MakerBot MicroTip: Skeinforge Secrets, Hidden in Plain Sight
Hollow Calibration Cube by Starno
Yesterday, I had a conversation with MakerBot Operator Rift and MakerBot Mechanical Engineer Nick Starno in the BotCave about the Skeinforge tool “Jitter.” Rift had come to visit for a consultation about Skeinforge calibrations and Starno’s excellent Print-O-Matic SF Assistant1.
Rift had printed a couple of Tornadoes in his Thing-O-Matic using ABS and wanted to see if Jitter was the right tool to avoid seam that can appear on the sides of thin-walled geometries. (Jitter was designed to adjust where the z-height increments when completing a layer.) Starno and Rift considered the pane within Skeinforge for Jitter and found the option “Jitter over Perimeter Width (ratio).” How exactly does this tool function? Lacking sufficient details within Skeinforge, they jumped into experimentation, trying a range of values so that they could test results.
There have been a number of attempts to create wikis for various versions of Skeinforge, but most of these web resources are in such disarray that those who consult them leave more frustrated than informed. But there is a secret, hidden in plain sight — the best reference for most of the tools within Skeinforge are included as prose comments within the python scripts for the tools themselves. Even as ReplicatorG integrates assistants to help save users from Skeinforge gauntlet, taking a look at these comments can be helpful reading to get a sense of how these tools function and what are their interdependencies.
To read these comments, look inside your ReplicatorG folder for the “skein-engines” folder. Nested deep within the folder for the version of Skeinforge you want to learn about are the “craft_plugins” folders that contains the python scripts themselves.
Grab yourself a plaintext application2 and investigate those python scripts one at a time, with a special emphasis on Carve, Fill, and Speed. While in places the scripts (in active development) diverge a bit from the comments, these comments remain your best shot for reading full explanations for what each tool was created for and how to use it.
Take a look at this excerpt from the Jitter page, that was able to help Starno and Rift investigate this tool:
“Jitter Over Perimeter Width===Default is two. Defines the amount the loop ends will be jittered over the perimeter width. A high value means the loops will start all over the place and a low value means loops will start at roughly the same place on each layer.”
Now that is a huge improvement over the amount of information available in the Skeinforge Jitter tool pane!
- which is now being integrated into the beta for ReplicatorG 25 [↩]
- I recommend notepad++ for Windows and TextWrangler for Mac OS X [↩]
| Tagged with | calibration cube, microtip, plaintext, python, skeinforge | 4 comments |
4 Comments so far
eagleapex
“Lacking sufficient details within Skeinforge”
This is like 90% of my difficulties when printing. Why is this integral part of the tool chain such a mystery?
Dave Durant
Not sure how well it works with the repg-integrated skeinforge but an alternative is:
- click the ? at the bottom of the skienforge window to open a web browser to the docs
- click the link on the top/left that says “skeinforge_application”
- click “skeinforge_plugins (package)”
- click “craft_plugins (package)”
Much easier done than said – it only takes a second, once you know how. All the plug-ins we normally use are documented in there, to varying degrees of doneness..
jetguy
I’m thinking about actually making a page in the wiki with some straight up copy paste. I’m getting really tired of everything spread out in different places and the wiki needs to be a better resource for this.
This is the downfall of open source-nobody ever wants to document anything properly so that a user might have a chance at finding it.
Still, this was a great tip as I never thought to look there.
Rashad Glover
My Cube Sucks
Hope This Works!