:12SPEAKER- No.
01:14SPEAKER- Really running out of logo.
01:15SPEAKERWait a minute.
01:16SPEAKER- Yeah.
01:17SPEAKER- Hang on.
01:19SPEAKEROkay, if this is it.
01:21SPEAKER- Yeah.
01:22SPEAKER- Mad respect.
01:23SPEAKER- Hello, hi.
01:24SPEAKER- Is it the Windows 95 network neighborhood icon?
01:27SPEAKER- I'm looking at it, I'm like, I deeply identify
01:29SPEAKERwith that Windows 95 network neighborhood icon.
01:31SPEAKER- That's, okay, look.
01:33SPEAKER- It speaks to me, 'cause you know what?
01:34SPEAKERIt's all about connection, Brad.
01:35SPEAKER- It's true, so you're not wrong.
01:37SPEAKERI mean, these two computers are connected
01:39SPEAKERby a right angle pipe of some kind.
01:40SPEAKERI mean, it's like they're right there.
01:42SPEAKER- One has a green screen, one has a blue screen.
01:44SPEAKERIt's the metaphor for Windows.
01:46SPEAKER- Is that actually, is that the metaphor
01:47SPEAKERfor iMessage versus SMS?
01:50SPEAKER- That's where it all started.
01:51SPEAKERWell, except for blue is the, blue is iMessage,
01:53SPEAKERand yeah, right, yeah.
01:55SPEAKER- Green is SMS.
01:55SPEAKER- Green is for bad people.
01:56SPEAKERI mean, Android people, whatever.
01:58SPEAKER- I picked the show art for all these episodes,
01:59SPEAKERand normally I just put the logo of the project
02:02SPEAKERfor the FOSPOD, but the Samba logo was not
02:06SPEAKERof such proportions that would fit into SimpleCasts.
02:09SPEAKERKind of, I guess that's a one by one frame.
02:12SPEAKER- Well, it's, I mean, it's more pixels than that,
02:13SPEAKERbut it's a one to one ratio.
02:14SPEAKER- One to one ratio is what I mean, yeah.
02:16SPEAKER- You can go up to like, you can put 512 pixels in there,
02:18SPEAKERif you want, you can put three pixels in, they don't guess.
02:20SPEAKER- The Samba logo is extremely wide
02:22SPEAKERand extremely not tall,
02:23SPEAKERso it doesn't fit into a square well.
02:25SPEAKERAnd then I was like, you know what is vaguely square shaped,
02:27SPEAKERis the icon set from Windows 95.
02:30SPEAKER- Home of SMB, that was like SMB two, right?
02:33SPEAKEROr one point something. - Was it really?
02:34SPEAKER- I can't remember.
02:35SPEAKER- So were you working with SMB at that time?
02:38SPEAKER- No, I was in college then.
02:39SPEAKER- Okay.
02:40SPEAKER- I mean, I was, but I didn't know anything about it.
02:42SPEAKERI knew enough, like that was back in the time
02:43SPEAKERwhen I knew enough to make a network work,
02:46SPEAKERand that was pretty much it.
02:48SPEAKERDidn't know how, I didn't understand TCPs or IPs,
02:51SPEAKERI vaguely understood that you had to get an IP address
02:53SPEAKERfrom somewhere if you wanted to share internet.
02:56SPEAKERBut beyond that, all bets were off.
02:59SPEAKER- Point to point protocol is just about the only protocol
03:02SPEAKERI was aware of at that time.
03:03SPEAKER- We were just slipping back then, man.
03:04SPEAKER- Yes, we arguably are still slipping.
03:08SPEAKER(upbeat music)
03:21SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)
03:36SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Make a Tech FOSPOD, I'm Will.
03:39SPEAKER- I'm the open source Brad, that doesn't make any sense.
03:42SPEAKERHello.
03:43SPEAKER- Hi, hello.
03:44SPEAKERWe're doing something a little bit different this week.
03:45SPEAKERIt's been a minute since we launched this new podcast
03:48SPEAKERin the dawn of 2022.
03:50SPEAKERNow we're coming into 2022's late middle age.
03:55SPEAKER- Dude, I was at Costco earlier.
03:58SPEAKER- Uh-huh, speaking of late middle age.
04:00SPEAKER- The holiday decks are out.
04:03SPEAKER- What?
04:04SPEAKER- The holiday decks, the decorations, the Christmas trees.
04:07SPEAKER- Wait, Christmas stuff is out?
04:08SPEAKERIt's not even Halloween yet.
04:09SPEAKER- It is quite literally still September,
04:11SPEAKERand Christmas trees with active lit up Christmas lights
04:15SPEAKERwere out, holiday blend coffee was around and for sale.
04:19SPEAKER- Gosh, have I missed the pumpkin spice window already?
04:22SPEAKER- Oh, I saw a new affront to nature
04:24SPEAKERin the pumpkin spice category.
04:26SPEAKERIt was like, it was pumpkin spice something
04:28SPEAKERthat should not have been, and I can't remember what it was.
04:30SPEAKER- What's like, what wouldn't benefit
04:32SPEAKERfrom being pumpkin spice?
04:34SPEAKERLike deodorant, not good pumpkin spice, I'm gonna say.
04:37SPEAKER- I think it was a pumpkin spice dipping sauce
04:40SPEAKERright in the middle between like the hummus
04:42SPEAKERand the artichoke dip and stuff.
04:43SPEAKERThere was a pumpkin spice dip.
04:45SPEAKER- Pumpkin spice flavored goo?
04:47SPEAKER- Yes.
04:48SPEAKER- I don't know about that one.
04:50SPEAKER- Yeah.
04:52SPEAKER- I'm not a huge fan of the pumpkin spice.
04:54SPEAKERI like a pumpkin pie, which has pumpkin spice.
04:57SPEAKER- Oh, you're a pumpkin pie.
04:58SPEAKERI didn't think I was a fan of pumpkin pie
05:00SPEAKERuntil I had yours and Gina's pumpkin pie,
05:02SPEAKERand then I was like, whoa.
05:04SPEAKER- Wait, what's this and Gina's crap?
05:05SPEAKERI make that one by hand.
05:06SPEAKER- Wait, really?
05:07SPEAKER- Yeah, that's all me. - The entire thing?
05:08SPEAKER- Uh-huh, from scratch usually.
05:10SPEAKER- Okay, well then your single handed pumpkin pie
05:13SPEAKERis pretty damn good.
05:14SPEAKER- Look, she makes a lot of the other stuff,
05:15SPEAKERbut the pies belong to me.
05:18SPEAKERYeah, look, I'm not a huge fan of the pumpkin spice latte.
05:21SPEAKERI've tried it, I've been there.
05:22SPEAKERI've tasted the forbidden fruit,
05:24SPEAKERand I was like, oh, this is okay.
05:25SPEAKERToo sweet for me.
05:26SPEAKER- You mean the forbidden gourd?
05:28SPEAKER- Yeah, yes, the forbidden gourd.
05:30SPEAKERI do really, really, really, really like
05:33SPEAKERa peppermint mocha, though.
05:35SPEAKERI'll go in for a peppermint mocha.
05:36SPEAKERThat's some chocolatey coffee pepperminty business
05:44SPEAKERI can get behind.
05:45SPEAKER- But this week, instead of doing a new tech pod,
05:49SPEAKERwe wanted to highlight a recent,
05:52SPEAKERwhat, like, okay, first off,
05:54SPEAKERthe Fosbod sits at the initial launch.
05:56SPEAKERYou know, you always find your legs with a new podcast.
05:58SPEAKERIt's changed a little bit.
05:59SPEAKERIt's gotten a little bit more interviewy of late.
06:01SPEAKERAnd we've done interviews with a ton of incredible guests
06:05SPEAKERwho run projects and work on projects,
06:08SPEAKERranging from Wikipedia and Home Assistant to Curl.
06:13SPEAKERWe, like, we've talked to people who've written code
06:15SPEAKERthat runs on Mars.
06:16SPEAKER- We have.
06:17SPEAKER- That's a trip.
06:17SPEAKERWe talked to the student insurrectionists,
06:21SPEAKERone of the student insurrectionists who founded VLC
06:25SPEAKERand works on VLC, Jean Baptiste.
06:28SPEAKER- VLC episode, pretty great.
06:30SPEAKER- Audio quality, not great.
06:31SPEAKERContent, 10 out of 10, I'm gonna say.
06:33SPEAKER- He had a lot of very interesting
06:34SPEAKERand opinionated things to say.
06:36SPEAKER- The number of fucks he gave was zero.
06:38SPEAKER- Special life goal achieved.
06:40SPEAKERWe talked to Foon.
06:41SPEAKER- We did talk to Foon about 3D Movie Maker.
06:45SPEAKER- Yeah, Twitter's own Foon.
06:47SPEAKER- Yeah.
06:48SPEAKER- One of the best followers on Twitter.
06:49SPEAKER- I mean, consistently, consistently the,
06:52SPEAKERI don't know what, like Foon just,
06:54SPEAKERlike every once in a while, you'll just open up Twitter
06:56SPEAKERand be like, oh, Foon's taking something apart again.
06:58SPEAKERAnd like yesterday it was a keyboard
07:02SPEAKERthat didn't, it had like McCherry MX key caps on it.
07:05SPEAKERBut then when they took the caps off
07:07SPEAKERand looked at what was underneath,
07:08SPEAKERit was just like a membrane key.
07:10SPEAKERSo the MX key caps were just into a plunger
07:12SPEAKERthat smashed to the membrane keyboard.
07:14SPEAKERI was like, this is amazing.
07:15SPEAKER- Yeah, data forensics are happening again.
07:18SPEAKERThey did like a 40 megabyte hard drive
07:20SPEAKERfrom the late 80s one time,
07:22SPEAKERwhich first of all took all kinds of bizarre partitioning
07:26SPEAKERand file system utilities to even access.
07:28SPEAKER- I'm sure.
07:29SPEAKER- But then they found the intact emails on there
07:31SPEAKERfrom like whatever business was using that hard drive
07:33SPEAKERin the late 80s.
07:34SPEAKER- Who was using email in the late, that's amazing.
07:36SPEAKER- It was, yeah.
07:37SPEAKER- Probably like IPM or somebody.
07:38SPEAKER- 40 gig hard, 40 meg hard drive was pretty big back then.
07:41SPEAKER- I'm kind of fudging dates and sizes a little bit,
07:43SPEAKERbut you can just, it was something like that.
07:45SPEAKERAnyway.
07:46SPEAKER- So yeah, we talked to Foon.
07:48SPEAKERWe talked to Paul Schautzen from Home Assistant.
07:50SPEAKERWe talked to Daniel Stenberg from Curl.
07:53SPEAKERWe've talked to, like we said, Jean Baptiste.
07:54SPEAKERWe talked to the two of the folks who work on Blender.
07:58SPEAKER- Yeah, Deli and Pablo from, those guys were great.
08:01SPEAKER- Yeah, that was fantastic.
08:02SPEAKER- Really interesting conversation on Blender.
08:04SPEAKER- And then the most recent episode,
08:06SPEAKERwe have Jeremy Allison, who is one of the co-creators
08:09SPEAKERand current maintainers of the Samba project,
08:11SPEAKERwhich like it's, so like we've had this interesting spectrum
08:15SPEAKERof people who are kind of have established wildly popular,
08:19SPEAKERlike best in class kind of applications,
08:21SPEAKERlike Jim Bailey from OBS and, you know,
08:24SPEAKERJean Baptiste from VLC and stuff like that.
08:26SPEAKERWe talked to people who do plumbing on the internet,
08:27SPEAKERlike Daniel Stenberg at Curl and Jeremy at Samba.
08:32SPEAKER- Yes.
08:33SPEAKER- This episode that we're running here today
08:36SPEAKERis one of my absolute favorites
08:38SPEAKER'cause it's a project that's a little bit newer.
08:40SPEAKERLike it's a project that's kind of grown
08:42SPEAKERwith the ecosystem that it supports.
08:43SPEAKERAnd it's Gina from OctoPrint came in and sat down with us.
08:49SPEAKERAnd we talked about kind of where,
08:52SPEAKERhow that project got started, how it, where it is now,
08:56SPEAKERwhat like the future of it holds.
08:59SPEAKER'Cause 3D printing, you know, she started that in 2011
09:02SPEAKERor 2012 when 3D printing was brand,
09:05SPEAKERlike consumer 3D printing was brand new.
09:07SPEAKERAnd with OctoPrint, if you don't know,
09:10SPEAKERis a print server for 3D printers.
09:12SPEAKERSo, you know, normally when you run a 3D printer,
09:14SPEAKERwell, we talk about it in the episode,
09:15SPEAKERI'm not gonna reiterate here,
09:16SPEAKERbut it served a really important purpose.
09:19SPEAKERI used it back in the early, early days
09:21SPEAKERbefore we really even had, like I ran it on a computer,
09:23SPEAKERnot even a Raspberry Pi back then.
09:26SPEAKERIt was hugely important for me with the 3D mystery object
09:28SPEAKERand for other stuff we were printing around the office.
09:30SPEAKERAnd her project is at a different place.
09:33SPEAKERIt's, she's at the point now where it's getting too big
09:36SPEAKERfor her to do everything herself.
09:38SPEAKERAnd she's having to like rework the project
09:40SPEAKERso that other people can contribute to it meaningfully.
09:42SPEAKERAnd it's a really interesting contrast
09:44SPEAKERto some of the other folks we've talked to along the way.
09:47SPEAKER- It seems like she's at the inflection point
09:49SPEAKERwhere she is going from just developer
09:51SPEAKERto now developer and maintainer.
09:52SPEAKEROr, I mean, I guess you're always a maintainer
09:55SPEAKEReven when you're the sole developer,
09:56SPEAKERbut I guess the air traffic control aspect
09:59SPEAKERof being a maintainer is going to come to the fore
10:01SPEAKERas soon as she starts taking contributions
10:04SPEAKERfrom other developers.
10:05SPEAKER- Yeah, she said she paused,
10:08SPEAKERwe talk about this a lot in the episode,
10:09SPEAKERbut she talks about literally pausing new work
10:13SPEAKERin order to like do documentation and stuff
10:16SPEAKERthat will let other people help her accelerate the project.
10:19SPEAKERAnd it's interesting 'cause as a contrast to Home Assistant
10:23SPEAKERwhere we talked to Paulus, like he went through that.
10:26SPEAKERHe's been like, this seems like the fire and flame
10:29SPEAKERthat open source projects that get past a certain level
10:31SPEAKERof success and popularity kind of have to get through,
10:34SPEAKERespecially when they support broad hardware ecosystems
10:38SPEAKERas both of those projects do, so.
10:40SPEAKER- Also just real quick, I mean, you'll hear more about this,
10:43SPEAKERbut just to pique people's interests
10:45SPEAKERor maybe wet their whistles a little bit,
10:47SPEAKERlike I learned a lot about just 3D printing,
10:49SPEAKERwhat the 3D printing stack entails
10:51SPEAKERand the ups and downs of that process.
10:52SPEAKERAnd like, there's a lot of neat stuff that OctoPrint does
10:55SPEAKERbesides what you might imagine.
10:56SPEAKERLike you could, let's say you want to put your 3D printer
10:58SPEAKERout in the garage so you don't have to breathe fumes
11:01SPEAKERand you can like hook a webcam into it
11:03SPEAKERand use that to observe your print remotely
11:06SPEAKERin addition to doing the kind of microcontroller-y aspects
11:09SPEAKERof running the print.
11:10SPEAKERAnyway, there's a lot of interesting info
11:12SPEAKERand even if you don't know anything about 3D printing
11:14SPEAKERor think you care about it,
11:15SPEAKERthere's actually a lot to learn in this episode.
11:18SPEAKER- For the 3D printing expert and the 3D printing curious
11:21SPEAKERis what I would say.
11:22SPEAKERYou can even do machine learning on those videos
11:25SPEAKERso that you see if like the print's going bad,
11:27SPEAKERit's really cool.
11:27SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
11:28SPEAKERThere's plugins that do visual,
11:32SPEAKERlike machine visual recognition of spigotification.
11:35SPEAKERIt's really neat.
11:36SPEAKERIt's a neat project.
11:37SPEAKER- Are you ever afraid of technology?
11:39SPEAKERYou ever like occasionally,
11:40SPEAKERdoes that just mean I'm getting old?
