Plater: a printer plates generator and optimizer

[Gregwar]

Hello everyone!


Today I'm introducing a brand new tool we're working on: Plater


This software is actually a plate builder and generator, it can be used to create printing plates quickly, and optimizing the place took by the parts on the plate.

You can give it a few STL files, with quantities and orientation, and some settings like your plate dimension and part spacing. It will then try to place your part and optimize so that it generates the least plates as possible, and output the plates in STL format.

You can also release the plater.conf file, a tiny text file that lists which stl should be printed for your design and the quantity of each, so the end users will be able to generate their own plates with their own settings.

It is open-source, and it uses somes parts of CuraEngine, you can find the sources here:
https://github.com/RobotsWar/Plater

We also released binaries which can be found in the official README of the repo, don't hesitate to leave feedbacks

[Yancy]

I'm sorry. This may sound like the dumbest question ever, but what is a "printing plate"?

[old man emu]

This appears to be software that carries out the task of "nesting".

Say, using the images below, that you want to print the four objects shown as single items, but you want multiple prints of each object, but not the same number of prints for every object. Say, too, that your print area is 200 x 200 (X & Y directions). What this software seems to do is analyse each object and the number of each required, then it examines various layouts until it finds the one that occupies the smallest area on your print area. Once this layout has been found, an stl fle is created that can be sent to your slicers for the Gcode to be generated.

This would be a useful bit of software to have if you were going to be printing multi-component objects.

Old Man Emu

[KDog]

Plating is very typically used in the RepRap world. If you want to replicate a printer then you want to optimize the number of times you have to print. The object is to try to get all the parts on one build platform or as few as possible. This software would be very useful for that if it cold do a better job than humans at puzzling this out. It's not just for printing other printers though. If you've ever printed out heart gears you will appreciate the last example:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4427 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:17392 http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:18144

[Gregwar]

Indeed, old man is right, Plater is dealing with nesting parts on a plate
The example of KDog involving stacked parts is interesting also, maybe it could be a Plater option

[Gregwar]

We've printed a spider robot with 22 parts in one parts that were placed automatically
(French post) http://www.robotcampus.fr/2014/05/27...ne-impression/