This week Jonathan Bennett and Katherine Druckman sit down with Gina Häußge to talk OctoPrint! It’s one of our favorite ways to babysit our 3D printers, and the project has come a long way in the last 12 years! It’s a labor of love, primarily led by Gina, who has managed to turn it into a full time job. Listen in to hear that story and more, including how to run an Open Source project without losing your sanity, why plugins are great, and how to avoid adding a special services employee as a co-maintainer!
– https://octoprint.org/blog/2020/07/29/automating-octoprints-release-tests/
– https://foosel.net
– https://octoprint.org
– https://chaos.social/@foosel
– https://octoprint.org/support-octoprint/
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right in the Hackaday Discord? Have someone you’d like use to interview? Let us know, or contact the guest and have them contact us! Next week we’re chatting with Andy Stewart about Linux and Ham Radio!
Direct Download in DRM-free MP3.
If you’d rather read along, here’s the transcript for this week’s episode.
Thanks for all your work Gina!
Hear hear! Octoprint has changed my relationship with my finicky little Monoprice that only takes one brand of (now corrupted) SD card, and has allowed me to print a lot more useful things without worry than I would have if I were still printing from that SD.
I honestly didn’t know that 3D printing could become a pleasurable experience, but Octoprint is just such a good little program.
And it’s helped out in unexpected ways: without Octoprint, I wouldn’t have plugged a USB camera into my NAS, wouldn’t have installed `mjpeg_streamer`, and wouldn’t have any easy way of monitoring the nine quail chicks in our basement when I’m upstairs! Thank you Gina for helping me keep my poultry healthy and safe :D
No thanks. Not after I discovered Moonraker/Mainsail/Fluidd years ago. Octoprint was way too bloated.
Thanks for letting me know. Now, what do you expect me to do with this kind of unspecific feedback? What is your goal here putting it underneath a podcast with me? Does it make you feel better? Do you think it helps anyone here? Do you expect me to stop working on OctoPrint and just delete it from the internet so you can feel great about killing a project with a similar goal than what you use?
Every single time that I make a public appearance in the maker community these days, there’s at least one of you people who feels like they have to tell everyone how crappy my work is and how much better the other options are. Use whatever works best for you, please, that’s all I ever wanted! But please – stop this stupid tribal war, it’s annoying not only to me but to the maintainers of at least some of the projects you mentioned above as well, which I know since we are in close contact.
I don’t appreciate the tone of the other blogger and can hardly imagine the time you invested. Still, I would consider using microdot instead of flask for your back end. You can then run it on the ESP32. I would also have a look at ERPNext and their backend and how your software integrates with a MES system. I also have my doubts on the profitability or your model. You give the community a lot of value. Do you get enough in return to innovate? Can you capture more customer lifetime value? Is the licensing model good… These are not simple questions but need reviewing every now and then with an open mind.
Cool episode, thanks
Octoprint fluffing rules, I’ve got two Docker instances of it on an RPi 4 in charge of two printers. They’re only half a printer without it.