Would be nice to see on cura
You won’t ever see it in a commercial / OTS slicer implementation for a while, fucking Stratasys still has a patent on it and they love lawyers. This guy finally just said fuck it and wrote it himself.
Stratasys still has a patent on it
That’s putting it generously, isn’t it?
This video from a year ago goes into why the patent they have today isn’t valid. (Short answer: prior art. They patented it in 1995 and that expired in 2015 in the U.S. and 2016 in Europe. Then they re-patented it in 2020, which isn’t really something they can do, but the patent office granted it anyway, probably unaware of the prior patent. There’s kindof a “new claim” in the later patent, but there’s prior art for that as well in the form of a 2019 feature request on PrusaSlicer’s Github.)
I get that Stratasys has lawyers and money and might theoretically be able to win even a case with as little merit as a patent case regarding that 2020 patent would have. But I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say they have a (valid) patent.
That’s a core problem with the patent system:
- Patent offices don’t really check for prior art. There’s a short period between patent applications and patents being granted where the public can submit prior art. If nobody notices that such an invalid patent is being applied for and thus nobody submits prior art, the patent is granted. Patent offices are of the opinion that it’s the responsibility of courts to sort out invalid patents like that.
- Patent litigation is super expensive and time consuming. So if a huge corporation like Stratasys holds a patent, most smaller companies (and yes, in this context Creality, Prusa and Bambulab count as small) usually don’t want to spend all the time, effort and risk of a patent fight. Also, even if you win, you don’t get your legal costs back. So even if e.g. Prusa fights Stratasys over that patent and wins, Prusa will still lose all the money they spent on legal costs for the lawsuit. All over a feature that, while cool, doesn’t bring them any money at all if they implement it.
Out of curiosity, I went and found the OrcaSlicer ticket where they’re working on adding the bricklaying feature to OrcaSlicer. Seems like they’re just hoping it doesn’t attract Stratasys’ attention.
Even if they have to remove the feature, it’ll still be in the history of the repo and it should be relatively easy to unrevert and rebuild personally on one’s own computer if necessary. Until the codebase changes enough to make it harder to maintain the fork.
Man I really don’t want to switch to something else
Same, I don’t get the popularity of Prusa Slicer and definitely not Bambu/Orca slicer, those last ones are awful.
What do you use?
Cura
Ok cool. I’ll give this one a try. I use whatever came with the printer (webuilder, I think it’s called), and it’s not great.
I like it the most, if you’re confident with 3d printers and how they work, I’d recommend figuring out how to get it to display all the settings, as it hides a lot on the default config. Theres also a plugin that provides good tool tip help for every setting, including pictures.
I had horrible stringing issues running a couple test prints in Orca.