11:41SPEAKERLike occasionally my like fascination and awe give way
11:44SPEAKERto terror briefly when I hear things like that.
11:47SPEAKER- What's the rule?
11:48SPEAKERAnything that existed before you were seven
11:50SPEAKERhas always existed.
11:51SPEAKERAnything that's invented between the time you're seven
11:54SPEAKERand 35 is exciting and cool.
11:56SPEAKERAnd anything that's invented after year 35 is terrifying.
11:59SPEAKER- I don't like where this is going.
12:00SPEAKER- Yeah, I got bad news for you, Brad.
12:03SPEAKERYeah, but anyway, our talk with Gina is great.
12:06SPEAKERYou should give the episode a listen.
12:08SPEAKERIf you enjoy it, please go over to phospod.content.town
12:11SPEAKERand mash that subscribe button, add it to your feed reader,
12:15SPEAKERor you can find us in all the listings now as well.
12:19SPEAKERYou have a nice backlog of excellent episodes to listen to.
12:21SPEAKERThere'll be more coming in the not too distant future.
12:25SPEAKERWe also would love it if anybody who likes the show
12:28SPEAKERwould go over to iTunes and mash the review button.
12:30SPEAKERIt's still like going there and putting a star rating
12:33SPEAKERon the episode is still one of the best ways
12:35SPEAKERto help podcasts get distribution.
12:37SPEAKERWhether it's our show or anybody else's,
12:40SPEAKERlike leaving reviews on iTunes for your favorite podcast,
12:44SPEAKEReven if you don't listen to them on iTunes
12:46SPEAKERor with the Apple podcast app or whatever,
12:49SPEAKERreally helpful for podcasters.
12:50SPEAKER- And iTunes reviews invented before I turned 35.
12:52SPEAKERSo pretty awesome, please.
12:55SPEAKERPlease participate.
12:57SPEAKER- And that's it.
12:58SPEAKERI think that, oh, oh, oh, we're doing a,
13:00SPEAKERwe want to do a question and answer episode.
13:02SPEAKER- Yeah, we're toying with the idea at least
13:03SPEAKERof doing like a Q and A type episode on the Phosphod.
13:06SPEAKERSo with phospod@content.town.
13:09SPEAKER- Yeah, that is an email address
13:10SPEAKERthat you can send a question to and we will answer it.
13:12SPEAKERWe will hopefully turn it into an A.
13:15SPEAKERWe're specifically looking for questions
13:16SPEAKERthat we need to go out and get people to answer.
13:18SPEAKER'Cause we have this large network of folks
13:20SPEAKERwho've been on the show and we're talking to you
13:22SPEAKERabout future episodes and stuff like that.
13:24SPEAKERAnd we want to loop them in
13:25SPEAKERand maybe get some like live answers
13:28SPEAKERfrom experts on their projects about stuff.
13:30SPEAKERSo yeah, we're going to abuse our network basically
13:33SPEAKERto do a Q and A episode.
13:34SPEAKERIt's going to take like 10 times the effort
13:36SPEAKERof a normal Q and A of a normal episode
13:38SPEAKERof the podcast probably, but here we go.
13:40SPEAKER- It's certainly true.
13:42SPEAKEREven people we haven't had on previously,
13:44SPEAKERif you've got people in the wider open source world
13:46SPEAKERthat you would like to put a Q to, we can do our best.
13:49SPEAKERWe've got some connections.
13:50SPEAKER- Yeah, we'll make an effort to turn it into an A.
13:52SPEAKERNo promises, but we'll see what we can do.
13:54SPEAKERAgain, the email address is--
13:55SPEAKER- Fospod@content.town.
13:58SPEAKER- Fospod@content.town, very good.
13:59SPEAKERIt's a good email address.
14:01SPEAKERSo I guess without further ado,
14:03SPEAKER17 minutes into this recording,
14:05SPEAKERlet's throw it over to past us,
14:08SPEAKERwho interviewed Gina from Octoprint.
14:10SPEAKER(dramatic music)
14:12SPEAKERHey Brad, do you remember the first time
14:14SPEAKERI came down to the basement at Giant Bomb in Sausalito
14:16SPEAKERand showed you a 3D printed ring
14:20SPEAKERthat looked vaguely like a deer
14:22SPEAKERand you all were kind of professionally disinterested in it?
14:26SPEAKER- No, that was the finest 3D print
14:28SPEAKERI had ever seen to date at the time.
14:30SPEAKER- That was the only 3D print you'd ever seen
14:32SPEAKERat the time, though, correct?
14:33SPEAKER- Completely professional high quality product
14:35SPEAKERthat you turned out there.
14:36SPEAKERI mean, look, that was early days for 3D printing
14:38SPEAKERand even in the best of circumstances,
14:41SPEAKERmaking kind of warmed over plastic behave itself,
14:44SPEAKERnot the smallest feat, right?
14:46SPEAKER- Yeah, it was, okay, so yeah,
14:47SPEAKERthe ring was a vaguely ring-shaped thing
14:49SPEAKERmade of goopy plastic and the MakerBot cupcake
14:52SPEAKERthat Norm and I built in the old Whiskey Media offices
14:55SPEAKERin 2010 was early, to say the least.
14:58SPEAKERIt was a finicky machine that was hard to keep running
15:01SPEAKERand hard to get good results out of,
15:03SPEAKERbut occasionally you could do something
15:05SPEAKERthat was kind of magical.
15:07SPEAKERAnd in the preceding 12 years, 13 years,
15:10SPEAKERthe technology has improved dramatically,
15:12SPEAKERboth in terms of the printers,
15:14SPEAKERthe kits and the motors that are available
15:16SPEAKERto drive the printers,
15:17SPEAKERthe electronics that drive the printers are more powerful.
15:19SPEAKERAnd the results that you get out of
15:21SPEAKEReven a really inexpensive 3D printer right now
15:23SPEAKERare like far and away better than anything
15:26SPEAKERwe ever got out of our old cupcake
15:28SPEAKERor even the subsequent printers we use
15:31SPEAKERover the next couple of years.
15:32SPEAKER- Sure, but Will, there are so many printers
15:34SPEAKERon the market now.
15:35SPEAKERWhat if there were, let's say like a home assistant,
15:39SPEAKERbut for 3D printers where you had one interface
15:41SPEAKERthat could talk to all of them
15:43SPEAKERand make everything work under a kind of common scheme?
15:46SPEAKER- Oh, you mean something like a print server
15:48SPEAKERfor 3D printers?
15:49SPEAKER- Sure, something like that.
15:50SPEAKERIf only we could do an episode about something like that.
15:53SPEAKER- If only.
15:54SPEAKER(upbeat music)
16:13SPEAKERWelcome to the FOSPOT, I'm Will.
16:14SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
16:15SPEAKER- Brad, this week I am very, very excited
16:18SPEAKERto introduce our guest.
16:20SPEAKERWe, on the show this week,
16:23SPEAKERhave Gina Hoyska of the OctoPrint project,
16:28SPEAKERwhich is, it's a print server for 3D printers.
16:31SPEAKER- Dude, 3D printing very close to your heart.
16:35SPEAKERNot something I have ever dabbled with.
16:36SPEAKERLike I just am an outsider looking in,
16:38SPEAKERbut like A, this was a fascinating conversation.
16:41SPEAKERLike she was so interesting to listen to.
16:43SPEAKERBut B, I have no idea how, let's say,
16:47SPEAKERramshackle the 3D printing process
16:50SPEAKERis without something like OctoPrint.
16:52SPEAKER- Well, okay, I wouldn't say it's ramshackle.
16:54SPEAKERThe process is pretty straightforward, right?
16:56SPEAKERYou take a 3D model that's an STL or an OBJ
16:58SPEAKERor some relatively standard file format
17:01SPEAKERthat describes a 3D shape in space, right?
17:04SPEAKERAnd then you use a tool called a slicer
17:06SPEAKERand you position that shape on the print bed
17:09SPEAKERand the slicer looks at it and says,
17:12SPEAKERokay, we're gonna cut it up into this many layers
17:14SPEAKER'cause this is the vertical resolution of the printer,
17:16SPEAKERhow thick the layers that the printer prints are.
17:18SPEAKERAnd you orient it on the bed
17:20SPEAKERso that you get the best results for what you want,
17:21SPEAKERwhether you want like a flat bottom or whatever.
17:24SPEAKERThere's a bunch of nuance to that,
17:25SPEAKERbut this is all stuff that people have to do.
17:28SPEAKERAnd then that slicer turns that 3D model
17:30SPEAKERinto a series of layers.
17:32SPEAKERAnd the layers are represented
17:34SPEAKERby the movements of the print head
17:35SPEAKERor the movements of whatever the mechanism is
17:37SPEAKERthat generates the material for each layer.
17:39SPEAKERAnd then it goes up a layer
17:40SPEAKERand then it does the same thing again.
17:42SPEAKERAnd eventually you have this stack of slices
17:44SPEAKERthat becomes a 3D object.
17:47SPEAKERNow, the tricky part is
17:49SPEAKERthat the slicer generates this stuff called G code,
17:51SPEAKERwhich is basically software that describes
17:54SPEAKERhow the print head moves.
17:57SPEAKERIt literally is like go from X zero zero to X one seven,
18:01SPEAKERyou know, X seven Y four
18:04SPEAKERand move the motor that extrudes the plastic this speed
18:07SPEAKERduring that entire movement, stuff like that.
18:10SPEAKERAnd that G code is both printer specific
18:13SPEAKERand is incredibly important
18:15SPEAKERto getting a high quality print out of your printer.
18:18SPEAKERSo if your slicer does a bad job,
18:19SPEAKERyou're not gonna have a good print.
18:20SPEAKERThere's nothing you can do about it at that point.
18:22SPEAKER- Right, that's an example of the kind of stuff
18:23SPEAKERI'm talking about.
18:24SPEAKERLike for example, what you just said,
18:26SPEAKERthe fact that G code is unique
18:28SPEAKERto kind of the maker of the 3D printer, right?
18:30SPEAKERLike it's not a universal language.
18:31SPEAKERAnd another fact that came out of this conversation
18:34SPEAKERthat blew my mind and OctoPrint helps with stuff like this
18:37SPEAKERis that it's not like you are loading that entire design
18:40SPEAKERonto onboard memory on the 3D printer
18:42SPEAKERand just pressing a button and walking away.
18:44SPEAKERLike you had to maintain a steady flow of information
18:47SPEAKERto the printer from like whatever PC
18:49SPEAKERyou were feeding it from.
18:50SPEAKERAnd like, that's a place where OctoPrint
18:52SPEAKERhelps smooth the process.
18:53SPEAKERWe'll get into that.
18:54SPEAKER- Well, yeah, so these days,
18:56SPEAKERmost printers do have onboard memory
18:57SPEAKERand lets you load it directly onto the board.
19:00SPEAKERThere are benefits to doing it with a host based connection,
19:03SPEAKERwhich is what it's, you know,
19:04SPEAKERusually in the old days in 2010,
19:06SPEAKERwhen we were printing in the tested office,
19:07SPEAKERwe would plug the cupcake with a USB port
19:10SPEAKERthat had a serial connection over that USB port
19:13SPEAKERto a host machine.
19:14SPEAKERAnd the G code would be fed from a machine,
19:16SPEAKERa piece of software running on that computer over.
19:18SPEAKERNow, if like the CPU usage spiked
19:20SPEAKERor the computer froze for a second or two,
19:22SPEAKERit would jack up your print
19:23SPEAKER'cause everything would get out of whack basically,
19:26SPEAKERwhich was- - That just blows my mind.
19:27SPEAKERLike, why would anybody want to deal with that?
19:29SPEAKER- Well, yeah. - Now they don't have to.
19:30SPEAKER- And the prints were, you know, 12, 13, 14 hours sometimes
19:34SPEAKERfor a big one.
19:35SPEAKERSo like the cost of failure there is really, really high
19:37SPEAKERin terms of time,
19:38SPEAKER'cause you get like one or two shots a day
19:40SPEAKERon a big, highly complex print.
19:42SPEAKERThe other thing was there was no way to monitor it.
19:44SPEAKERSo these prints take a long time.
19:46SPEAKERYou don't necessarily want to have the thing
19:47SPEAKERthat's spitting out the ABS plastic
19:49SPEAKERsitting in your workspace
19:50SPEAKERwhether you're gonna look at it,
19:51SPEAKER'cause it smells bad and it'll give you a headache.
19:53SPEAKERAnd it's probably not super healthy over the longterm.
19:56SPEAKERSo, but also you don't want to leave this thing
19:59SPEAKERthat has a 200 degree Celsius hot end
20:01SPEAKERspewing plastic out unsupervised,
20:03SPEAKER'cause it's kind of a fire hazard,
20:05SPEAKERnot like a bad fire hazard,
20:06SPEAKERbut it's like just often enough
20:07SPEAKERthat you want to keep an eye on it.
20:09SPEAKERSo OctoPrint does both of those things.
20:11SPEAKERIt feeds the G-code to the printers.
20:13SPEAKERIt lets you hook up cameras and things like that
20:15SPEAKERto the device so you can kind of track what's going on.
20:18SPEAKERAnd it does all sorts of other fancy stuff.
20:20SPEAKERLike there's all like cool machine learning visual,
20:23SPEAKERwe'll talk about with Gina in a minute.
20:24SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
20:25SPEAKERIt sounds like it does quite a bit more
20:26SPEAKERthan just that basic stuff.
20:27SPEAKERBut yeah, why don't we let Gina tell us all about it?
20:30SPEAKER- This week's FOSBOD is brought to you by Google Open Source.
20:33SPEAKERThey bring all the value of open source to Google
20:35SPEAKERand all the resources of Google to open source.
20:38SPEAKERYou can find out more about Google Open Source
20:39SPEAKERat opensource.google.
20:42SPEAKER(upbeat music)
20:46SPEAKERI'm curious how you got started with OctoPrint.
20:47SPEAKERLike were you working with 3D printing for work or for fun
20:51SPEAKERand you had a problem to solve?
20:53SPEAKERWhat was your path to thinking,
20:54SPEAKERoh, I need to make a print server for 3D printers?
20:57SPEAKER- Yeah, so first of all, maybe I should start
20:59SPEAKERhow I even got into 3D printing in the first place.
21:03SPEAKERAnd it so happened that I was at this hacker conference
21:05SPEAKERhacking at random in 2009 in the Netherlands.
21:09SPEAKERAnd in one tent, or maybe it was also a brick building,
21:13SPEAKERI can't remember,
21:13SPEAKERthey had set up some of these new 3D printers.
21:17SPEAKERSo the patents had just expired a couple of years prior
21:19SPEAKERor maybe even one year prior.
21:21SPEAKERI can't remember right now the exact timeline.
21:23SPEAKERAnd suddenly there were these things now for me to look at
21:26SPEAKERand be mesmerized by like pieces of plastic
21:30SPEAKERjust happening out of thin air into existence,
21:34SPEAKERa bit like replicators from Star Trek
21:36SPEAKERor something like that.
21:36SPEAKERAnd that was kind of when I figured,
21:38SPEAKERokay, this is a very fascinating technology,
21:41SPEAKERbut I did not have space for something like that
21:43SPEAKERat that time.
21:43SPEAKERSo, and then suddenly friends, nerdy friends of mine
21:47SPEAKERstarted to acquire 3D printers left and right.
21:49SPEAKERAnd we are now in something like 2010, 2011.
21:53SPEAKERAnd then in 2012, I moved into a bigger apartment,
21:57SPEAKERwhich I'm also actually still in.
21:59SPEAKERAnd suddenly I have found myself in the possession of space
22:03SPEAKERto acquire a 3D printer.
22:04SPEAKERSo after some back and forth and research and all that,
22:06SPEAKERI bought myself a 3D printer, set it up here in my office,
22:09SPEAKERput it next to my PC.
22:11SPEAKERAnd back then these things were really, really dumb.
22:13SPEAKERSo they did not have the capability
22:15SPEAKERof running a print shop themselves,
22:17SPEAKERbut you had to tether them to your computer
22:19SPEAKERor to your laptop or whatnot,
22:20SPEAKERand then spool and stream the full job to them
22:23SPEAKERover the duration of the job.
22:25SPEAKERSo if your PC decided to do an upgrade in the meantime,
22:28SPEAKERyour print was broken.
