rapman-education's posterous

rapman-education's posterous

Dave White  //  A place for educators, teachers, lecturers and students to find "stuff" about RapMan,BfB3000 and BfB 3DTouch printers... The unofficial Blog by Dave White, Advanced Skills Teacher and Head of D&T in Clevedon School UK.

Mar 6 / 10:06pm

Axon 2 ... Full version released

(download)

5th March saw the release of the full (non beta) version of Axon 2 ... The 3DS BfB software for converting .stl files into the gcode that drives RapMan, 3DTouch and BfB 3000 3D printers.

The interface will look very familiar to users of the previous versions but Andrew at BfB has done a lot of tweaks and tidying up.

There are loads of changes... Far to many to list them all here... Some of the nice ones are.

Drag and drop files into the program.

Objects that are moved too far on the print bed show up as "out of bounds" and lines are displayed on the bed to show the limits of the extruders (this matches the number of extruders installed on the machine.

Tidy materials editor including materials cost... An estimate of the printed object cost is shown after generating the gcode.

Warning if trying to exit without saving the gcode.

Bug fixes ..many of these.. Such as the object now moves in the correct direction when moved on the print bed. And changing a material profile no longer needs a restart of the program.... And more.

"thin wall" settings removed as skeinforge (the engine that drives Axon in the background) handles these better.

A revert to default button... Fantastic when after tinkering with the settings has gone horribly wrong... Must have happened to us all at some time or other.

And one of my favourites ... Right click switches from 3D view to a 2D top view (great for moving the object around on the print bed and checking layers of the gcode.

A huge thank you to Andrew at 3DS BfB as many of these improvements have come about because of constructive feedback from users... And I'm really pleased to see that a few of my suggestions have been implemented.

So all in all Axon 2 is looking and working very well and as always produces excellent results straight out of the box... Great for students and teachers alike.

Oh and watch out for the new icon... It took me ages to find it on the far too cluttered desktop on my battered old laptop!