Open Source: Philosophy and the Snapmaker Orca Project
Snapmaker’s Open Source Philosophy, the Snapmaker Orca Project, and What Lies Ahead
Our Philosophy: The Way of the Snapmaker
There’s been quite a bit of discussion lately on the role of open source in the 3D Printing Community. With that in mind, we want to affirm Snapmaker’s commitment to open source development.
We believe in openness, expandability, and continuous optimization to ensure our users have the best experience with their machines, and can make something wonderful – however they want.
Our way forward is to open up our old machines to easier integration with various third party software and common protocols, provide the best possible tools to our users in the form of slicer profiles and software developed in house, and in fact to allow users of other machines to make use of our software as well.
The Snapmaker Orca Project
Snapmaker’s software ecosystem is undergoing a transformative phase with the release of Snapmaker Orca, a fork of OrcaSlicer. This new software builds upon the foundations of open-source development and is tailored specifically for Snapmaker machines, although we plan on opening it up to third party devices in the near future.
Currently, slicing tasks are handled by Luban, which is based on the Cura engine. While great for beginners, Luban lacks advanced features and optimizations for Snapmaker machines, leading many users to use third party options. This is great – we love tinkering and experimenting, and encourage Snapmaker fans to continue to do so. To make life better and easier for everyone, in the upcoming V2.x, the Orca project will provide more user-friendly device control and management functions. Gradually, we will continue integrating protocols for device control and management from a range of third-party apps. Until then, you will still have to use Luban as a pass-through. Note that Luban itself isn’t going anywhere – it will continue to serve as an excellent entrypoint to the world of 3D Printing, Laser, and CNC machining.
We decided to go with Orca because it was popular with users and already had Snapmaker specific profiles created and managed externally. Bringing these in house gives us better control over these configurations, enhances compatibility, and offers new avenues for user-centric development. Using Snapmaker Orca will allow users early access to our advanced optimizations, but we will continue to push these up to the main OrcaSlicer. We can’t guarantee that every update will be accepted by the main fork, but we will be building an ‘open garden’ and continue to support OrcaSlicer however we can.
Snapmaker Orca Beta V1.1.0
With Snapmaker Orca Beta V1.1.0 out and available now, what are the top things users will get out of it?
- Early Access to Optimized Features: Snapmaker Orca allows users to access optimized features and various Snapmaker machine presets earlier than OrcaSlicer.
- Enhanced Multi-Extruder Support: Snapmaker Orca has made further improvements in multi-extruder functionality and will continue to enhance this area, developing more features to meet user needs.
- Commitment to Open Source: Snapmaker Orca remains aligned with OrcaSlicer in the slicing domain, contributing optimizations back to OrcaSlicer while maintaining its own open-source nature.
Snapmaker Orca Roadmap
The Snapmaker Orca project has only just begun. Let’s take a look at what lies ahead:
- V0.x (Previous): Internal development and testing phase, focusing on establishing the foundational workflow for Snapmaker machines in design, slicing, printing, and connectivity.
- V1.x (Current): Iterative improvements centered on print quality optimization, multi-extruder functionality refinement, and enhanced user experience. The goal is to better adapt Snapmaker Orca to Snapmaker machines while improving the usability of its general features.
- V2.x (Future): Comprehensive support for software connectivity, focusing on device discovery, connection, control, and management. Additional support for third-party machines will also be gradually introduced.
Vision & Goal: To establish Snapmaker Orca as a universal software platform supporting multi-brand machines, integrating user model communities, machine control and management, and model design and slicing capabilities.
A Note On Security
We are committed to using technology to ensure the security of machines when they are connected to the cloud and during communication. We will not rely on closed-source or closed-ecosystem approaches to ensure security (in fact, these methods cannot guarantee security either).
Since we are still in the early stages of development, we are currently unable to provide a complete technical solution. However, our guiding principles will not change.
More Thoughts On Open Source
Snapmaker has benefitted tremendously from the open source community.
The Snapmaker Software Team is made up of young and passionate engineers, whose education, side projects, and now main work would not be possible in a closed-loop world.
We built Luban and the Snapmaker 2.0 firmware based on open source projects, and are now similarly developing Snapmaker Orca. Without open source projects, there would be no Snapmaker machines. Every one of us personally contributes to open source projects on GitHub and elsewhere. As part of the Snapmaker team, we built Snapmaker Luban into a popular CAM software over the past few years, with over 1000 followers.
And now as we start to work on Snapmaker Orca, we will still follow this principle. We work with SoftFever’s repository more than just copying the code, so we can make pull requests to SoftFever/OrcaSlicer easily and continuously. We’ve written quite a bit of code that’s been merged upstream into the main SoftFever/OrcaSlicer repo. Maybe now is a good time to give SoftFever a special thank you. And while we’re on it, let’s also give a special shoutout to MacDylan, who had previously maintained the Snapmaker machine profiles for OrcaSlicer and was instrumental in our internal development. There are too many people to thank right here, through GitHub, our Facebook Community Groups, and other channels – but we are sincerely grateful to our friends and collaborators across the world.
Moreover, our work on Snapmaker Orca is part of our ambition to be the new core of the 3D slicer open source community. We will not restrict our work to Snapmaker machines, but rather open up the software to interface with every printer that will accept it.
Sincerely,
The Snapmaker Team