22:30SPEAKERIf you wanted to play a game, which I'm also a gamer,
22:33SPEAKERwhich is something that I tend to do in my free time
22:36SPEAKERwhen I'm sitting in front of my desk,
22:38SPEAKERthen you were running the risk of interrupting your print
22:41SPEAKERby slowdowns or something like that.
22:43SPEAKERSo that was a bit suboptimal.
22:45SPEAKERAnd also there is the addition of printers,
22:48SPEAKERproduce noise, produce fumes,
22:50SPEAKERand this thing was sitting next to me for hours on end,
22:54SPEAKERso that was a bit annoying.
22:55SPEAKERAnd I figured, okay, this year in 2012,
22:59SPEAKERthe Raspberry Pi had just been released,
23:00SPEAKERwhich was this little, or is this little,
23:02SPEAKERabout 35, 40-ish bucks kind of single PCB computer.
23:07SPEAKERAnd I figured, well, I'm sure there is some software
23:10SPEAKERout of there that I can just throw on the thing
23:12SPEAKERand then put a Wi-Fi dongle on it.
23:14SPEAKERThe Raspberry Pi back then did not even have Wi-Fi
23:16SPEAKERon board yet, throw that in my spare bathroom,
23:19SPEAKERmonitor it from my phone or something like that,
23:21SPEAKERand then I know what is going on,
23:23SPEAKERbut I do not have to sit next to it,
23:25SPEAKERand also it does not take up my PC
23:27SPEAKERand also not the whole office, basically.
23:30SPEAKERAnd so I got myself a Raspberry Pi,
23:32SPEAKERand then I looked for software that would do what I wanted,
23:35SPEAKERand I couldn't find any.
23:36SPEAKERSo there were some, I think, two or three packages
23:39SPEAKERthat basically treated the printer like a black box,
23:42SPEAKERlike shooting it code and hoping it would do the right thing
23:45SPEAKERbut no kind of feedback loop.
23:47SPEAKERAnd that was something that really was not something
23:49SPEAKERthat I wanted, because printers back then
23:52SPEAKERwere even less reliable than they are these days.
23:56SPEAKERSo you really wanted to keep an eye on it,
23:58SPEAKERespecially during the crucial first half an hour
24:00SPEAKERor something like that,
24:01SPEAKERto make sure that bed adhesion was working
24:02SPEAKERand the temperatures kept up and stuff like that.
24:05SPEAKERAnd so I figured, okay, there is nothing like that.
24:08SPEAKERMaybe I should just sit down and build.
24:11SPEAKERSo maybe some words on my background.
24:14SPEAKERI've always been a nerd.
24:15SPEAKERI learned coding at the age of seven.
24:17SPEAKERI got into computer science at university,
24:20SPEAKERand I later turned software engineer
24:23SPEAKERslash technical architect stuff.
24:25SPEAKERSo that was my background back there,
24:27SPEAKERbeing like a corporate drone during the day,
24:30SPEAKERand then at night tinkering with pet projects
24:33SPEAKERbecause coding to this day is still like my major passion.
24:37SPEAKER- How did you get started coding at,
24:38SPEAKERlike seven seems early.
24:40SPEAKER- Yeah, especially in the 80s, right?
24:42SPEAKER(laughs)
24:44SPEAKERYeah, that was when my parents got the first computer
24:47SPEAKERback then from my uncle actually,
24:49SPEAKERan old Apple IIe that he no longer needed,
24:52SPEAKERwhich was, it had this green shaded monitor
24:56SPEAKERand it came with two five and a quarter inch floppy drives
25:00SPEAKERand that was it.
25:02SPEAKERAnd naturally me as a six or seven year old,
25:04SPEAKERseeing that thing,
25:05SPEAKERI was all about gaming and playing games with it.
25:08SPEAKERAnd my dad on the other hand, however,
25:10SPEAKERhe took me to the side and was like,
25:11SPEAKERno, this is a working machine.
25:12SPEAKERThis is a tool.
25:13SPEAKERThis is not a toy, but I can show you something.
25:16SPEAKERAnd then he showed me the first couple of lines of basic
25:19SPEAKERand I wrote my first code.
25:21SPEAKERAnd then we went into this a bit
25:23SPEAKERas a daddy daughter kind of thing.
25:24SPEAKERMy mom also chimed in here and there
25:26SPEAKERand then also coded some stuff up.
25:28SPEAKERSo it was a bit of a family thing at first,
25:30SPEAKERbut it kind of totally clicked with me
25:33SPEAKERbecause I also love, still love,
25:36SPEAKERand back then already loved playing with Lego
25:39SPEAKERand building stuff with Lego.
25:40SPEAKERAnd to me, coding still to this day,
25:44SPEAKERjust feels like building stuff out of Lego,
25:47SPEAKERbut the bricks never run out.
25:48SPEAKERAnd if I'm missing a certain kind of brick,
25:50SPEAKERI can just build it.
25:52SPEAKER- I never thought about it like that before.
25:53SPEAKERIt makes a ton of sense.
25:54SPEAKER- What kind of coding work were you doing as you put it
25:56SPEAKERas a corporate drone before you started working
25:58SPEAKERon OctoPrint full time?
25:59SPEAKERWere you doing coding that already worked with hardware
26:01SPEAKERin your day job at that time or?
26:03SPEAKER- No less, I mean, yeah, in a way,
26:05SPEAKERevery kind of code works with hardware, right?
26:07SPEAKERBut I was mostly working as a consultant
26:12SPEAKERdoing custom solution development for various clients
26:15SPEAKERwith a bit of a focus on IPTV stuff,
26:18SPEAKERlike coding recording back ends and set up box front ends
26:23SPEAKERand stuff like this in various languages,
26:26SPEAKERprimarily Java though.
26:27SPEAKERSo building OctoPrint in Python was a bit of a diversion
26:31SPEAKERfrom a usual kind of thing as well.
26:33SPEAKERI had been a system administrator
26:36SPEAKERduring my university days and so got familiar with Python
26:38SPEAKERduring that time because you have automation
26:41SPEAKERor something like that, it's just beautiful.
26:43SPEAKERAnd then when I sat down during my Christmas break of 2012
26:48SPEAKERand was wondering, so how do I get this,
26:50SPEAKERwhat I'm envisioning here,
26:52SPEAKERthis remote control slash baby monitor thingy
26:55SPEAKERfor my 3D printer now somehow built in a way
26:59SPEAKERthat it will actually be done within like one or two weeks.
27:03SPEAKERYeah, the word done is a bit ironic
27:05SPEAKERgiven that we are now almost 10 years later
27:07SPEAKERand I'm still working on it, but so that it's usable.
27:10SPEAKERLet's call it like that.
27:11SPEAKERAnd I fell over what is still available by the way,
27:15SPEAKERwhich is the Cura Slicer and the Cura Slicer back then
27:17SPEAKERand I think also still had the ability
27:20SPEAKERto also connect to a printer and talk to a printer
27:22SPEAKERand stream stuff to a printer.
27:24SPEAKERSo I took this part and Cura is written in Python.
27:26SPEAKERSo I took this part and build up all around it.
27:29SPEAKERIn the beginning, I had absolutely no idea
27:31SPEAKERhow to communicate with a printer.
27:32SPEAKERI figured, oh, it's a serial interface.
27:34SPEAKERIt can't be so difficult and it turns out
27:36SPEAKERthat this is one of the most stressful
27:37SPEAKERand complicated parts of my whole job now
27:41SPEAKERbecause yeah, we don't really have
27:44SPEAKERa proper well-defined standard there.
27:46SPEAKERSo every printer vendor and every firmware vendor
27:49SPEAKERdoes things slightly differently,
27:51SPEAKERwhich makes it an absolute nightmare to interface with.
27:53SPEAKERBut back then I was naive and optimistic
27:57SPEAKERand just took this basic com layer from Cura
28:01SPEAKERand built my web interface in Flask on top of it.
28:04SPEAKERAnd within, I think around, yeah,
28:08SPEAKERI sat down on it sometime around December 20th or 23rd
28:13SPEAKERand by 25th it was already printing and giving me feedback.
28:17SPEAKERAnd then I also added a webcam feed
28:19SPEAKERand by the end of my vacation come January,
28:23SPEAKERI figured, okay, it's doing everything that I wanted it to.
28:25SPEAKERI'm just going to throw it up now on GitHub
28:27SPEAKERor something like that and yeah, post some stuff
28:32SPEAKERpublicly about it on Google Plus back then
28:34SPEAKERwas still my hood, so to speak.
28:36SPEAKERAnd then I'll return to my normal life.
28:39SPEAKERAnd then suddenly emails started pouring in
28:42SPEAKERfrom all over the world and tickets started showing up
28:44SPEAKERin my GitHub issue tracker where people were like,
28:46SPEAKEReh, I've been meaning to have something like this for ages
28:50SPEAKERor that's beautiful, I never thought I needed this
28:53SPEAKERbut now I can't live without it anymore, things like that.
28:56SPEAKERAnd it started growing and growing and growing.
29:01SPEAKERAnd by mid of 2013, I actually talked to my boss
29:05SPEAKERabout reducing my job to four days a week
29:07SPEAKERso that I could have one week dedicated to OctoPrint,
29:11SPEAKERobviously out of my own pocket.
29:13SPEAKERAnd then by early 2014, I had to realize that this one week,
29:19SPEAKERone day per week was not even remotely doing it justice
29:22SPEAKERanymore either because the user base was just growing
29:24SPEAKERand growing and growing.
29:25SPEAKERAnd at that time I was approached by a Spanish technology
29:29SPEAKERcompany who was also building 3D printers.
29:32SPEAKERAnd they said, hey, we want to invite you to Madrid.
29:35SPEAKERAnd then they flew me in and then we talked
29:37SPEAKERand it turned out that they really enjoyed my work
29:39SPEAKERon OctoPrint and just wanted me to be able
29:41SPEAKERto do it full time.
29:42SPEAKER- Oh, that's fabulous.
29:43SPEAKER- Yeah, that was nice because it also came
29:46SPEAKERwith an absolutely perfect timing because I was really
29:50SPEAKERstarting to wonder how to juggle both
29:53SPEAKERof these responsibilities in my life, the paying job
29:56SPEAKERand the little paying job and this creation of mine
30:01SPEAKERthat I felt was gaining a lot of traction
30:03SPEAKERand that I was really not doing it justice
30:06SPEAKERdue to a lack of time.
30:07SPEAKER- Had you done open source work before this
30:08SPEAKERor was this the first open source project
30:10SPEAKERyou contributed to?
30:11SPEAKER- Nah, I did some, yeah.
30:12SPEAKERSo actually I did open source before I knew
30:16SPEAKERwhat open source was.
30:17SPEAKERSo back then the stuff that I published very, very early
30:21SPEAKERin the very early 2000s, I just threw that up
30:25SPEAKERfor people to use.
30:26SPEAKERI didn't know what open source licenses were
30:28SPEAKERor something like this, but that is how I started.
30:31SPEAKERAnd then I also, I was a contributor
30:33SPEAKERto the Docker Wiki project for a while
30:35SPEAKERand the maintainer Andreas Gor is still also
30:37SPEAKERa close person, a friend of mine.
30:39SPEAKERSo I already made friendships through open source
30:43SPEAKERbefore I had my own big project going.
30:45SPEAKERSo that's kind of nice.
30:47SPEAKER(upbeat music)
30:51SPEAKER- So I installed Octoprint because I foolishly,
30:54SPEAKERI desperately needed to have a 3D printer.
30:56SPEAKERI didn't wanna spend my own money on one.
30:57SPEAKERSo I justified it by telling the people
30:59SPEAKERthat owned the site that I was working on at the time
31:01SPEAKERthat we would just do a weekly print
31:03SPEAKERand make a time-lapse video that we put on YouTube
31:05SPEAKERand people would love that.
31:06SPEAKERAnd it turns out two of those things were true.
31:09SPEAKERAnd in 2010, when we built the cupcake,
31:11SPEAKERgetting a 3D printer to work reliably once a week
31:15SPEAKERturned out to be a pretty substantial challenge.
31:17SPEAKER- Oh yeah, yeah.
31:18SPEAKERBut by the time you came around with Octoprint,
31:21SPEAKERI think we were on a MakerBot or a Replicator
31:23SPEAKERor something like that and eventually moved to PrinterBots
31:25SPEAKERand the market for printers exploded right around the time
31:28SPEAKERthat you kicked off with Octoprint.
31:30SPEAKERHow much has that explosion of that 3D printer market,
31:33SPEAKERlike just the sheer volume of 3D printers
31:36SPEAKERbeen both important to you and also,
31:38SPEAKERI have to imagine it's an absolute nightmare
31:40SPEAKERsupporting a million different printers.
31:43SPEAKER- It is, yeah, it absolutely is.
31:46SPEAKERAnd yeah, so this explosion kind of coincided
31:49SPEAKERwith my move towards first being full-time working
31:54SPEAKERon Octoprint, but still employed.
31:56SPEAKERAnd then later when this company that I mentioned
31:58SPEAKERran out of money for endeavors like that,
32:00SPEAKERalso yeah, this boom and this enormous amount
32:04SPEAKERof people out there now with printers allowed me to say,
32:08SPEAKERokay, I'm going to risk this.
32:09SPEAKERI'm going to try if I can do this through crowdfunding
32:12SPEAKERback in 2016 and that has been working well since then.
32:16SPEAKERSo, I mean, in the beginning,
32:18SPEAKERwe only had a very, very small number of companies
32:20SPEAKERproducing printers commercially
32:22SPEAKERand usually it was a case of find someone with a printer
32:24SPEAKERand have them print some parts for you,
32:26SPEAKERthe vitamins you add yourself
32:28SPEAKERwith the vitamins being stuff like screws
32:30SPEAKERand linear rails and whatnot.
32:32SPEAKERAnd then you build that and hopefully at some point
32:36SPEAKERit would actually work or sometimes it didn't.
32:39SPEAKERAnd then people like MakerBot and Ultimaker
32:42SPEAKERand later also PrinterBot and stuff came on the scene
32:46SPEAKERand made this a bit more accessible for the masses
32:48SPEAKERand that was also when I jumped in.
32:50SPEAKERAnd then after that, then came China, right?
32:54SPEAKERAnd that was really when the whole boom happened,
32:56SPEAKERwhen we got these cheap printers
32:58SPEAKERwhere it was pretty much a race to the bottom,
33:00SPEAKERsadly not only in price, but also in quality.
33:02SPEAKERSo there have been some safety hazards over the years
33:05SPEAKERand also some absolutely horrible things in firmware
33:10SPEAKERthat I had to work around.
33:12SPEAKERAnd so that has been a bit of a gift and a curse
33:15SPEAKERat the same time.
33:16SPEAKEROn the one hand, it made the whole technology
33:17SPEAKERreally accessible for a lot of people
33:19SPEAKERwho have done really, really awesome things with it.
33:22SPEAKEROn the other hand, it has made the whole landscape
33:26SPEAKERso very much fragmented
33:27SPEAKERand with a multitude of electronics
33:29SPEAKERthat I can encounter with OctoPrint,
33:31SPEAKERwith a multitude of firmware
33:32SPEAKERthat I can encounter with OctoPrint
33:34SPEAKERthat writing code to interface with all the 3D printers
33:38SPEAKERunder the sun out there is really, really challenging
33:41SPEAKERand I had absolutely not anticipated
33:44SPEAKERhow much work that would be.
33:45SPEAKERI thought the biggest challenge would be the web interface
33:47SPEAKERand the API and designing that stuff
33:50SPEAKERso that people would actually want to use it.
33:52SPEAKERBut, and I mean that as also a big challenge.
33:54SPEAKERAnd now I also have the plug-in system
33:55SPEAKERthat I have to think about and things like that.
33:57SPEAKERBut whenever I need to do something
34:00SPEAKERin the communication layer,
34:02SPEAKERlet's just say the gray in my hair
34:05SPEAKERhas really increased over the past 10 years.
34:09SPEAKERAnd I think at least some of that is due to OctoPrint.
34:12SPEAKER- How many actual platforms would you say there are
34:14SPEAKERthat you have to support?
34:15SPEAKERLike in the smart home space, for example,
34:17SPEAKERthere will be like smart plugs
34:18SPEAKERfrom a zillion different vendors,
34:19SPEAKERbut then you look and see that like,
34:21SPEAKERoh, 90% of these are all using the same controller chips.
34:23SPEAKERSo that's actually just one interface.
