nanoDLP

delbonis

Member

Registered: 2019-11-06

Posts: 1

Request: Publish full source code

I'm helping a friend with his university final year project and he's looking into using NanoDLP for his project.  He has experience with 3D printers before but is lacking in the software development skills that he needs to make NanoDLP work with the 3D printer design he's working on.

I was looking for the source code to NanoDLP and could not find it, doing some more searching turned up this thread: https://www.nano3dtech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1593

I am thankful that the UI code is published on GitHub, but unfortunately in order to make meaningful improvements to NanoDLP we need the full source code for the printer binary.  I saw this comment that Shahin made:

UI part of nanodlp released on github but contribution was very rare. Also there is limited activity on other sla 3d printer software github repos.

That's unfortunate, but that's only what can be expected given what's been open sourced so far.  The UI is only one part of the NanoDLP project, it works very well and I feel very comfortable using it.  But it's not possible to add entirely new features without being able to modify the internals that do the actual heavy lifting.  My friend has some particular tasks for his 3D printer that need to be done between printing each layer, and being able to call out and run another script (waiting for it to complete before moving onto the next layer) to take care of those tasks would be extremely useful.  I'm very well experienced in Go and am capable digging through the source code and making that possible myself.  But without the source code I am stuck.  This is the essence of open source.

We are all thankful that NanoDLP is given away for free.  Many of us will download it and use it and be happy with that, but some of us like myself will inevitably want to dig deeper and make enhancements to the core.  There's really no downsides to opening up the full codebase, and the publicity of a well-made fully featured DLP project like NanoDLP going fully libre will absolutely attract people to it that wouldn't have before.  Release it under the GPL for good measure, if you want to.

Thank you for your consideration.

Last edited by delbonis (2019-11-06 17:45:27)

Shahin

Administrator

Registered: 2016-02-17

Posts: 3,541

Re: Request: Publish full source code

Thank you for your interest.
We do not have short term plan to open source NanoDLP core.