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Grid: Free, local-first, browser-based 3D printing/CNC/laser slicer
- cyrusradfar 9mo agoSurprised this hasn't been shared here before. Built by my former colleague, Stewart Allen (Co-Founder/CTO of WebMethods, CTO of AddThis, Co-Founder/CPO of IonQ, et al.). What caught my attention: - 100% free, no subscriptions, no accounts, no cloud - Local-first: all slicing and toolpath generation runs on your machine - Works in any browser, even offline once loaded - Supports FDM/SLA, CNC milling, laser cutting, wire EDM - Fully open source: github.com/GridSpace/grid-apps Refreshing to see a tool that isn't trying to lock you into a subscription or harvest your data.
- downrightmike 9mo agoAny circuit designers? looking to hobby, but what I saw was all proprietary
- daemonologist 9mo agoYou mean like PCBs? KiCad is pretty popular.
- s0a 9mo agosecond KiCad. just had my first board printed a few months back. its an esp32 stackable daughterboard. first time doing anything like that outside of breadboarding, and it worked great.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- iamflimflam1 9mo agoCreating PCBs is surprisingly straightforward and there are a ton of good resources available. It’s probably one of the few area of YouTube that is actually still useful. Probably a high enough barrier to entry to stop most slop.
- IshKebab 9mo agoKiCAD has pretty awful UX though. I've tried all of the FOSS PCB design apps except LibrePCB (on my to-do list) and Horizon EDA is definitely the one I'd recommend (even though it also has a fair amount of UX oddities it's much better than KiCAD). DesignSpark PCB is also decent - only minor UX mistakes like warping the mouse when you zoom.
- contingencies 9mo agoKiCAD has pretty awful UX though It's not perfect but it's pretty damn good these days. By EE standards it's positively awesome. Single platform vendor toolchain hell is why people leave commercial software and move to KiCad, which runs everywhere, is open source, and has a plugin architecture plus mostly every feature you could ever need except high end simulation (which just needs time).
- amelius 9mo agoHas anyone tried EasyEDA? I hear people raving about it, but I don't know if it's because of the tight integration with LCSC, the availability of symbols and footprints, or if it's really that good.
- contingencies 9mo agoEasyEDA is basically a single-supply-chain web-SaaS alternative to open source multi-platform KiCad. Not a smart thing to invest time in. Furthermore, its design library is of worse than dubious quality. The vast majority of shared designs are probably non-functional to dangerous.
- amelius 9mo agoOk, but it is easy to drag and drop components from lcsc. Sounds like an enormous time saver. But you're probably right about the lock-in. Anyway, I'm waiting for AI that is smart enough to read a datasheet and convert it to a KiCad symbol and footprint. Should be around the corner.
- wolvoleo 9mo agoCan it be locally installed in docker or something? It's kinda a bummer when I need to do something and there's a connection problem or the server is down. Edit: looks like yes! https://github.com/GridSpace/grid-apps https://github.com/GridSpace/grid-apps I will try it then. In fact I had that only a month or 2 ago with fusion 360. Something in their cloud was down so I couldn't export to STL and i really needed that urgently.
- WillAdams 9mo ago(ob. discl., I work for a company which sells software in this space) I wrote up a bit on Carbide Create at: - https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing (note that there is a link to a free (as in beer) download for Windows or Mac OS at that link) - https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/toolpaths https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/toolpaths Other commercial programs which one licenses and installs and which don't intrude beyond that include: - MeshCAM https://www.grzsoftware.com/ https://www.grzsoftware.com/ - Alibre https://www.alibre.com/ https://www.alibre.com/ (note that there is a CAM option which is a re-badged MeshCAM) - Moment of Inspiration 3D https://moi3d.com/ https://moi3d.com/ (this is probably the next commercial package I try) and of course FreeCAD has a CAM Workbench which has seen great strides and Solvespace has a basic facility for G-code generation and some folks just program G-code/CAM directly --- I've been working on a tool for that myself: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
- reactordev 9mo agoNow if we can only get an offline printer…
- observationist 9mo agoElegoo printers can be offline - you can run everything from the machine itself, as long as you have your model/s on a thumb drive. Or is that not what you mean?
- reactordev 9mo agohttps://youtu.be/kS-9ISzMhBM https://youtu.be/kS-9ISzMhBM They’re trying to introduce legislation that would require 3D printers to be online so that if you try to print a firearm, it won’t let you… Granted, today, you can print offline. Tomorrow? A firmware update might just brick it the next time it goes online or won’t be able to read the grbl
- mikestorrent 9mo agoHow would it know what is a firearm and what isn't? Seems trivial to defeat for someone who knows CAD, no?
- reactordev 9mo agoThat’s the tricky part of this whole mess. Online servers would have to mesh and volume your model and determine if it matches a likeness of any known models. So much for printing NERF. I don’t think this will pass as is but it shows you where lawmakers heads are. They would rather brick your capability than do actual policing.