34:25SPEAKERIs there a similar situation in 3D printers
34:27SPEAKERwhere a lot of the like rebadged models
34:29SPEAKERare all actually using the same controller hardware?
34:31SPEAKER- Yeah, so thankfully we have a bunch of,
34:33SPEAKERlet's say firmware families.
34:36SPEAKERSo on one hand, there is Marlin,
34:38SPEAKERwhich is still I think the biggest player.
34:40SPEAKERI have some stats up on stats.octoprint.org
34:43SPEAKERthat people can look at if they are interested
34:45SPEAKERin what firmware I use.
34:47SPEAKERBut there is Marlin.
34:49SPEAKERThen there is various forks of that also
34:52SPEAKERthat have slight different implementations here and there.
34:55SPEAKERThen Repetier firmware is also something
34:58SPEAKERthat is still present.
35:00SPEAKERWe have Clipper.
35:01SPEAKERWe used to have something called,
35:04SPEAKERhow was it called, Redeem, maybe, not sure right now.
35:09SPEAKERAnd some other stuff,
35:11SPEAKERsome self-cooked things that I like to just call.
35:14SPEAKERYeah, it's tricky for some of the things
35:16SPEAKERto give them a name even,
35:18SPEAKERbecause if the firmware doesn't identify itself
35:20SPEAKERwith some name, then you have to give it some name.
35:22SPEAKERSo one firmware out there I just call CBDMated,
35:26SPEAKERbecause that is what the firmware prints out
35:28SPEAKERwhen you run it.
35:29SPEAKERBut yeah, no idea who actually made it.
35:31SPEAKERIt just ships with some Chinese printers
35:33SPEAKERand has some very, very interesting interpretations
35:36SPEAKERof the communication protocol,
35:37SPEAKERwhich require an OctoPrint plugin to fix,
35:40SPEAKERor rather to standardize and to make usable again.
35:44SPEAKER- You had mentioned that some of the firmware
35:46SPEAKERis shipped with things that were shocking to you.
35:48SPEAKERLike what kind of,
35:50SPEAKERI mean, a 3D printer is an inherently semi-dangerous thing.
35:53SPEAKERIt has a hot end that gets, what, 200 Celsius,
35:55SPEAKERand it runs something that'll catch on fire
35:57SPEAKERif you leave it in there long enough through that end.
36:00SPEAKERBut what do you find that's dangerous?
36:02SPEAKER- So one of the things that OctoPrint
36:04SPEAKERactually started warning people about
36:06SPEAKERafter one too many posts on Reddit
36:08SPEAKERabout actually burned down printers
36:11SPEAKERwas that some vendors ship their printers
36:14SPEAKERwith the so-called thermal runaway protection disabled.
36:17SPEAKERAnd that is simply a feature in firmware
36:19SPEAKERthat will look at how much power
36:21SPEAKERis it currently putting into the heater,
36:23SPEAKERand what kind of temperature difference
36:25SPEAKERis it measuring with the thermistor that is in the hot end.
36:29SPEAKERAnd if it sees that one thing is rising,
36:31SPEAKERbut the other isn't, then there is some kind of disconnect.
36:34SPEAKERSo either the heater cartridge is stuck in on position
36:38SPEAKERor something like that,
36:39SPEAKERor the thermistor fell out of the hot end,
36:40SPEAKERwhich, yes, is something that can happen,
36:43SPEAKERespecially in, let's say, sub-quality components
36:46SPEAKERor sub-par quality components.
36:49SPEAKERAnd the problem with this is if you buy cheap thermistors
36:52SPEAKERand cheap hardware in general,
36:54SPEAKERthat sometimes that's hardware in these thermistors
36:57SPEAKERand also your controllers and whatnot can be a bit flaky.
37:00SPEAKERAnd this flakiness then will lead to false positives
37:03SPEAKERof this thermal runaway protection.
37:05SPEAKERSo some vendors are going the route of,
37:07SPEAKERinstead of fixing their components,
37:09SPEAKERthey're simply disabling the watchdog.
37:11SPEAKERAnd then if something breaks,
37:14SPEAKERyou might suddenly have a hot end
37:16SPEAKERthat is not sitting at 200 degrees, but at 600 degrees.
37:19SPEAKERAnd the PTFE tube inside is now releasing
37:22SPEAKERsome chlorine compounds or something like that.
37:25SPEAKERSo a burning printer is not necessarily the worst thing
37:28SPEAKERthat can happen to you in this case,
37:30SPEAKERor the only thing that can happen to you.
37:32SPEAKERAnd yeah, so I started identifying firmware
37:35SPEAKERalso for this reason, to just be able to tell people,
37:38SPEAKER"Hey, the firmware you're running there,
37:40SPEAKERthat has this very, very, very bad flaw,
37:43SPEAKERand you really need to get this fixed,
37:45SPEAKERflash different firmware or read up here
37:48SPEAKERon how to configure it properly," stuff like that.
37:51SPEAKER- It's interesting 'cause the more I spent 3D printing,
37:54SPEAKERthe less I wanted to sit next to a 3D printer all day
37:56SPEAKERwhile it was running.
37:57SPEAKERI don't know that people necessarily understand,
38:00SPEAKER3D prints, especially FDM, the fuse deposition
38:03SPEAKERwhere you spit the plastic out,
38:04SPEAKERit's often a really lengthy time-consuming process.
38:07SPEAKERA short print can be a couple of hours
38:09SPEAKERand a long one can be several days.
38:11SPEAKERHow long was it before you got OctoPrint to a point,
38:14SPEAKERespecially with those early pies,
38:16SPEAKERthat it was able to handle a really long, huge project
38:19SPEAKERon one of the bigger printers?
38:21SPEAKERHow do you optimize that versus the person
38:23SPEAKERwho has a $400 home, somebody who's a professional?
38:29SPEAKER'Cause I know both professionals and enthusiasts
38:31SPEAKERwho use OctoPrint, and it's a very different market
38:33SPEAKERand very different failure--
38:35SPEAKER- Tolerance?
38:36SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly, failure tolerance.
38:37SPEAKER- Yeah, so funnily enough, I rarely had any kind
38:42SPEAKERof stability issues from the get-go.
38:43SPEAKERSo it was not me who did the first multiple day print
38:49SPEAKERon OctoPrint, but it was actually someone
38:50SPEAKERthat I knew from Google+ who messaged me,
38:53SPEAKERand hey, by the way, this Taj Mahal print here
38:56SPEAKERthat went on for 28 hours or something flawlessly,
38:59SPEAKERwhy are OctoPrints?
38:59SPEAKERThank you again.
39:00SPEAKERAnd it was like, okay, cool, apparently this works.
39:03SPEAKERI mean, the thing is, if you figure out
39:05SPEAKERhow to reliably communicate with the printer,
39:07SPEAKERwhether you do it for one hour or for 200 of them
39:11SPEAKERis not necessarily the problem.
39:12SPEAKERThe bigger problem here is instead actually stuff
39:15SPEAKERlike will the print actually stick to the bed long enough?
39:18SPEAKERWill the filament tangle?
39:20SPEAKERWill horrible, horrible things happen due to a cat
39:22SPEAKERin the room?
39:23SPEAKERYou don't know about all of that.
39:24SPEAKERSo the idea behind OctoPrint really in that point
39:26SPEAKERwas you cannot, I mean, okay, I have to add a caveat here.
39:31SPEAKERObviously OctoPrint will tell you when you set it up
39:33SPEAKERfor the very first time that you should never leave
39:35SPEAKERyour print unattended and that you should make sure
39:38SPEAKERthat at any point in time when something goes wrong,
39:40SPEAKERa human can intervene and prevent a fire
39:43SPEAKERor prevent whatever.
39:46SPEAKERStill, I'm leaving my prints unattended myself
39:48SPEAKERbecause I trust my printer.
39:49SPEAKERI know that my printer is electronically sound
39:52SPEAKERand the only, yeah, the worst thing that can happen
39:55SPEAKERactually just happened this morning when I woke up
39:57SPEAKERto a whole print bed full of maybe five hours
40:01SPEAKERof extruded filament, completely not attached to anything.
40:05SPEAKERSo what we call spaghetti.
40:08SPEAKERSo spaghetti for breakfast is the stuff
40:12SPEAKERthat still can happen.
40:13SPEAKERAlthough there are actually OctoPrint plugins
40:15SPEAKERthat can help you with that through machine learning
40:17SPEAKERand picture analysis from the webcam
40:20SPEAKERand then tell apart a working print from a spaghetti print
40:23SPEAKERand then stop the print job for you.
40:25SPEAKERI did not have anything like that installed.
40:27SPEAKERBut yeah, so in general, from my personal experience,
40:31SPEAKERthe bigger issue is really with the reliability
40:33SPEAKERof the printer from a mechanical perspective
40:35SPEAKERor from the filament from a mechanical perspective.
40:38SPEAKERAnd the software so far has rarely been the issue.
40:41SPEAKERI am very happy about that and I knock on wood
40:45SPEAKERthat it stays this way, but yeah.
40:47SPEAKERSome issues that we had actually was where,
40:51SPEAKERso most common thing that you install OctoPrint on
40:53SPEAKERis a Raspberry Pi and that is what I was originally
40:56SPEAKERwriting it for, but it runs on everything.
40:58SPEAKERThe problem is with Raspberry Pis, they are a bit,
41:03SPEAKERhow do I say, choosy when it comes to the power supply
41:06SPEAKERthat they accept as adequate.
41:08SPEAKERAnd a lot of people are seeing the micro USB input
41:11SPEAKERor these days they use BC input on the Raspberry Pi
41:14SPEAKERand think, oh, I still have a phone charger
41:16SPEAKERlying around here somewhere and use that to power that thing
41:19SPEAKERwith the result that it is browning out left and right
41:22SPEAKERand causing all kind of weird things.
41:24SPEAKERAnd there was a time when I was constantly getting reports
41:27SPEAKERlike OctoPrint suddenly stopped by print at, I don't know,
41:31SPEAKER5 a.m. in the morning or something like that.
41:33SPEAKERAnd it was one of these issues where it's absolutely
41:36SPEAKERimpossible to reproduce, where it's absolutely impossible
41:38SPEAKERto debug, but at some point I started,
41:42SPEAKERI got the idea that might be a good idea to just monitor
41:45SPEAKERwhether the Pi was getting enough power.
41:47SPEAKERAnd then it turned out that a lot,
41:50SPEAKERmaybe even most of these issues that I observed
41:52SPEAKERover the years was down to the Pi browning out,
41:55SPEAKERlosing the serial connection to the printer,
41:57SPEAKERlosing a network connection, losing whatnot,
42:01SPEAKERlosing its marbles and deciding to just send
42:03SPEAKERhalf the lines over, stuff like that.
42:05SPEAKERAnd ever since OctoPrint is warning people
42:08SPEAKERabout these under voltage situations,
42:11SPEAKERit has caused a number of tickets due to these,
42:15SPEAKERmade go down significantly.
42:17SPEAKEROn the other hand, it has opened me up to a lot
42:20SPEAKERof angry users who feel like I'm overstepping my boundaries
42:24SPEAKERby telling them that their power supplies are inadequate
42:27SPEAKERand that it is perfectly fine because it says three amps
42:31SPEAKERon it and that cannot be a browning out issue.
42:33SPEAKERAnd it must be my code that is at fault,
42:36SPEAKERat which point I don't usually point them to the fact
42:38SPEAKERthat I'm actually just using the Raspberry Pi's own code
42:41SPEAKERand that if says it is browning out,
42:43SPEAKERthen it is browning out regardless
42:46SPEAKERof whether that is correct or not.
42:47SPEAKERAnd then I cannot help them
42:48SPEAKERand they need to fix the power supply.
42:50SPEAKERBut yeah, that is an ongoing battle still.
42:53SPEAKER- Do you have any contact
42:54SPEAKERwith the Raspberry Pi Foundation at all?
42:55SPEAKERHave you ever spoken to them about stuff like this?
42:57SPEAKERLike I've bought endless Pis over time
42:59SPEAKERand I'm a little surprised that they don't more aggressively
43:02SPEAKERpush that issue on people.
43:03SPEAKERYou know, they're very like politely like,
43:06SPEAKERwe like our official power supply.
43:08SPEAKERLike you should look for one that does this,
43:10SPEAKERbut it's not, they're maybe not as forceful
43:12SPEAKERabout hammering that requirement home as they could be.
43:15SPEAKER- I mean, they built in the way at least
43:17SPEAKERthat you can detect it.
43:18SPEAKERAnd also if you run their UI,
43:20SPEAKERif you put that thing not headless,
43:22SPEAKERlike I usually booted,
43:23SPEAKERbut actually with a monitor and stuff attached,
43:25SPEAKERyou will see a little warning thingy pop up
43:28SPEAKERin the upper right corner, I think.
43:30SPEAKERIf you have under voltage,
43:32SPEAKERso they are aware of the problem, I think,
43:34SPEAKERbut they, yeah, for some reason,
43:36SPEAKERthey are not actively pushing it.
43:38SPEAKERI do have contact in there though,
43:39SPEAKERbut frankly I figured if I just rebuild the same mechanism
43:44SPEAKERthat they already have in the UI and warn people
43:47SPEAKERand constantly annoy people.
43:50SPEAKERSo some stuff in OctoPrint is now also disabled
43:52SPEAKERif it is detecting an ongoing under voltage situation,
43:55SPEAKERbecause we, for example, we saw the problem
43:57SPEAKERthat people were installing very CPU intense plugins
44:01SPEAKERduring or whether the plugin installation itself
44:03SPEAKERwas CPU intense because it had to compile some stuff
44:06SPEAKERor something during an under voltage situation.
44:08SPEAKERAnd then the whole installation failed
44:11SPEAKERor things were wonky and corrupted after that.
44:15SPEAKERSo things like plugin installation are now simply disabled
44:18SPEAKERwhen you are experiencing an under voltage.
44:21SPEAKERAnd that has also made this whole error situation
44:24SPEAKERor this whole bug report family completely go away
44:28SPEAKERat the cost of some people, of course, being disgruntled
44:30SPEAKERbecause again, the whole with the overstay.
44:32SPEAKERIt's funny how many people are actually angry
44:35SPEAKERwhen you tell them that what they have has a problem
44:37SPEAKERbecause they are completely and utterly convinced
44:40SPEAKERthat no, it hasn't and you are wrong.
44:42SPEAKER- Einstein said that the universe and human stupidity
44:46SPEAKERare the only two things that are infinite.
44:47SPEAKERI would say entitlement is another one probably.
44:49SPEAKER- Yeah, absolutely.
44:50SPEAKERAnd I think he also said he's not entirely sure
44:52SPEAKERabout the universe.
44:54SPEAKER- Yes, yeah, of course, of course.
44:55SPEAKERThat's the important part of the quote, I think.
44:57SPEAKERI was excited to hear you still get to have time
44:59SPEAKERto print stuff and you get to print stuff.
45:00SPEAKERI'm curious what you use your 3D printers for
45:02SPEAKERat this point in time.
45:04SPEAKER- Mostly functional stuff.
45:05SPEAKERAnd actually, that was all I ever did.
45:08SPEAKERSo I got this in the first place
45:09SPEAKERbecause I wanted to be able to,
45:12SPEAKERyou know, when you walk around your house and you think,
45:14SPEAKERah, it would be so nice if there was some part
45:16SPEAKERthat did this and that so that I can just solve
45:19SPEAKERthis one little tiny paper cut that I experience every day.
45:22SPEAKERSo I started doing that.
45:24SPEAKERFor example, a couple of years ago,
45:26SPEAKERand that's still going strong,
45:27SPEAKERI designed a splash guard for the kitchen sink
45:29SPEAKERbecause every time that I was using it,
45:32SPEAKERit was splashing to the left over the counter
45:34SPEAKERand that was annoying me.
45:36SPEAKERAnd so I just designed something with some acrylic sheet
45:39SPEAKERand some hinges and some printed parts
45:41SPEAKERthat I can now pull out and then everything to the left
45:44SPEAKERis protected from water splash.
45:46SPEAKERIt's silly, but it helped me.
45:48SPEAKERAnd also the kitchen sink,
45:49SPEAKERthe faucet was a bit stupid to handle.
45:52SPEAKERAnd so I built a little, designed a little extension
45:55SPEAKERfor that was something like two hours of a print
45:57SPEAKERhas been going strong now for five years
45:59SPEAKERand is something that I use every day
46:01SPEAKERand don't even think about anymore
46:03SPEAKERand has improved my life so much.
