Help bring Forge-X / Feather to AD5X and Creator 5

[DrA1ex]

I’ve been thinking about bringing Forge-X and Feather to more printers, and I’d like to see whether the community is interested enough to make that realistic.

The first candidates are:

• FlashForge AD5X
• FlashForge Creator 5 / Creator 5 Pro

Feather itself is fairly portable, but proper support still requires having the actual printer available for development, testing, debugging, and dealing with all the hardware-specific details.

So the first step is simple: I need access to the printers.

Hardware funding

If there’s enough interest, I’d like to organize community funding to purchase an AD5X and/or Creator 5 specifically for Forge-X development.

Getting the printer would be enough for me to start investigating and working on the port.

However, I also want to be transparent about the amount of work involved.

Forge-X 1.4.2 alone has already taken me around 250 hours of development. Supporting a completely new printer is likely to mean another 2–3 months of focused work, possibly more, depending on the platform.

Because of that, hardware funding and development support are really two separate things:

• Hardware funding makes the port possible to start.
• Ongoing support determines how much time I can realistically dedicate to it and how quickly it can progress.

I currently have some free time between work projects, which is why I’ve been able to spend so much time on Forge-X recently. But that won’t last forever, and I can’t realistically put hundreds of hours into each new printer indefinitely without some level of community support.

This doesn’t need to be anything huge. Even around 100 people supporting development with $5+ per month would make a few months of focused work much more realistic.

There are no guarantees about exact timelines or compatibility before I have the hardware and can properly investigate it, but I’m definitely interested in doing this if the community wants it too.

Interest polls

FlashForge AD5X:
https://strawpoll.com/e6Z2A1G08gN

FlashForge Creator 5 (Pro):
https://strawpoll.com/Dwyo3Oxz0yA

Forge-X development support:
https://strawpoll.com/kjn1D1P0LyQ

Please vote and share these polls with anyone who might be interested. A large part of the potential user base probably won’t see this discussion directly.

For now I mainly want to understand the real level of interest. If there’s enough support, we can organize the hardware funding from there.

[ToddRAllen]

If Forge-X existed for the Creator 5 Pro I would buy one and would gladly pay an extra 5% of the printer's cost for Forge-X. But without Forge-X I have zero interest in the printer. It is a shame 3d printer companies do not respect the licenses of the open source software that make their products possible.