- Gigachad 9mo agoWhat gets me is this doesn’t even seem to be the most effective way to regulate this. 3D printed guns require a lot of non 3D printed gun parts. You can’t 3D print bullets for example. The is really just a US specific issue where 90% what you need for a gun can be purchased easily, but the non functional handle requires registration, etc. They could just make buying gun parts as strict as buying a whole gun
- SethTro 9mo agoI've used kiri:moto for several simple CNC projects! This probably won't scroll to the correct place on the page but there's some images of my project at https://hcc.haus/propmania/#2024-palm-torches https://hcc.haus/propmania/#2024-palm-torches and https://static.cloudygo.com/static/Prop%20Making/2024%20Palm%20Torch%20-%20Complete%20Blank.jpg https://static.cloudygo.com/static/Prop%20Making/2024%20Palm... I used it instead of the terrible closed source Easel App for a CARVEY hobby CNC. For metal milling I find Fusion 360 is necessary.
- cyrusradfar 9mo agoCurious if you can elaborate on what's missing or failing, to require Fusion 360?
- s0a 9mo agoprobably adaptive milling, which will be in an upcoming release. sharp path changes in harder metals can wear or break tools if you don't go slow, which has other issues.
- bsimpson 9mo agoMore open source, browser-accessible tools is a good thing. That said, aren't Prusa/Orca/etc. all already open-source (and part of the same lineage)?
- s0a 9mo agono shared lineage. Cura and Kiri started around the same time (2011/2012), but as completely separate projects. Cura is a C++ desktop app and Kiri has always been 100% browser-based (no cloud, all computation in the browser sandbox). the licenses are different, too. Cura/Prusa/Orca are GPL based and Kiri is MIT.
- WJW 9mo agoAm I weird in not being too surprised? It don't have experience with wire EDM but every toolpath generator or slicer I've ever used was just local software.
- pests 9mo agoBambu Labs ~recently had some drama around requiring an account / harvesting data for their machines. Might be what that's about.
- jacquesm 9mo agoBambu is great hardware but the software (and the firmware) is just terrible.
- steve_adams_86 9mo agoTruly. The slicer is able to generate bugs I've never seen before, in around 6 years of printing with several slicers and firmwares. Cura, Flashprint, Orca, Prusa, using Marlin, Sailfish, Klipper. None of them produced the weird stuff I find with Bambu's pipeline. When the bugs don't creep up it's absolutely incredible, though.
- jacquesm 9mo agoThe slicer even introduces bugs in things that were working perfectly in the software they ripped off. For the A1 and P1S you're better off backporting the profile to PrusaSlicer or Orca. And don't get me started on the network plug-in (the lack of transparency there makes me fairly suspicious that something is up) and the lack of directory structure support on the SD cards. Really, how could you mess it up.
- Aurornis 9mo ago> in the software they ripped off. It’s a fork of PrusaSlicer, which was a fork of Slic3r. There’s a fork of BambuStudio called OrcaSlicer now. They didn’t “rip off” an open source project, they forked it just as the parent project forked another project. This is how open source is supposed to work, isn’t it? Why are we shaming them for doing the thing we always encourage and then giving features back to the community which have gone into OrcaSlicer now?
- eseymour 9mo agoThis looks great. I was hoping it would have been a good OrcaSlicer replacement for my FDM printer, but unfortunately it didn't generate any top surfaces (except for the topmost one) for a model I imported in. I didn't know if it was the printer profile (Creality.Ender3) or something else, but it seems I'm still using OrcaSlicer for the time being.
- s0a 9mo agothis does look like a bug in the default Ender 3 profile. easily fixable.
- danfunk 9mo agoGreat tool for a Makerspace - really appreciate the ability to use the same tool for laser cutting, 3d printing, and CNC. These are big jumps for people typically - having a familiar tool would help people transition from one area to another.
- s0a 9mo agoMakerspaces and education are two areas of focus. no SW install, fully loads in under a second. through the Onshape integration and ability to run on Chromebooks, it's made its way into high school and university STEM curriculum.
- abdullahkhalids 9mo agoOT: Why is that Alphabet, Mozilla, Apple, etc can get together to create web standards that allow anyone to create software that works cross-platform - only a browser is needed, but Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Canonical, etc can't get together to create standards that allow anyone to create software that works cross-platform?
- chungy 9mo agoGiven you have two of the same names on both sides of the list, it looks like your question is self-contradictory. Could you clarify?
- cyrusradfar 9mo agoAh, I'm always up for a tangent. The boring answer from Capt. Obvious. Incentive alignment. That said, WebAssembly might be the trojan horse. While it started as a browser compile target, WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) is extending it beyond browsers into filesystem, networking, etc. etc. etc. Fingers crossed, we may get cross-platform standards by accident.