46:06SPEAKERAnd recently I bought myself an e-bike
46:08SPEAKERand also a trailer for it.
46:09SPEAKERSo because I'm trying to replace my car
46:12SPEAKERfor all these short trips that you just buy yourself
46:15SPEAKERand maybe carrying some groceries or something like that.
46:18SPEAKERSo, and for that, I also bought two heavy duty D-locks
46:23SPEAKERand then I found myself in the weird position
46:25SPEAKERthat I now had these locks,
46:26SPEAKERbut no way to mount them to the bike.
46:27SPEAKERSo I designed a mount for that.
46:30SPEAKERAnd that went over several iterations
46:32SPEAKERuntil it was finally doing what I wanted it to,
46:34SPEAKERbut now it's working beautifully
46:36SPEAKERand is something that I'm very, very proud of.
46:39SPEAKER- There's something really satisfying
46:41SPEAKERabout that iterative loop.
46:42SPEAKERIt's the thing that I like about 3D printing
46:43SPEAKERand just computer, laser cutting, 3D printing,
46:45SPEAKERwhatever it is you're doing.
46:47SPEAKER- Absolutely, yeah.
46:47SPEAKER- Where you build the first version, you're like,
46:49SPEAKER"Oh, this is pretty good, but it's not quite right."
46:51SPEAKERAnd then you're like, "I think I can do it better."
46:52SPEAKERAnd you go back and you iterate it three
46:54SPEAKERor four or five times and then all of a sudden
46:56SPEAKERyou have something that's exactly,
46:57SPEAKERexactly what you were hoping it would be.
46:59SPEAKER- Yeah, and that dispute.
47:00SPEAKERAnd it also makes you think about the problem
47:02SPEAKERfrom various angles.
47:03SPEAKERBecause for example, for printing,
47:04SPEAKERyou really have to think about how can I print that?
47:07SPEAKERBecause if you use something that uses FDM,
47:10SPEAKERyou have the problem that you kind of have
47:11SPEAKERto fight gravity here and there.
47:13SPEAKERBecause if you're printing something
47:14SPEAKERthat imagine is shaped like a T,
47:17SPEAKERif you're trying to print these horizontal bars
47:20SPEAKERup in the end up there,
47:21SPEAKERand you're simply basically splurging the molten plastic
47:24SPEAKERout of a nozzle up there, it will just drop down.
47:27SPEAKERThere will be nothing stopping it from falling down.
47:29SPEAKERSo in 3D printing, you always have to think about stuff
47:31SPEAKERlike support placement, support structure placement.
47:34SPEAKERThen you also have to think about for mechanical parts,
47:36SPEAKERfor example, for the bike lock,
47:37SPEAKERI explicitly modeled it on the bike lock mount.
47:40SPEAKERI modeled it so that all the weight would be held
47:44SPEAKERnot by the layer adhesion,
47:46SPEAKERso not by the parts where the layers are stuck together,
47:49SPEAKERbut actually by the lines that make up,
47:51SPEAKERso the loops that make up the individual layers
47:53SPEAKERso that this would be really, really strong
47:55SPEAKERin the direction of force.
47:58SPEAKERAnd that of course then made,
48:00SPEAKERcost me a few head scratches on how to design that thing
48:03SPEAKERso that it was still printable
48:05SPEAKERwithout a ton of support and things like that.
48:08SPEAKERAnd I really like how this makes you,
48:10SPEAKERI don't get to print as much as I originally planned to
48:14SPEAKERwhen I bought the printer in the first place,
48:17SPEAKERbecause I'm more busy with the software side of things,
48:19SPEAKERbut here and there, whenever something just annoys me
48:23SPEAKERor I need to solve something,
48:25SPEAKERthen I sit down and whip up FreeCAD
48:28SPEAKERand design it in that and go through some iterations.
48:32SPEAKERAnd that is also something that I really, really enjoy.
48:35SPEAKERAlso something that I assume we'll have to do
48:38SPEAKERis I need to program a bunch of smart plugs
48:42SPEAKERand I need a programming jig for them
48:43SPEAKERso that I can easily attach the serial interface for that.
48:46SPEAKERAnd that is something where I was looking around
48:48SPEAKERfor something that was already done to do that,
48:50SPEAKERbut I couldn't find it.
48:52SPEAKERAnd then I found a print, but that didn't work as well.
48:55SPEAKERAnd then I figured, well,
48:56SPEAKERmaybe I can laser cut this just from sheet stock
48:59SPEAKERrather easily.
49:00SPEAKERSo I just have to sit down, cut it out,
49:02SPEAKERand then I have a laser cutter sitting right behind me.
49:04SPEAKERSo, which by the way also runs OctoPrint.
49:08SPEAKER- That's a good opportunity to talk about this.
49:09SPEAKEROctoPrint has kind of gone from this thing
49:11SPEAKERthat was for 3D printers to like,
49:12SPEAKERit seems like everything that runs GD
49:13SPEAKERor many things that run G code, is that,
49:15SPEAKERlike where does OctoPrint end, I guess, is a-
49:18SPEAKER- In principle, OctoPrint is still
49:20SPEAKERthe snappy web interface for your 3D printer.
49:22SPEAKERSo it is very much too focused on 3D printers.
49:25SPEAKERBut with the plug-in system, it's of course easy
49:28SPEAKERto just swap out certain parts of OctoPrint,
49:31SPEAKERsuppress others, add others.
49:33SPEAKERSo in case of the laser printer
49:36SPEAKERthat I have in my office here,
49:38SPEAKERthat is actually more like an engraver,
49:40SPEAKERbut it is enough to cut some plywood and stuff.
49:42SPEAKERAnd that is produced by a company in Munich
49:45SPEAKERwho had this idea for a cheap and affordable laser cutter,
49:50SPEAKERbut lacked the software.
49:51SPEAKERAnd we met at a fair and got to talk at a trade show.
49:55SPEAKERI should maybe rather say.
49:57SPEAKERAnd we got to talk and yeah,
49:59SPEAKERthen they simply took OctoPrint
50:00SPEAKERand adapted it to their needs and that worked well.
50:04SPEAKERSo it's kind of fun that whenever I use this laser cutter,
50:07SPEAKERI now also use my software,
50:09SPEAKEReven though it doesn't look even remotely
50:11SPEAKERlike my software anymore.
50:13SPEAKERSo yeah, kind of fun.
50:14SPEAKERAnd I also know that some people
50:16SPEAKERhave also used it for CNC routers.
50:17SPEAKERAnd I think there is at least one pick and place project
50:22SPEAKERout there that uses it then for, yeah,
50:25SPEAKERpick and place population of PCBs.
50:29SPEAKERBut yeah, in general, I mean, at its core,
50:32SPEAKEROctoPrint is something that can stream G code
50:35SPEAKERover a serial connection to something
50:37SPEAKERand then give you feedback about this via a web socket,
50:40SPEAKERvia a web interface or an API, whatever you want.
50:45SPEAKERSo it can be adapted to a lot of stuff,
50:47SPEAKERthough my focus still is on 3D printers.
50:50SPEAKER- So where does OctoPrint fit in the 3D printing stack
50:52SPEAKERfor people who haven't spent time 3D printing,
50:54SPEAKERmaybe don't understand the intricacies of the process?
50:57SPEAKER- Usually if you want to print something,
50:58SPEAKERand let's assume you already have the 3D object
51:02SPEAKERthat you want to print and you do not have to figure out
51:03SPEAKERhow to design that first.
51:04SPEAKERSo you download it from 3Dworks or from printables.com
51:07SPEAKERor something like that.
51:08SPEAKERAnd now you have this STL or 3MF file sitting there.
51:11SPEAKERAnd the first thing that you need to do now is,
51:13SPEAKERwhat you have there is basically a mesh of triangles
51:16SPEAKERthat make up a three dimensional object.
51:18SPEAKERThat is not something that the printer can do anything about
51:21SPEAKERor do anything with.
51:22SPEAKERSo what you first need to do is run it through a slicer.
51:25SPEAKERAnd the slicer is basically a piece of software
51:27SPEAKERthat takes this 3D mesh and then slices it up
51:31SPEAKERinto individual layers based on a lot of parameters
51:34SPEAKERthat you can configure.
51:35SPEAKERAnd then from those layers also generates
51:38SPEAKERthe individual commands for the printer to run through.
51:43SPEAKERSo imagine a 3D printer and an FDM 3D printer,
51:45SPEAKERI should add as basically a hot glue gun
51:49SPEAKERmounted to a 3D gentry.
51:50SPEAKERSo you can move it in X and Y direction
51:52SPEAKERand you can also move it up into Z.
51:55SPEAKERAnd what the slicer now does is pretty much create the path
52:01SPEAKERthat this glue gun is now supposed to take
52:04SPEAKERand also include the commands at which point
52:07SPEAKERit is supposed to extrude how much of the glue
52:09SPEAKERor in this case molten plastic into the spot
52:11SPEAKERwhere it is currently at.
52:13SPEAKERAnd at the end then something called the g-code file
52:17SPEAKERdrops out and this contains all the information
52:20SPEAKERlike all the layer commands and all the movement commands
52:23SPEAKERand also stuff like what temperature to heat up the bed
52:26SPEAKERand the nozzle and maybe also the chamber to at what point,
52:29SPEAKERwhen to start, what fan, at what speeds, stuff like that.
52:33SPEAKERAnd now you also, you need to get this somehow
52:36SPEAKERto the printer.
52:36SPEAKERAnd these days the easiest way to do that
52:38SPEAKERis to just throw it on an SD card or on a USB stick
52:41SPEAKERand go to your printer and put it in
52:44SPEAKERand then on the printer you select some option in the menu
52:48SPEAKERand tell it to print this file and then it will do that.
52:51SPEAKERAnd that works fine.
52:52SPEAKERThis is however something that 10 years ago
52:55SPEAKERwas something that no printer could do.
52:58SPEAKERIt also has the downside
52:59SPEAKERthat it completely lacks a feedback loop.
53:01SPEAKERSo the thing is you now have your printer sitting there
53:04SPEAKERmaybe working for days on end
53:06SPEAKERand every time that you have to want to figure out
53:08SPEAKERif it is still doing what it is supposed to be doing
53:10SPEAKERand how long it will still take,
53:13SPEAKERyou have to physically go next to your printer
53:16SPEAKERand look at it with your own eyes.
53:18SPEAKERAnd that is annoying with really long print jobs.
53:22SPEAKERSo Octoprint comes in is instead of you throwing
53:25SPEAKERthis piece of G code that fell out of your slicer
53:27SPEAKERonto an SD card or a USB stick
53:29SPEAKERand then physically walking it over your printer,
53:32SPEAKERyou instead upload it to a thing
53:34SPEAKERthat is connected to your printer
53:35SPEAKERand talks to it via a serial interface.
53:37SPEAKERAnd that is Octoprint.
53:38SPEAKERAnd then in Octoprint's web interface,
53:41SPEAKERso you go into your browser,
53:42SPEAKERyou can access that from the same PC as your slicer,
53:46SPEAKERfor example, go into your browser
53:48SPEAKERand then you can select this file for printing
53:50SPEAKERand fire it off.
53:51SPEAKERAnd then you not only get progress information
53:53SPEAKERand temperature control, but also webcam overview.
53:55SPEAKERAnd you can even install plugins
53:57SPEAKERthat send you notifications on your phone
53:59SPEAKERwhen it reaches certain percentages
54:01SPEAKERor when it's done or it warns you about errors or stuff.
54:05SPEAKERWith the current generation of slicers,
54:07SPEAKERso the most common ones, Cura, Prusa Slicer, Super Slicer,
54:11SPEAKERthey all even have either natively built in
54:15SPEAKERor accessible via a plugin, Octoprint integration.
54:18SPEAKERSo instead of you having to now locate the file
54:21SPEAKERthat your slicer produced on your disc
54:23SPEAKERand then uploading it through the web interface
54:25SPEAKERin Octoprint, you tell your slicer,
54:27SPEAKER"By the way, my printer is accessible via Octoprint
54:30SPEAKERon this and this IP with this and this API key."
54:32SPEAKERAnd then the slicer, after slicing the file,
54:35SPEAKERwill just send it to Octoprint, maybe even power up
54:38SPEAKERthe printer if needed and yeah, do all of that for you
54:42SPEAKERand also show you the progress then in your slicer.
54:45SPEAKERSo that is kinda neat.
54:47SPEAKER- The thing that I didn't understand
54:48SPEAKERwhen I started 3D printing is that if you hand your printer
54:50SPEAKERa piece of G-code, it's just gonna run through the steps
54:53SPEAKERof that G-code no matter what, whether it's working or not.
54:57SPEAKER- Exactly, there is no,
54:58SPEAKERso we don't have a closed loop system there or something.
55:01SPEAKERIf you run your printer through a piece of G-code
55:03SPEAKERand at some point just hold the extruder or the head,
55:07SPEAKERthe print head tight in your fist,
55:09SPEAKERit will make some horrible grinding noises
55:11SPEAKERbut it will use its stepper position
55:13SPEAKERand if you then let loose again,
55:15SPEAKERit will simply try to continue on its merry way.
55:18SPEAKERThe problem is it will completely be offset
55:20SPEAKERand horrible things happen then
55:22SPEAKERand it ruins the whole print.
55:24SPEAKERAnd this is because the 3D printers as we know them today,
55:28SPEAKERthey just use run-of-the-mill NEMA 17 stepper motors.
55:33SPEAKERSo you can tell them something like go to this position
55:36SPEAKERbut you cannot say at what position are you,
55:39SPEAKERwhich means the firmware can only pray and hope
55:42SPEAKERafter firing of a movement command
55:43SPEAKERand it will actually be executed.
55:46SPEAKERWith the heating, we have a bit more control
55:49SPEAKERbut still not much because again,
55:50SPEAKERthermal runaway can be a thing and such.
55:53SPEAKERAnd yeah, it boils down to a lot of stuff can go wrong
55:56SPEAKERat any given point.
55:57SPEAKERSo you really do not want to just leave it running for days
56:01SPEAKERand then come back to what I woke up to this morning
56:04SPEAKERbut way, way worse.
56:05SPEAKERYeah.
56:06SPEAKER- I think the worst thing we ever did was make,
56:09SPEAKERit's amazing how much plastic it can extrude
56:11SPEAKERwhen it's spaghettifying.
56:12SPEAKER- Yeah.
56:13SPEAKER- Because you'll just get an enormous snarl of like a ball
56:17SPEAKERthree feet around a plastic
56:18SPEAKERthat's going for hours and hours and hours.
56:20SPEAKER- I had a bit of a problem getting all of the garbage
56:22SPEAKERthat was generated by this mishap this morning
56:24SPEAKERinto my garbage bin.
56:25SPEAKERSo, (laughs)
56:28SPEAKERand it wasn't that much. - The printers are faster now.
56:30SPEAKER- But yeah, I mean, if you squeeze something through an 0.4
56:34SPEAKERor in my case right now, an 0.6 nozzle,
56:37SPEAKERit gets really, really thin.
56:38SPEAKERSo even small amounts of plastic that you squeeze
56:41SPEAKERthrough such a nozzle can become very, very long.
56:45SPEAKERAnd yeah, so it always looks kind of funny.
56:49SPEAKERAnd it is a bit frustrating if it was something
56:51SPEAKERthat you were hoping would be done by the morning
56:53SPEAKERand then it is only angel hair or spaghetti or whatever,
56:56SPEAKERbut it's okay.
56:58SPEAKERWe live and learn.
56:59SPEAKERThis is the process, right?
57:01SPEAKER- So if resources were not a concern,
57:02SPEAKERif you had unlimited time, money, contributors, everything,
57:05SPEAKERis there, what's your fantasy feature for OctoPrint?
57:07SPEAKERIs there like one thing you would just love to get in there
57:09SPEAKERif you had the capability to do so?
57:12SPEAKER- There's actually one thing that I've been sitting on now
57:15SPEAKERfor years, which is rebuilding the comm layer. (laughs)
57:20SPEAKERBecause right now that comm you occasionally,
57:21SPEAKERthat is just like naturally organically grown thing
57:25SPEAKERthat tries to talk to every printer under the sun.
57:28SPEAKERAnd I have a refactor going on,
57:30SPEAKERbut every time that I sit down and work on it,
57:32SPEAKERsomething happens.
