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Robo3D may be out of the consumer market

Discussion in 'Off Topic' started by WheresWaldo, May 23, 2019.

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  1. sgomes

    sgomes Active Member

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    The pretty design and marketing were pretty much the only distinguishing factors for the R2/C2 series (I hear the R1 was a better machine at the time).

    They're decent enough machines if you modify them enough, but they were marketed as out of the box ready for noobs. And they were not. Faulty beds with faulty connections, poorly packaged printers that broke themselves on transport, ridiculously noisy power supplies... At least for the initial batches there were large numbers of duds, including as mentioned some sent to YouTube reviewers (multiple times).

    And even today, the machines require mods to have proper cooling, both hotend and part. Stock machines clog with e.g. ColorFabb PLA/PHA because of the tiny, incorrectly mounted hotend cooling fan they ship with, and the part cooling fans need to be modded to actually point at the part.

    And software wise it's even worse. Ridiculous changes to firmware that add broken versions of already existing functionality, an OS that's a collection of stuff they threw at the wall until part of it stuck, and RoboLCD code that's unsalvageable and of dubious reusability anyway because of licensing issues.

    I'm not surprised they're going out of business, as their product had a lot of flaws that they never truly fixed, even though the community repeatedly asked them to and offered advice on how to do it. It sucks for us as owners, but we can always mod the machines with better, industry standard parts as things stop working. That will make them better, anyway.

    At least the mechanics and assembly seem to be pretty sturdy for the most part!
     
    #21 sgomes, Jun 3, 2019
    Last edited: Jun 3, 2019
  2. WheresWaldo

    WheresWaldo Volunteer ( ͠° ͟ʖ ͡°)
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    Relatively good machine, horrendous after sales service and support, poor software choices and needless firmware modifications are all part of the story. As a printer, I actually like my R2 better than the R1.

    There is some good news for R2 / C2 owners, there is a small group working on replicating the functionality of just the LCD part of RoboOS. Basically a complete rewrite of the code to make it a standalone application and then a complete update of the underlying operating environment to use all the latest functional parts of an OctoPrint server and RoboOS. There won't be any of the now unsupported and unmaintained Robo forced plugins. All the plugins are from the original author's latest code bases. All the Robo created plugins that phone home removed, especially important since there is no one listening at the other end. I would hope that we could have a test version out before Robo eventually shuts down this forum.

    Right now the underpinnings are complete. We have a complete OctoPrint setup with all the necessary parts in place with an alternative user interface until we have a UI that mimics the look and feel of RoboLCD. It does control the printer and prints fine but no wizards, so basically we made the printer a bit dumber but more like any of the other printers on the market that use a dedicated graphical LCD screen (not the simple Marlin smart controller screen).
     
    #22 WheresWaldo, Jun 3, 2019
    TransBat likes this.
  3. BrooklynBay

    BrooklynBay Active Member

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    Will the stand alone controller be compatible with the R1?
     
    #23 BrooklynBay, Jun 3, 2019
  4. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    Yes, yes it will...

    It will have configurable printer settings in the the properties file.
    The plan is to test it with settings for the ones we can anticipate (C2 LCD, R2 screen sizes and some other more generic ones for the 3.5-7 or 10 inch ranges). I would like for the UI to scale consistently across them.
     
    #24 mark tomlinson, Jun 3, 2019
    Last edited: Jun 3, 2019
  5. WheresWaldo

    WheresWaldo Volunteer ( ͠° ͟ʖ ͡°)
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    @BrooklynBay if you are interested in testing the underlying server on your R1 then you can download the image from here, https://github.com/WheresWaldo/CommunityOS/releases/tag/0.6.85-beta

    I am pretty sure we will start a new thread specific to this Raspberry Pi image. You can pick either the C2 or R2 image, it doesn't matter if you are going to use it on the R1. Just so you know, it isn't quite Plug and Play, there are a few things you have to do first before loading, @tkoco is going to be writing documentation, but in the meantime just start a thread in the R1 section and we can help walk you through setting it up. The setup isn't bad, you just have to edit 2 text files before the first boot, just as you would for any rPi image. Please note that this is a beta and not a real release version.
     
    #25 WheresWaldo, Jun 3, 2019
  6. BrooklynBay

    BrooklynBay Active Member

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    Is there a hardware kit available with the screen, Raspberry Pi, case, cables, software, etc or a parts list of what is required?
     
    #26 BrooklynBay, Jun 3, 2019
  7. WheresWaldo

    WheresWaldo Volunteer ( ͠° ͟ʖ ͡°)
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    #27 WheresWaldo, Jun 3, 2019
  8. mark tomlinson

    mark tomlinson ༼ つ ◕_ ◕ ༽つ
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    Yes, in the R1 section there was a thread for this: http://community.robo3d.com/index.p...roller-modification-for-the-beta-r1-r1.17834/

    This new image would work with that exact same hardware.
    If you want to use the 5" LCD then a different case will be needed. Probably like the one I linked in the BarBot project.
     
    #28 mark tomlinson, Jun 3, 2019
  9. WheresWaldo

    WheresWaldo Volunteer ( ͠° ͟ʖ ͡°)
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    #29 WheresWaldo, Jun 4, 2019
    TransBat and MChrisP1 like this.
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