- auggierose 9mo agoYou answered the question yourself: There is already a standard that allows anyone to create software that works cross-platform: the browser.
- jacquesm 9mo agoThe browser is an extremely poor medium to deliver applications. It works, but barely, is a huge resource hog, fragile and it breaks way too often due to a lack of backwards compatibility between browser versions of the same manufacturer. I have a small app that I support and it's been fun to get it to work in the browser (instant cross platform support was indeed the driver) but the experience is still sub-par compared to what I could do on a local application.
- s0a 9mo agothis does not track with my experience, so possibly it's the nature of your app or the way it's coded. frameworks like react are notoriously crap. stick to pure html5/css/js and it can be extremely fast and light.
- FloatArtifact 9mo agoIt's a shame they don't have an actual application for a truly offline experience. If they had both, people could have their cake and eat it too.
- jacquesm 9mo agoIt says 'local first' doesn't that mean you can run it locally after downloading? That's how I set up pianojacq, just so there aren't going to be a lot of disappointed people that lose their practice logs if I get hit by bus #9.
- s0a 9mo agothere are desktop builds https://grid.space/downloads.html https://grid.space/downloads.html that run entirely offline. you can also use the center menu to "install" it as a progressive web app.
- the_fall 9mo agoPart of me wants to be wary. The useful life of industrial machinery such as CNC mills is much longer than the lifespan of websites, so locally-installed software you own is usually a better choice. But another part of me realizes that everyone is using Fusion360, despite the fact they have a history of taking away features to force people to migrate to paid tiers. So it probably doesn't matter.
- asveikau 9mo agoFor comparison, I was looking at slicer source lately. Slic3r and its popular forks (prusa slicer, Bambu, orca) are using C++ with wxWidgets and boost. Sometimes outdated versions of those libraries at that. But stuff that will work, and totally local.
- s0a 9mo agoof Kiri? it's in its 14th year. CAM was added in 2016, but the major work on that mode really kicked in around 2024.
- the_fall 9mo agoI have a CNC mill made in 2006. It's still perfectly fine. It should still be fine in 2036. The most significant threat to its existence is the compatibility of OS drivers and software support in CAM tools. That and USB ports getting replaced by something else, which was a problem for earlier-generation machines that used RS-232.
- gmueckl 9mo agoUSB to RS233 adapters should still work for those unless there are really weird timig requirememts.
- iamflimflam1 9mo agoWorst case - you could at some point rip out the brains and replace them. CNC machines are somewhat basic machines really.
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- zaps 9mo agoStop it with “free forever”. It never ever is.
- s0a 9mo agospend 30 seconds reading up first. fork it if you disagree.
- caditinpiscinam 9mo agoFor those wondering why having a browser based slicer is useful: teaching. The site mentions this, but I'll add my own experience that having good in-browser software like this is incredibly useful when you have a classroom full of students who a) aren't used to installing desktop software, b) are running a bunch of different operating systems (including chrome os), and c) have firewalls prevents them from installing local software anyway. I wouldn't want online tools to be come the default (like google docs) but having them as an options is great. (I find onshape and photopea useful in this way as well).
- rbbydotdev 9mo ago- 100% free, no subscriptions, no accounts, no cloud - Local-first: all slicing and toolpath generation runs on your machine - Works in any browser, even offline once loaded YES! I think a new type of open source is emerging centering around what is now possible in browsers. Browsers have a great track record when running legacy projects. Relying on a backend could be a liability for longevity. I built opal editor myself, a local first open source free markdown editor with these same principles, https://github.com/rbbydotdev/opal https://github.com/rbbydotdev/opal
- h4kunamata 9mo ago> Works in any browser, even offline once loaded That, my friend, is not how offline works. You will be required to have internet access in one way or another. Offline works 100% locally no matter if you have internet or not.
- soanvig 9mo agoBut you have to get the software somehow? Once you get it, it works offline. The same here I guess: once you download the source code/binaries into browser's cache (that can store things indefinitely) it's offline.
- hulitu 9mo ago> But you have to get the software somehow? We call this: download. Usually better than RCE.
- fwip 9mo agoTrue, but you are at the whims of the browser cache, and how long it wants to keep it around.
- zdp7 9mo agoIf you are worried, download and self host. As suggested on the website (when discussing trust and PII).
- cmarot 9mo agoWhat is the geometry kernel behind this for CAD ?
- retSava 9mo agoA fun thing you can do with this excellent sw is to slice a 3d object into slices to cut with a laser cutter. Ie you'll get a bunch of layers of eg cardboard or plywood, which you can assemble into a large object. Increase layer height to thicker than your material to create gaps in between. This operation is the basis for some very nice looking creative stuff you can find on etsy or even high-end wood working stuff.
- MORPHOICES 9mo ago[dead]
- SilverElfin 9mo agoSo is this the software part? Or do they sell hardware too? Are there recommended ones?