57:34SPEAKERSo the first time that I actually started working on that,
57:38SPEAKERthe whole funding situation happened where I lost this job
57:40SPEAKERwith the 3D printing company stuff
57:42SPEAKERand had to go look into the crowdfunding.
57:44SPEAKERSo that put this on the back burner.
57:46SPEAKERThe second time that I really had time for that,
57:48SPEAKERlet's just say a 16 year relationship broke apart.
57:52SPEAKERAnd so that was a bit of fun.
57:54SPEAKERThen the next time I had the time to actually work on that,
57:58SPEAKERthe pandemic hit.
57:59SPEAKERAnd yeah, so this thing is really under a bad star,
58:03SPEAKERI have the feeling.
58:04SPEAKERBut this would be the first thing that I would tackle.
58:06SPEAKERThen another thing that I immediately would look into
58:09SPEAKERis I'm still using JavaScript libraries
58:12SPEAKERand tooling from 2012.
58:15SPEAKERYou can imagine that this is a bit of a problem
58:18SPEAKERthese time and ages.
58:20SPEAKERSo we are planning on,
58:22SPEAKERand with we, I mean the regular contributors and I,
58:25SPEAKERwe are planning on replacing Octoprint's UI
58:27SPEAKERsomewhere down the road.
58:28SPEAKERThe challenge here is the plugin situation
58:30SPEAKERbecause the plugins use the same UI system.
58:33SPEAKERSo yeah, how to do this without nuking a whole ecosystem,
58:37SPEAKERright?
58:38SPEAKERAnd also just finding the time to sit down
58:39SPEAKERand finally figure out what to do,
58:41SPEAKERhow, when, where, and why.
58:43SPEAKERBecause as I said,
58:44SPEAKERevery time that I think I have time for stuff like that,
58:47SPEAKERsomething horrible happens.
58:49SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the plugin system
58:51SPEAKER'cause I think the plugin system is a real strength
58:53SPEAKERof Octoprint.
58:54SPEAKERYou know, the fact that you can apply machine learning
58:58SPEAKERto tell if the printer's gone bad from a webcam feed is like,
59:02SPEAKERif I told 2010 or 2011 me that that was a feature
59:04SPEAKERof 3D printers 10 years down the road,
59:07SPEAKERmy mind would be blown.
59:08SPEAKERDo you have plugins that you find
59:10SPEAKERthat feel like magic to you or?
59:12SPEAKER- Octolabs.
59:13SPEAKERSo Octoprint has this natively built-in time lapse feature,
59:17SPEAKERwhich I originally really just added for debugging reasons.
59:20SPEAKERAnd/or maybe to show off a bit how a print actually works.
59:25SPEAKERAnd then Brad took this to 11 by creating Octolabs.
59:30SPEAKERAnd that was quite a funny experience
59:32SPEAKERbecause suddenly there was this dude
59:34SPEAKERon the Octoprint issue tracker
59:36SPEAKERwho was asking for weird features to be added left and right
59:39SPEAKERto pause stuff and interact with the com layer
59:41SPEAKERin ways that I never anticipated,
59:43SPEAKERbut he seemed pleasant enough to work with and ask nicely.
59:46SPEAKERAnd so we worked together.
59:47SPEAKERAnd then I learned why he was asking for all of that stuff.
59:51SPEAKERAnd that was, yeah, basically developing Octolabs.
59:53SPEAKERAnd Octolabs is this time lapse for Octoprint on steroids
59:57SPEAKERwhere you don't just have, I don't know,
1:00:00SPEAKERa picture taken every two seconds
1:00:01SPEAKERand then you see the printer go really fast
1:00:04SPEAKERall over the screen and everything wobbles.
1:00:06SPEAKERAnd with a bed slinger,
1:00:07SPEAKERso a printer that moves the bed back and forth
1:00:09SPEAKERfor the Y axis, you pretty much see nothing
1:00:11SPEAKERbecause everything just is constantly in motion.
1:00:14SPEAKERAnd he built this plugin that now can at certain points
1:00:17SPEAKERfor example, on layer change or at certain points in time,
1:00:20SPEAKERjust move the printed out of the way, take a picture,
1:00:22SPEAKERthen move the print head back.
1:00:23SPEAKERAnd she also has modes where it looks like the print head
1:00:26SPEAKERis just constantly going in circles over the print
1:00:29SPEAKERwhile it grows up from the bed.
1:00:31SPEAKERAnd yeah, he built all of that as an Octoprint plugin.
1:00:34SPEAKERAnd the first time that I saw a time lapse
1:00:37SPEAKERgenerated with Octolabs, my mind was blown
1:00:40SPEAKERbecause I had no idea that this was something
1:00:41SPEAKERthat was possible with Octoprint.
1:00:45SPEAKERAnd yeah, that is also usually,
1:00:48SPEAKERso if you see some print job time lapse
1:00:50SPEAKERwhere the print job is just growing out of the bed
1:00:53SPEAKERand the nozzle is doing fancy movements above it
1:00:56SPEAKERand everything looks just like it is synced up and stuff,
1:00:59SPEAKERthat is usually Octolabs and that has also boosted
1:01:02SPEAKEROctoprint adoption by a ton single-handedly.
1:01:05SPEAKER- The initial time lapse feature
1:01:07SPEAKERwas why I installed Octoprint at the beginning
1:01:08SPEAKER'cause it made the production process
1:01:10SPEAKERfor our time lapses a lot easier.
1:01:12SPEAKERBut the stuff that you can do with Octolabs
1:01:14SPEAKERis unbelievable, it's so cool.
1:01:16SPEAKER- It's amazing.
1:01:16SPEAKERHe even allows you to test some G-photo integration
1:01:19SPEAKERso you can attach a mirrorless or a DSLR
1:01:23SPEAKERor something like that to take the pictures
1:01:25SPEAKERinstead of your run of the mill webcam
1:01:26SPEAKERand it's just amazing what this spits out.
1:01:30SPEAKERAnd then he, a couple of years later,
1:01:31SPEAKERhe actually came up with ArcWelder.
1:01:33SPEAKERSo the thing is with most printers
1:01:35SPEAKERor most printer firmware and slicers,
1:01:37SPEAKERso slicers usually when you have some model
1:01:39SPEAKERthat is like circle shaped, it just say a cylinder,
1:01:43SPEAKERyou want to print a cylinder.
1:01:44SPEAKERYour average slicer will now go there
1:01:47SPEAKERand slice this apart into individual layers
1:01:49SPEAKERand then each circle will not be turned
1:01:52SPEAKERinto a circle command for the printer
1:01:53SPEAKERbut actually segmented into individual lines.
1:01:56SPEAKERAnd the shorter those line segments,
1:01:58SPEAKERthe faster stuff needs to be sent
1:02:00SPEAKERover the serial interface now to the printer
1:02:02SPEAKERin order to keep it fed with commands
1:02:04SPEAKERso that it doesn't start to stutter.
1:02:05SPEAKERAnd this is actually a problem that we see a lot
1:02:08SPEAKERwith very fast prints and very curvy prints
1:02:11SPEAKERstreamed over OctoPrint to firmware
1:02:14SPEAKERwith very small command buffers,
1:02:16SPEAKERwhich is a very interesting combo,
1:02:18SPEAKERbut that leads to stuttering print jobs.
1:02:21SPEAKERAnd maybe there's also some performance bottlenecks
1:02:23SPEAKERhere and there still in OctoPrint's code
1:02:24SPEAKERthat I'm trying to iron out whenever I find them
1:02:27SPEAKERbut there is a logical ceiling caused by the serial board rate
1:02:31SPEAKERand bandwidth available and the thing
1:02:33SPEAKERthat every line has to be sent, acknowledged
1:02:35SPEAKERand then the next sent and acknowledged
1:02:37SPEAKERand also checksum and whatnot.
1:02:39SPEAKERThe thing is though that most firmware out there
1:02:40SPEAKERactually supports circle commands or rather arc commands.
1:02:43SPEAKERSo there are codes G2 and G3 to tell the printer
1:02:48SPEAKERor rather the print head to move in a circle
1:02:50SPEAKERwith this and this center point
1:02:53SPEAKERand this radius from this start angle
1:02:56SPEAKERto this end angle or something like that.
1:02:58SPEAKERI think the actual coordination is a bit different
1:03:01SPEAKERbut you get the idea.
1:03:03SPEAKERSo you can basically just create arcs,
1:03:05SPEAKERcounterclockwise and clockwise.
1:03:06SPEAKERBut the slicers do not output code that utilizes this
1:03:11SPEAKERbecause not all firmware does it.
1:03:12SPEAKERAnd we heard there is a lot of fragmentation out there.
1:03:15SPEAKERSo you can, a slicer has the same problem in that regard.
1:03:17SPEAKERLike I do with OctoPrint,
1:03:19SPEAKERI have to interface with the printers.
1:03:21SPEAKERThey have to generate code that the printers can understand.
1:03:23SPEAKERSo better say that sorry and leave out the arc commands.
1:03:27SPEAKERAnd Brad now came and with ArcWelder created a tool
1:03:31SPEAKERthat will analyze the G code and detect things
1:03:35SPEAKERthat could be arcs and rewrite it so it contains arcs.
1:03:39SPEAKERAnd that can reduce the whole G code by 50 or 60%
1:03:43SPEAKERand obviously also increase the speed
1:03:44SPEAKERwith which it can be transmitted by a lot.
1:03:46SPEAKERAnd that is stuff this guy just comes up with
1:03:50SPEAKERand whips out of his sleeve.
1:03:53SPEAKERAnd that is really, really astonishing.
1:03:55SPEAKER- It seems like the fragmented nature
1:03:57SPEAKERis kind of a pro and a con of the 3D printing ecosystem.
1:04:00SPEAKERDo you think, is there any movement at all
1:04:02SPEAKERto unify firmware API for the thing that OctoPrint does?
1:04:07SPEAKER- So funnily enough, a couple of years ago, I tried that.
1:04:10SPEAKERI tried to just sit down and write a spec for G code.
1:04:14SPEAKERAnd people from the CNC world will now say
1:04:17SPEAKERthere is already a spec for G code,
1:04:19SPEAKERNIST numbers, something or other, yeah.
1:04:21SPEAKERThe problem is that 3D printers use something
1:04:24SPEAKERthey also call G code, but which is in fact a file format
1:04:28SPEAKERand a serial interface protocol thingy,
1:04:30SPEAKERwhereas the NIST specification for CNC machining
1:04:33SPEAKERis only a file format with a very limited command set.
1:04:37SPEAKERAnd when 3D printers were created
1:04:39SPEAKERin the way that we know them now,
1:04:40SPEAKERpeople took this CNC stuff and adapted it
1:04:43SPEAKERand hacked it together and just made it somehow work,
1:04:46SPEAKERbut it grew organically and in various, various shapes
1:04:49SPEAKERand forms, depending on who was working on what.
1:04:54SPEAKERAnd a couple of years back, I decided, okay,
1:04:55SPEAKERenough is enough, this is just an absolute nightmare.
1:04:58SPEAKERI need to try to somehow generalize this,
1:05:01SPEAKERat least find a common ground, document it,
1:05:04SPEAKERand make people agree that this is how we are going
1:05:08SPEAKERto do things from now on.
1:05:09SPEAKERAnd herding cats would have been easier.
1:05:13SPEAKERI got together some people from the wrap-wrap
1:05:16SPEAKERand from the 3D printing community, and it just,
1:05:20SPEAKERlet's just say it devolved into name calling here and there,
1:05:23SPEAKERand that was where I decided, okay,
1:05:25SPEAKERthis is not going to work that way.
1:05:27SPEAKERSo my current idea is just to,
1:05:30SPEAKERas part also of the documentation effort,
1:05:31SPEAKERto just document what OctoPrint supports
1:05:33SPEAKERand then have other people just adapt to that
1:05:36SPEAKERbecause anything else.
1:05:36SPEAKERAt least what I achieved is that I am in the loop
1:05:39SPEAKERon some firmware developments now going on
1:05:41SPEAKERafter one too many cases with, yeah,
1:05:44SPEAKERsomeone unintentionally broke something in a pull request,
1:05:47SPEAKERand then suddenly a whole bunch of printers
1:05:50SPEAKERdidn't work with OctoPrint anymore,
1:05:52SPEAKERand I had to field your bug reports for that.
1:05:54SPEAKERSo at least that got this communication going, kind of,
1:05:57SPEAKERbut yeah.
1:06:00SPEAKERLet's just say there's a lot of ego in this whole community.
1:06:03SPEAKER(laughing)
1:06:04SPEAKER- Fair.
1:06:05SPEAKERWe've got just a couple of short questions
1:06:07SPEAKERfrom listeners here.
1:06:08SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:06:09SPEAKER- One is, what do you think of the evolution
1:06:11SPEAKERof AI-based failure detection and correction?
1:06:14SPEAKERDo you think that that is something,
1:06:16SPEAKERA, is that in a place that it needs to be now,
1:06:18SPEAKERor is there a lot more work to do there?
1:06:19SPEAKERAnd B, is that something that you think
1:06:21SPEAKERwill make 3D printing more accessible
1:06:22SPEAKERto people who are less technical?
1:06:24SPEAKER- I personally really enjoy what I'm seeing there.
1:06:27SPEAKERI have to admit that I so far have not used it myself.
1:06:29SPEAKERI maybe should install Obico later
1:06:32SPEAKERto avoid another mishap like last night once
1:06:36SPEAKERon the coming morning, but from what I can see,
1:06:38SPEAKERthey have already come a long, long way.
1:06:41SPEAKERAnd what I think that the next step should actually be
1:06:43SPEAKERin that regard is less AI
1:06:44SPEAKERand more focused maybe on the mechanical parts,
1:06:46SPEAKERbecause currently we're trying
1:06:48SPEAKERto solve everything in software,
1:06:49SPEAKERand I also noticed this a lot
1:06:51SPEAKERin the feature requests for OctoPrint where people like,
1:06:53SPEAKERoh, OctoPrint should tell me if the print bed is not clear,
1:06:55SPEAKERor OctoPrint should do this and that
1:06:57SPEAKERand work around firmware limitations and some such.
1:07:00SPEAKERAnd I think not everything should be,
1:07:03SPEAKERor we should, as a community,
1:07:04SPEAKERwe should not try to beat every problem
1:07:07SPEAKERinto submission with software,
1:07:09SPEAKERbecause sometimes the easier
1:07:10SPEAKERand also the cleaner solution really is
1:07:13SPEAKERto solve it in hardware.
1:07:14SPEAKERAnd for things like, for example, layer skipping,
1:07:18SPEAKERwhere at some point the print head got stuck somewhere,
1:07:21SPEAKERfor example, on the print object itself,
1:07:23SPEAKERand now you have an offset
1:07:24SPEAKERon every consecutive layer due to that,
1:07:26SPEAKERthings like this could be really easily solved
1:07:29SPEAKERwith a closed loop system on the stepper
1:07:31SPEAKERwhere we would actually know
1:07:32SPEAKERwhere they are at the given moment
1:07:34SPEAKERand not where we hopefully send them to,
1:07:36SPEAKERbut where they actually are.
1:07:37SPEAKERAnd these are solved problems.
1:07:39SPEAKERIt's just expensive technology or not that expensive,
1:07:42SPEAKERbut way more expensive than 150 euros at the hardware store
1:07:46SPEAKERthat we are currently,
1:07:47SPEAKERor that a lot of people are currently willing
1:07:49SPEAKERto pay for a printer.
1:07:52SPEAKERAnd yeah, I think that would be one big step to take.
1:07:56SPEAKEROf course, 3D printing for our masses
1:07:58SPEAKERis always something where I'm a bit unsure
1:08:01SPEAKERwhether that is the right approach,
1:08:02SPEAKERbecause a 3D printer is still something very technical,
1:08:07SPEAKERand I'm not sure that we want to dump them down enough
1:08:12SPEAKERthat they can be something that everyone can easily operate,
1:08:17SPEAKERbecause at that point,
1:08:18SPEAKERusually they either become proprietary,
1:08:21SPEAKERwhich we do not want because we've been there,
1:08:24SPEAKERand the result were printers that cost millions,
1:08:27SPEAKERor they become limited.
1:08:30SPEAKERAnd we probably also do not want to do that
1:08:32SPEAKERbecause then we will have less than we have now.
