Building Universal Peachy Printer Software

[Aztecphoenix]

Why is the peachy software so demanding? I would have thought that something that originally could have run from an MP3 player would be far less hardware intensive, what is it exactly that requires so much PC power?

also, is there any way you can get this to run on Windows XP?

[rylangrayston]

Why is the peachy software so demanding? I would have thought that something that originally could have run from an MP3 player would be far less hardware intensive, what is it exactly that requires so much PC power?

also, is there any way you can get this to run on Windows XP?

our minimum specs for running the peachy software are a bit misleading... we dont actually know how it preforms on older machines.
What we do know is that we only have one dedicated software guy right now and we cant expect him to keep up with testing and maintaining lots of older machines and older OS's.
Currently we are attempting to test and maintain for about 6 different machines. We dont want to spread James any thinner than he already is. Its already mind bogleing to see what is on his plate on a daily basis and his todo list contains about a years worth of work right now. So for now we have to leave it to the community and the source code to do more.

Still the question as to what the peachy printer software is doing that is demanding is a great one... this will be a fun brain exercise for me seeing as I didn write a line of code on the latest version of the software....

There is alot more going on under the hood then there was back in the days that we used wav files. alto thinking way back to my first "blender modle --> wav file" scrip
it some times took 45 min to generate a massive wav file that was then used to print later on.

Now we read and execute GCode on the fly. So when a Gcode asks the laser to go from A to B we create a list of all the thousands of points between A and B.
Next we take those each of those points and apply calibration, So for every point along the way our software dose the math to calculate a correlating calibrated position on the fly in a space that is 18x18 bits, and then we take that calibrated spot and calculate the angle that the mirror needs to point to hit it at the given height. We also send data about the lasers state( on off/ power level) about 1000 times per second.

Another newer computation is the openGL UI with the ability to display an animated view of the print on your screen in 3d( a work in progress). Im not saying that all this wont run on some older machines, but trying to support older machines out of box could be more work than all the new features we plan to write this year.

As for your XP machine, might I suggest a custom live boot of Ubuntu ? and then run from source...
If someone wants to work on a custom live boot that could do this, I have a few hundred USB sticks I could be loading it onto and sending it out to those in need.

Thanks for the Great questons Aztecphoenix ... so great infact I think I will quote you in our FAQ, so that this is easy to find.
http://peachyprinter.ipbhost.com/ind...lder-computer/

[oninoshiko]

While i'm unfortunately not a KS backer, but MUCH later, I do have a teensy 3.2 I'm using for a project (one I plan on using the peechy for prototyping mechanics for!). If we want to try and run it on something like that, I'd be willing to give it a go and do testing.

Unrelated question: For those of us who bought using the backerkit store-front post-KS, when can we expect to start seeing shipments? I realize we're behind the backers, but I'm really looking forward to having the peachy! If we start seeing them around the time the last of the backers get theirs, I should be getting ready to prototype the PCBs for my project (I just got most of the stuff talking on my breadboard prototype!). Suffice it to say, I'm really excited!

[Aztecphoenix]

[QUOTE=rylangrayston;79287]
If someone wants to work on a custom live boot that could do this, I have a few hundred USB sticks I could be loading it onto and sending it out to those in need.
[QUOTE]

Please someone I'm still learning Linux and have no idea how to make a live boot and I think it would be cool to have a quick start system to start printing immediately after assembly.

a cool idea for an upgraded future controller board would be to have built in flash memory with a live boot of Linux and the peachy software pre-loaded that could make the PeachyPrinter fully Plug-and-Play (that is assuming it is even possible)