Raise3D – one of the largest and most respected manufacturers of 3D printers of the FDM / FFF type in the world, for several years has been developing its own cloud environment – the RaiseCloud. The system helps in remote slicing and 3D printing, monitoring filament consumption, reduced downtime through instant notifications, visual monitoring of prints and a plethora of other features. And above it all – it is a great solution to manage work of 3D printing farms.
While RaiseCloud is dedicated to industrial users and professionals, manufacturer has decided to extend its benefits to those who are more community-oriented and usually use different brands of printers. As of today, Raise3D announced launching the RaiseOcto – a plugin based on Raspberry Pi with Octoprint on board that, together with the RaiseOcto app, will allow Raise3D users to manage all their machines, regardless of the brand, on the same platform.
With RaiseOcto, users who have third party open-source 3D printers will be able to use RaiseCloud Lite, a version of RaiseCloud with the features that are essential for starting a print farm. RaiseOcto will, therefore, enable all 3D printing users to instantly have all their desktop 3D printers no matter where they are.
Users can slice their models online thanks to its integrated ideaMaker slicer or upload Gcode files previously sliced offline, then send them off to print by choosing a machine that is on standby, and let RaiseCloud do the rest. In the meantime, they can also monitor the progress of any ongoing 3D prints, view snapshots of the printers that have cameras attached to the Raspberry Pi, tweak standard printer settings on the fly like temperature, feed rate, flow rate, fan speed, as well as cancel jobs, prioritize the order in which queued parts are printed, create work orders, review time-lapses and organize Gcode and STL files with ease.
For those who are production-oriented, RaiseCloud gives the ability to create teams with dedicated permission settings along with a long list of reporting features to keep track of all the activity related to their 3D printer statistics, like filament consumption, work order details and history, job statistics and much more. RaiseCloud Lite differs here from the standard version, by limiting the number of team members and printers, and not having a reporting system.
The features available on RaiseCloud Lite are usually enough to manage a small-scale 3D print farm for personal use or for a small business, making it as powerful as most paid platforms. However, given the fantastic contribution of makers producing PPE during the worldwide pandemic crisis, Raise3D will waive any limitations and extend the full available benefits to everyone.