1:08:35SPEAKERSo personally, I think a 3D printer is a tool
1:08:39SPEAKERlike a CNC machine is, like, I don't know,
1:08:42SPEAKERlike a power drill is, like a saw is,
1:08:46SPEAKERlike my laser cutter is.
1:08:47SPEAKERAnd for a tool, you need to learn some stuff first.
1:08:50SPEAKERIt is not something that you simply put into your bedroom
1:08:53SPEAKERand then have your toddler use or something like that,
1:08:58SPEAKERbut it is a tool, it is a machining tool.
1:09:00SPEAKERIt is a very approachable one, in my opinion,
1:09:04SPEAKERcompared to all the other stuff,
1:09:05SPEAKERalso because the most that it produces is fumes and noise,
1:09:09SPEAKERand not a lot of chips and stuff flying around and no powder.
1:09:14SPEAKEROf course, if you're working with resin printers,
1:09:17SPEAKERthe situation is a bit different
1:09:19SPEAKERbecause then you have a lot of very, very toxic chemicals
1:09:21SPEAKERthat you are now suddenly handling.
1:09:23SPEAKERBut the FTM printer side is very, very easy
1:09:26SPEAKERand approachable, I think, but it is still a tool.
1:09:29SPEAKERAnd I don't think that our expectation should be
1:09:32SPEAKERthat this should turn from a tool
1:09:34SPEAKERto something like a paper printer,
1:09:39SPEAKERbecause it is a very, very more complex process,
1:09:41SPEAKERand it will always be a more complex process.
1:09:43SPEAKER- What's the most interesting place
1:09:45SPEAKERyou've found people using OctoPrint,
1:09:47SPEAKERor you've heard of people using OctoPrint?
1:09:48SPEAKERAre there any notable ones?
1:09:50SPEAKER- I mean, what I really love is whenever I hear
1:09:52SPEAKERabout someone using them in a classroom for the curriculum,
1:09:56SPEAKERwhere the students actually design stuff,
1:09:59SPEAKERlearn how to shape things in a cut program,
1:10:01SPEAKERmaybe do something like,
1:10:03SPEAKERfirst they go through how is a function formed,
1:10:05SPEAKERand then rotate that around some axes,
1:10:08SPEAKERand then extrude that or export that into a cut program,
1:10:11SPEAKERand then slice that and send that off to a printer
1:10:13SPEAKERand suddenly you have a figurine
1:10:15SPEAKERthat is based on a mathematical formula
1:10:17SPEAKERthat you entered into something.
1:10:19SPEAKERAnd things like this is where I think it really helps kids
1:10:23SPEAKERand young adults to learn that they are in control
1:10:27SPEAKERof the world around them,
1:10:28SPEAKERand that they can do more than just consume
1:10:31SPEAKERand take whatever is already created,
1:10:33SPEAKERbut that they can actually shape the world around them.
1:10:36SPEAKERAnd I've also had the pleasure
1:10:39SPEAKERof when I was still at my old job,
1:10:41SPEAKERbut already doing Octopint on the site,
1:10:44SPEAKERat some point we organized a little maker get together
1:10:47SPEAKERin the company, and I dragged my 3D printer in there
1:10:50SPEAKERand showed it off and fired it off and printed some whistles
1:10:53SPEAKERwhere the P inside the whistle
1:10:54SPEAKERwas already inside the whistle.
1:10:56SPEAKERSo you had to break it off afterwards,
1:10:58SPEAKERbut it was inside, printed inside.
1:10:59SPEAKERAnd there were three kids there of a colleague
1:11:01SPEAKERwho were absolutely blown away.
1:11:04SPEAKERI gave each of them a whistle.
1:11:05SPEAKERI'm not sure if the colleague
1:11:06SPEAKERwould still talk to me after that,
1:11:08SPEAKERbut the glowing in the eyes,
1:11:12SPEAKERthat was just absolutely amazing.
1:11:14SPEAKERLike they understood what was happening there
1:11:17SPEAKERand they understood the process.
1:11:18SPEAKERAnd I think it might have shifted something in their heads
1:11:21SPEAKERas to how to approach the world, even a tiny, tiny bit.
1:11:25SPEAKERI know that it did for me when I got access to a 3D printer,
1:11:28SPEAKERhow it started making me not look at a problem and go,
1:11:32SPEAKERbut rather maybe if I just do this
1:11:35SPEAKERand then design something like that,
1:11:36SPEAKERand then add some screws here and hey, solved.
1:11:40SPEAKER- It has the same loop as like the first time
1:11:42SPEAKERyou use an Arduino to do something
1:11:43SPEAKERand instead of changing something on a screen with code,
1:11:47SPEAKERyou turn on a light or turn on a motor with code,
1:11:49SPEAKERit has the same, it gives you the same good brain.
1:11:52SPEAKER- Absolutely.
1:11:53SPEAKERAnd that's, I guess that's also why
1:11:54SPEAKERI maybe also am drawn to electronics,
1:11:56SPEAKERwhich is also something that I tinker with.
1:11:58SPEAKERSo it all just tickles the same part of my brain.
1:12:01SPEAKERI think this problem solving
1:12:04SPEAKERand then being able to build something custom
1:12:07SPEAKERto your specific problem,
1:12:09SPEAKERbut maybe not so custom
1:12:11SPEAKERthat it cannot also be used by others.
1:12:12SPEAKERSo that is also something that I find very rewarding
1:12:15SPEAKERand like just solving an issue,
1:12:18SPEAKERnot only for me, but also for others
1:12:19SPEAKERand reducing the time that collective humankind
1:12:23SPEAKERhas to spend on problems, maybe.
1:12:25SPEAKER- I love it.
1:12:26SPEAKERI can't think of a better way to spend your time.
1:12:28SPEAKER- Right?
1:12:29SPEAKERIt is fun.
1:12:30SPEAKER(upbeat music)
1:12:33SPEAKER- So one of the things we're really interested in
1:12:35SPEAKERon the show is kind of the lifestyle
1:12:37SPEAKERof making your living from an open source project.
1:12:39SPEAKERYou're full-time on Octoprint
1:12:40SPEAKERand you're pretty much just crowdfunding
1:12:42SPEAKERthe project at this point. - Exactly.
1:12:43SPEAKER- Is that the model?
1:12:44SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.
1:12:45SPEAKERSo I have a patron, I have GitHub sponsors.
1:12:48SPEAKERI have some ad revenue from the forums
1:12:51SPEAKERand the main webpage and the plugin repository as well.
1:12:54SPEAKERI have some merchandise going on as well,
1:12:58SPEAKERbut that's not really generating much revenue.
1:13:00SPEAKERThat's more like people were asking for it.
1:13:02SPEAKERAnd so I figured, well, okay, here is a spreadsheet store.
1:13:04SPEAKERHave fun.
1:13:05SPEAKERAnd all of that combined is actually paying my salary,
1:13:10SPEAKERso to speak.
1:13:11SPEAKERAnd that is pretty amazing.
1:13:12SPEAKERI am still kind of stumped that this works.
1:13:15SPEAKERAnd I actually am also a bit skeptical
1:13:18SPEAKERif it will work endlessly, but currently it looks good
1:13:21SPEAKERand I'm just going with it and happy that it is working.
1:13:26SPEAKER'Cause it has enabled me to work full-time on Octoprint
1:13:28SPEAKERand really concentrate fully on it.
1:13:30SPEAKERAnd even better than the employment situation
1:13:33SPEAKERthat I had before, because there I also had a bit,
1:13:35SPEAKERof course, the employer had some interest in Octoprint,
1:13:38SPEAKERsteering it in certain directions.
1:13:39SPEAKERAnd while I was still fully in control, of course,
1:13:42SPEAKERI had to always juggle a bit with regards
1:13:44SPEAKERto what to spend my time on.
1:13:46SPEAKERAnd so now I simply concentrate on the things
1:13:49SPEAKERthat I think will bring the most value
1:13:52SPEAKERto the community in one way or the other.
1:13:54SPEAKERSo currently, for example, the biggest next task
1:13:57SPEAKERis actually something that only on second look
1:14:01SPEAKERwill bring value to the community.
1:14:03SPEAKERBecause the thing is that, yeah, this year so far
1:14:05SPEAKERhas been very, very intense for some reason.
1:14:07SPEAKERI think, so the pandemic brought in a ton of more users
1:14:11SPEAKERbecause everyone was buying printers to print PPE
1:14:15SPEAKERand then keeping the printers
1:14:17SPEAKERand continuing to print stuff.
1:14:18SPEAKERSo the last, let's say three years have been
1:14:22SPEAKEReven more stressful and even more work intense as before.
1:14:24SPEAKERAnd it's now come to a point where I'm noticing
1:14:26SPEAKERthat the project as it is needs to change in that way
1:14:31SPEAKERthat I need to make it sustainable for me again
1:14:33SPEAKERand for reasons of my own mental health.
1:14:35SPEAKERSo the current idea is, or the current push
1:14:38SPEAKERis towards better documentation, better contributor help.
1:14:41SPEAKERBecause the thing is that even 10 years in
1:14:44SPEAKERor almost 10 years in,
1:14:46SPEAKERmost of the code is still only written by me.
1:14:49SPEAKERSo recently, so over the last couple of releases
1:14:52SPEAKERthat has gotten a bit better
1:14:53SPEAKERand I'm actually seeing a lot of pull requests now
1:14:56SPEAKERthat I didn't have to take care of and such,
1:14:58SPEAKERbut it's still mostly a one woman show
1:15:01SPEAKERand that only scales so much.
1:15:03SPEAKERSo the goal now is to really try to open this up more,
1:15:07SPEAKERmake it more accessible, get a ton of that stuff
1:15:10SPEAKERthat currently only lives in my head
1:15:11SPEAKERabout knowledge of the system,
1:15:13SPEAKERknowledge about the G-code communication stack,
1:15:16SPEAKERknowledge about various firmware quirks and stuff,
1:15:19SPEAKERall of this somehow documented.
1:15:21SPEAKERAnd this is like a behemoth of work,
1:15:24SPEAKERbut I think it will be worth it.
1:15:25SPEAKEREven though at first, I think the regular user of OctoPrint
1:15:29SPEAKERwill probably not immediately see that as a benefit,
1:15:31SPEAKERbut long-term, I think it definitely will be a benefit
1:15:34SPEAKERfor the project as a whole.
1:15:36SPEAKER- It seems like this is a turn
1:15:37SPEAKERthat most successful projects hit at some point,
1:15:39SPEAKERwhere they go from either one
1:15:41SPEAKERor a small number of contributors
1:15:43SPEAKERto realizing that they need to be building the infrastructure
1:15:47SPEAKERso that a lot more people can contribute.
1:15:49SPEAKERDo you have the sense that there are people waiting,
1:15:52SPEAKEReager, ready to go and start contributing code,
1:15:54SPEAKERmaking pull requests?
1:15:55SPEAKER- I talk very openly about situations like these.
1:15:59SPEAKERAlso, I have this monthly or semi-monthly devlog
1:16:02SPEAKERfor OctoPrint for my Patreons mostly,
1:16:04SPEAKERbut I also push the recordings public for everyone after,
1:16:07SPEAKERwhere I also talk about things like that.
1:16:09SPEAKERAnd whenever I mentioned that, I'm just feeling overwhelmed
1:16:12SPEAKERand that I need to look into somehow making all of this
1:16:16SPEAKERa bit more sustainable.
1:16:17SPEAKERAgain, I always get people like, how can I help?
1:16:20SPEAKERSo the will is there.
1:16:21SPEAKERThe problem is that right now,
1:16:23SPEAKERthe project is simply not in a state
1:16:24SPEAKERwhere I can just point someone somewhere and say go,
1:16:27SPEAKERbecause that will only generate even more work
1:16:30SPEAKERbecause then I have to teach them first.
1:16:32SPEAKERSo the idea is to get the teaching out upfront
1:16:34SPEAKERand then hopefully scale it that way.
1:16:38SPEAKERAnd in some way, I actually already did this
1:16:42SPEAKERwhen I created a plugin system back in 2015,
1:16:44SPEAKERbecause before that, whenever someone wanted a new feature
1:16:47SPEAKERin OctoPrint, they had to request it from me to build,
1:16:50SPEAKERand maybe they also build it themselves,
1:16:53SPEAKERbut then after I had to maintain it myself.
1:16:55SPEAKERAnd with the plugin system, I now have the situation
1:16:58SPEAKERthat when someone wants something that is not suitable
1:17:01SPEAKERfor the general public or not usable for the general public,
1:17:04SPEAKERbecause for example, it targets a very specific piece
1:17:07SPEAKERof hardware that additional hardware lights
1:17:10SPEAKERthat are attached to the Raspberry Pi
1:17:12SPEAKERor a very specific notification service
1:17:15SPEAKERor something like that.
1:17:16SPEAKERThat is not something that should go into core,
1:17:17SPEAKERbut now I can tell people, hey, just build it as a plugin.
1:17:20SPEAKERAnd then people can install it and use it.
1:17:23SPEAKERAnd that way I already have
1:17:25SPEAKERat least this maintenance overload spread over,
1:17:28SPEAKERI think something like 300,
1:17:31SPEAKERno, it's not 300 plugin authors,
1:17:34SPEAKERbut something like 300 plugins.
1:17:35SPEAKERI have to look that up,
1:17:36SPEAKERbut over a massive amount of shoulders.
1:17:39SPEAKERAnd the good thing is that people who write plugins
1:17:41SPEAKERand write many plugins and are really into writing plugins
1:17:44SPEAKERsooner rather than later,
1:17:45SPEAKERalso learn about the internals of OctoPrint
1:17:48SPEAKERand then also help here and there, there.
1:17:51SPEAKERAnd this is how I currently recruit contributors.
1:17:55SPEAKERAnd that has been very fruitful,
1:17:57SPEAKERbut it would be really nice, I think,
1:17:59SPEAKERto make it even easier to get a grasp of how stuff works,
1:18:03SPEAKERbecause it's still something where if you are interested
1:18:06SPEAKERinto getting into OctoPrint development right now,
1:18:08SPEAKERyou will have to do a lot of legwork
1:18:11SPEAKERbecause you will have to sit down and read through the code.
1:18:13SPEAKERI mean, I do my best in documenting it well
1:18:16SPEAKERand making it so that you can really read it
1:18:18SPEAKERand understand it,
1:18:19SPEAKERbut you still will need some while to navigate the code base
1:18:23SPEAKERto figure out which components will live where,
1:18:25SPEAKERwhat part talks to what and stuff like this.
1:18:28SPEAKERAnd these are things that are currently absolutely, yeah,
1:18:32SPEAKERliving inside my head and ready to be called there
1:18:35SPEAKEReven after four weeks of vacation, as I'm just noticing.
1:18:38SPEAKERBut it's something that not everyone obviously has,
1:18:42SPEAKERand it would be nice to just have some kind of documentation
1:18:45SPEAKERalso documenting the code structures,
1:18:47SPEAKERdocumenting the whole architecture, also design decisions,
1:18:50SPEAKERbecause often I get things
1:18:52SPEAKERwhere someone influenced something,
1:18:55SPEAKERbut in a way that will cause issues
1:18:57SPEAKERbecause they have no thought about this, this, this, this,
1:19:00SPEAKERand that, and things like that I think are way less likely
1:19:04SPEAKERto happen if you have more of a larger overview
1:19:07SPEAKERabout how everything fits together and clicks together.
1:19:10SPEAKER- Is your end goal to get to the point that you can say,
1:19:12SPEAKERhey, here's a list of tasks that need to be done
1:19:14SPEAKERand people can just grab them and do pull requests
1:19:16SPEAKERand get there? - That would be wonderful,
1:19:18SPEAKERyeah. - Okay.
1:19:19SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
1:19:19SPEAKER- Yeah, more people writing code
1:19:22SPEAKERmeans it's better for everybody, right?
1:19:23SPEAKER- I mean, it's not only writing code,
1:19:25SPEAKERit would also be nice having help in writing documentation,
1:19:27SPEAKERimproving documentation and such,
1:19:29SPEAKERbut for that you also have to first, of course,
1:19:31SPEAKERget an entry way into the platform and all that.
1:19:35SPEAKERAnd that is something where I found the project
1:19:37SPEAKERto be severely lacking at the moment because it's just,
1:19:41SPEAKERI mean, you find a lot of very beginner-friendly things,
1:19:43SPEAKERlike how do you install OctoPrint?
