A New Slicer

[skalnik]

Not sure what we should move to, but Makerbot has seemingly abandoned Miracle Grue. They're continuing to work on some slicer (which seems to be Grue based), but not continuing to open source it. Since the last version of Miracle Grue is not that great, I think we should move to a new slicer, but I'm not sure of all the options out there.

• Skeinforge is a well known one, but quite slow, and not officially on GitHub. Makerbot's version seems to be up to date-ish, but I don't know if we want to rely on that.
• Slic3r is under active development, speedier than Skeinforge, and supports multiple printers well (my main concerns are the Replicator & Ultimaker).
• Cura/CuraEngine seems to be fast (from seeing others use Cura), and could be a good option.

Curious if anyone else has thoughts on this or any other suggestions of slicers to try out.

[eweinhoffer]

I can't recommend Cura enough. They recently released an update that's even more speedy than before..it will now slice automatically after making modifications to the part, and does it really quickly too. Ultimaker recently announced a dual extruder kit, which will be released soon. Cura already supports two-color printing (and will support two-material printing soon).

The developer seems open to suggestions and is active online at the Ultimaker forums -- check out his recent discussion on support material generation: http://umforum.ultimaker.com/index.php?/topic/2611-new-support-material-method/

[erinzm]

No problems with Slic3r + Replicators, see this wiki page. I believe that it works on Rep2s as well. If not, you could use ReplicatorG to get GCode, and then use the start + end from RepG on Slic3r.

And NO skeinforge. I don't been to be offensive to anyone, but it's REALLY slow, and was last updated in 2014.

It would be cool to get this project going again!