1:19:45SPEAKERHow do you install plugins into it and things?
1:19:48SPEAKERI also have a plugin tutorial which covers the basics
1:19:51SPEAKERon how to get up running and also points you
1:19:53SPEAKERto various spaces where you can go to try more.
1:19:56SPEAKERAnd then of course, there's also a whole bunch of plugins
1:19:58SPEAKERthat you can just look at and figure out
1:20:00SPEAKERhow they did certain things,
1:20:03SPEAKERbut that will only get you so far.
1:20:05SPEAKERAnd I have a certain quality expectation
1:20:10SPEAKERwhen it comes to the code of OctoPrint
1:20:12SPEAKERin order to be able to,
1:20:15SPEAKERor in order to enable contributors to meet that,
1:20:18SPEAKERI think I have to do some more legwork
1:20:19SPEAKERin order to give them the information
1:20:22SPEAKERand the background that they need to know what is what
1:20:26SPEAKERand why things should be done in a certain way
1:20:29SPEAKERand not others, and yeah.
1:20:31SPEAKER- Well, then there's infrastructure
1:20:32SPEAKERand stuff like code reviews and all.
1:20:33SPEAKERThere's a ton that goes into the post work
1:20:35SPEAKERonce people do the contributions as well,
1:20:37SPEAKERwhich I think a lot of people who use open source projects
1:20:39SPEAKERmaybe don't exactly understand.
1:20:41SPEAKER- Yeah, the pull requests are always a bit
1:20:44SPEAKERof a mixed bag in that regard.
1:20:45SPEAKERSo thankfully, often it's a case of you look at the code
1:20:49SPEAKERand it looks fine and you just merge it and say thank you
1:20:51SPEAKERand hooray, another bug solved
1:20:54SPEAKERand another small improvement made, everything is fine.
1:20:57SPEAKERBut often it's also a case, for example,
1:20:59SPEAKERyesterday I found myself in a situation,
1:21:01SPEAKERor was it the day before yesterday, it's all a blur,
1:21:03SPEAKERwhere I was reviewing a pull request that someone had sent
1:21:07SPEAKERand I was really struggling to describe
1:21:11SPEAKERthe downside of the current design
1:21:13SPEAKERand why another design would be better.
1:21:14SPEAKERAnd it took me something like an hour or so
1:21:16SPEAKERto somehow put my thoughts on paper, so to speak,
1:21:20SPEAKERand communicate it to them.
1:21:21SPEAKERAnd I'm still not sure if I did this correctly
1:21:23SPEAKERbecause I haven't heard back yet,
1:21:25SPEAKERbut it would have taken me five minutes to do it myself.
1:21:28SPEAKERBut these five minutes, I mean,
1:21:30SPEAKERif I always take these five minutes and do it myself,
1:21:32SPEAKERthat doesn't educate anyone,
1:21:35SPEAKERthat doesn't teach the others how to do this properly.
1:21:37SPEAKERSo taking this time to teach and to explain
1:21:41SPEAKERand to motivate and maybe also to just walk them
1:21:45SPEAKERthrough my own thoughts and my approach to solution,
1:21:49SPEAKERdiscovery and all that, that pays off,
1:21:53SPEAKERbut it costs a lot of time.
1:21:55SPEAKERSo what I never understand is really how projects like,
1:22:00SPEAKERfor example, Home Assistant that gets swamped
1:22:03SPEAKERin pull requests, how they do that,
1:22:05SPEAKERbecause all of this stuff has to be reviewed.
1:22:07SPEAKERAll of this stuff has to be coached.
1:22:08SPEAKERAnd I'm certainly not at a point yet
1:22:10SPEAKERwhere I would be able to handle
1:22:14SPEAKERthat amount of pull requests, for example.
1:22:16SPEAKERAs wonderful as it is to get
1:22:18SPEAKERthese many community contributions,
1:22:20SPEAKERthey always also cost time to handle
1:22:24SPEAKERand that is something that I think would be lovely
1:22:27SPEAKERif more people also understood
1:22:28SPEAKERthat if the pull request sits around a while,
1:22:31SPEAKERthat doesn't mean I'm not interested in it
1:22:33SPEAKERor that I don't like it or I'm simply too chicken
1:22:37SPEAKERto tell them, but it might just be a simple resource problem.
1:22:41SPEAKER- When we had Paulis on the show,
1:22:42SPEAKERI think he said they have 16 people
1:22:45SPEAKERwho are working in different aspects of Home Assistant, so.
1:22:47SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, we are in contact as well.
1:22:50SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:22:51SPEAKER- If you have amount of people that,
1:22:53SPEAKERI now also have some people who helped me
1:22:54SPEAKERwith reviewing and stuff, but still the,
1:22:57SPEAKERdue to the lack of knowledge transfer from the past,
1:23:00SPEAKERI still am stuck on a lot of stuff that I have to do myself.
1:23:04SPEAKER- So you're based in Germany and a good number
1:23:06SPEAKERof the maintainers and open source developers
1:23:08SPEAKERthat we've talked to are based in various parts of Europe.
1:23:11SPEAKERDo you feel like Europe is maybe a better
1:23:13SPEAKERand more supportive environment for people
1:23:15SPEAKERto do open source work full-time?
1:23:18SPEAKER- Maybe full-time because we have this healthcare thing
1:23:20SPEAKERthat is better implemented.
1:23:23SPEAKER- That's what I was hoping you would say.
1:23:24SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying that our approach
1:23:27SPEAKERto healthcare is perfect.
1:23:28SPEAKERIn fact, I could rent probably for another hour or so
1:23:32SPEAKERabout everything that is wrong
1:23:34SPEAKERwith the German approach to healthcare,
1:23:37SPEAKERbut at least I do not have to worry
1:23:39SPEAKERabout developing a toothache or breaking my hand
1:23:42SPEAKERor something, I mean, I still would worry
1:23:44SPEAKERabout breaking my hand, but I wouldn't worry
1:23:46SPEAKERabout the invoice from the hospital or something like that,
1:23:50SPEAKERbut rather about when will I be able to work again?
1:23:52SPEAKERCan I ever go climbing again or something like that?
1:23:56SPEAKERSo I think that might be a factor, but I don't know.
1:24:01SPEAKERI also see a lot of, at least from the plugin maintainers,
1:24:04SPEAKERa bunch of them are from the US,
1:24:07SPEAKERbut as you said, none of them full-time.
1:24:09SPEAKERSo yeah, maybe that is indeed the thing.
1:24:12SPEAKER- It also seemed like at least in the past,
1:24:15SPEAKERmaybe like in primary schools and early education,
1:24:19SPEAKERyou all did a better job teaching kids how to program,
1:24:22SPEAKERit seems like, than we did here.
1:24:23SPEAKERI know you were self-taught, but-
1:24:25SPEAKER- I wouldn't say that about my school, I have to say.
1:24:27SPEAKER- Okay, okay, it's mostly the Norwegians, I think.
1:24:31SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, the Scandinavian side of things
1:24:33SPEAKERis regarding education, the education system is top notch,
1:24:37SPEAKERso that is pretty damn amazing what they are doing there.
1:24:40SPEAKER(upbeat music)
1:24:44SPEAKER- Thanks again to Gina for coming by and chatting with us.
1:24:46SPEAKERThis has been fascinating.
1:24:46SPEAKERI've been using OctoPrint since almost the beginning.
1:24:49SPEAKERWe used it on some of the early MakerBots
1:24:52SPEAKERthat we used at the Tested Office
1:24:53SPEAKERfor the Print the Mystery.
1:24:55SPEAKERWe did a series of videos where we printed a new object
1:24:57SPEAKERevery week-ish for five years, I think, four and a half years
1:25:01SPEAKERand it was literally the reason I gave to the people
1:25:05SPEAKERin charge of money, I was like,
1:25:06SPEAKER"Hey, we need to buy a 3D printer."
1:25:08SPEAKERThey were like, "Well, if you're only getting one video out
1:25:09SPEAKER"of I'm not spending $1,000," and I was like,
1:25:11SPEAKER"What if we did a video every week with it?"
1:25:13SPEAKERThey were like, "Yes, that's what we're looking for."
1:25:16SPEAKER- Now that's ROI.
1:25:17SPEAKER- Yeah, and then it ended up being an enormous boondoggle
1:25:20SPEAKERthat took hours and hours and hours every week
1:25:22SPEAKERfor a four-minute video that 50,000 people watched.
1:25:25SPEAKER- Well, hey, I got that little headphone hook out of it
1:25:28SPEAKERfrom you, so totally worth it.
1:25:30SPEAKER- Oh, that's true, I printed you a headphone hook, right?
1:25:32SPEAKER- Yes, and a tiny Super Meat Boy.
1:25:35SPEAKER- Yeah, I printed a tiny Joey Famelli, our producer.
1:25:37SPEAKER- That's amazing.
1:25:38SPEAKER- It sat on our dining room table for a really long time,
1:25:40SPEAKERbut if you'd like to know more about OctoPrint,
1:25:42SPEAKERyou can find out more at octoprint.org.
1:25:44SPEAKERIt runs on a bunch of pies.
1:25:46SPEAKERI've run it on, Gina said not to run it on low end,
1:25:49SPEAKERon old pies now, but a pie three will run it fantastic,
1:25:52SPEAKERis my understanding, and when I get a new 3D printer,
1:25:55SPEAKERI'm gonna plug it back up, and I kinda got the hankering
1:25:59SPEAKERfor 3D printer as a result of talking to Gina about this.
1:26:02SPEAKER- Yeah, I could see it.
1:26:03SPEAKERAlso, listen to Gina.
1:26:04SPEAKERDon't use a substandard power supply with your Raspberry Pi.
1:26:07SPEAKER- Yeah, never. - Just don't.
1:26:08SPEAKER- Never.
1:26:09SPEAKERIt was also fascinating to talk to somebody
1:26:11SPEAKERwho's at this stage of their open-source journey,
1:26:14SPEAKERwhere she's now into the place where she's doing the work
1:26:17SPEAKERto expand the audience for contributors to the project.
1:26:21SPEAKER- I think, I wanna say, I'm thinking back,
1:26:23SPEAKERI think she's the first maintainer we've heard
1:26:26SPEAKERessentially say that they're still writing
1:26:28SPEAKERbasically all the code themselves.
1:26:30SPEAKER- Yeah, everybody else we've talked to
1:26:31SPEAKERhas gone through this trial.
1:26:36SPEAKERFrom talking to different people over the last six months
1:26:38SPEAKERsince we started doing the show,
1:26:39SPEAKERit seems like everybody reaches a point
1:26:42SPEAKERwhere they're like, okay, I have to do some work
1:26:43SPEAKERso that other people can do the work
1:26:45SPEAKERand help me do the work.
1:26:47SPEAKERAnd like Paula said, Home Assistant did this long ago.
1:26:51SPEAKERWith Gina, it seems like she's just reaching that point
1:26:53SPEAKERand I'm excited to see how it goes for her
1:26:55SPEAKERand I'm sure she would love contributors soon, so.
1:26:59SPEAKERI guess that'll do it for us this week.
1:27:01SPEAKERThis episode of the FOSSPOD, as always,
1:27:03SPEAKERis brought to you by Google Open Source.
1:27:05SPEAKERThey bring all the value of open source to Google
1:27:07SPEAKERand all the resources of Google to open source.
1:27:11SPEAKERMatt Purdy produced this episode and Sabrina Hill edited it.
1:27:14SPEAKERWe'll be back in two weeks
1:27:16SPEAKERwith another episode of the FOSSPOD.
1:27:18SPEAKERI don't know about you, Brad,
1:27:19SPEAKERbut I'm feeling a little samba in my life.
1:27:21SPEAKER- Samba, really?
1:27:25SPEAKER- Samba.
1:27:26SPEAKER- People can't see you dancing in this video call.
1:27:29SPEAKER- Oh, this is awkward.
1:27:30SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't know.
1:27:31SPEAKERYeah, dude, I've been spending a lot of time
1:27:33SPEAKERin smb.conf recently, so.
1:27:36SPEAKERThe next episode, well-timed for me.
1:27:39SPEAKERSee y'all then.
1:27:41SPEAKER(upbeat music)
1:27:46SPEAKERWell, that was a fabulous interview.
1:27:47SPEAKERWhat lovely and intelligent people, too much?
1:27:52SPEAKER- If we do say so ourselves.
1:27:54SPEAKER- Yes, oh, I thought you did an excellent job, Brad.
1:27:57SPEAKER- Well, thank you, same to you.
1:27:58SPEAKERWe're just the best.
1:27:59SPEAKER- We really do kick ass, modest.
1:28:02SPEAKERI realized that the,
1:28:03SPEAKERas I was looking at the FOSSPOD page
1:28:05SPEAKERfor the first time in a while,
1:28:06SPEAKERI realized that the joke description of the show
1:28:08SPEAKERthat I typed in and never changed is still there.
1:28:11SPEAKER- Oh, these. - Which is,
1:28:12SPEAKERfrom the creative geniuses
1:28:13SPEAKERbehind "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod."
1:28:15SPEAKER- It was, that was an extremely considered
1:28:17SPEAKERtongue-in-cheek kind of thing.
1:28:19SPEAKER- Yeah, last minute.
1:28:20SPEAKERI hope people get that joke,
1:28:21SPEAKER'cause otherwise we just sound like incredible assholes.
1:28:23SPEAKER- They have to, right?
1:28:25SPEAKER- I would hope so.
1:28:26SPEAKERBut nobody would say that earnestly, right?
1:28:29SPEAKER- Oh, no, that is,
1:28:31SPEAKERpeople absolutely would say that earnestly.
1:28:33SPEAKERI would hope not about a podcast.
1:28:35SPEAKERBut anyway, speaking of people
1:28:38SPEAKERwho aren't incredible assholes
1:28:39SPEAKERand are actually really delightful, wonderful people,
1:28:41SPEAKERthis is the part of the show where we thank our patrons.
1:28:43SPEAKER- Thank you, patrons.
1:28:44SPEAKER- Thank you, patrons.
1:28:46SPEAKERAs always, if you would like to find out
1:28:48SPEAKERhow you can support "Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod,"
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1:28:56SPEAKERFor as little as two bucks a month,
1:28:57SPEAKERyou can get access to the fabulous Tech Pod Discord,
1:29:00SPEAKERwhere there's a bunch of beautiful nerds
1:29:01SPEAKERwho talk about things that are almost certainly
1:29:04SPEAKERgonna be of interest to you
1:29:05SPEAKERif you've made it this far into this podcast,
1:29:07SPEAKERincluding 3D printing and Linux
1:29:09SPEAKERand running things on Raspberry Pis and--
1:29:12SPEAKER- I missed a conversation in the Linux channel today
1:29:14SPEAKERabout shell customization,
1:29:16SPEAKERpeople sharing their aliases.
1:29:18SPEAKER- Look, I'm gonna tell you a secret
1:29:20SPEAKERabout being the person who's one of the two people
1:29:22SPEAKERwhose name is on the podcast,
1:29:24SPEAKERis that when you go into the channel
1:29:25SPEAKERand you dredge up a four-hour-old conversation--
1:29:28SPEAKER- Oh, I know, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:29:29SPEAKER- No one's gonna complain.
1:29:30SPEAKER- I know.
1:29:31SPEAKER- With great power, great responsibility, yada yada.
1:29:34SPEAKERThis is the part of the show where we thank our patrons.
1:29:36SPEAKERSo, as always, a very special thank you
1:29:39SPEAKERgoes out to our executive producer tier patrons,
1:29:41SPEAKERincluding Paddle Creek Games, makers of Fractured Veil,
1:29:44SPEAKERAndrew Slosky, Do The Bunny Crime, Serve The Bunny Time.
1:29:49SPEAKERThis is getting a little intense now.
1:29:51SPEAKER- Lyrical.
1:29:52SPEAKER- Wedge, Joel Krauska, Twinkle Twinkie, and James Kamik.
1:29:56SPEAKERThank you all so, so much.
1:29:57SPEAKERWe appreciate you all.
1:29:58SPEAKER- Yes, we do.
1:29:59SPEAKER- And I guess that will do it for us this week.
1:30:02SPEAKERI hope everybody has a lovely, lovely, lovely week,
1:30:05SPEAKERand we'll be back next week with another fresh episode
1:30:09SPEAKERof Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
1:30:11SPEAKERSee you all next week.