Salad Slicer is currently undergoing rapid development and breaking changes. Until we achieve a 1.0 release, we are playing a little fast and loose with semantic versioning. Check your files carefully when you update to a new version.
Salad Slicer is an open-source Rhinoceros Grasshopper plugin developed for slicing objects for 3D concrete printing, however, the plugin is also suitable for slicing objects to print other materials such as ceramics or polymers. Among other functionalities, Salad Slicer offers:
- Slicing planar 2.5D objects from a 2D curve
- Slicing planar 3D objects from a 3D mesh
- Possibility to define your own slicers and/or reconstruct and customize the pre-defined slicers with the components from the Geometry category.
- Possibility to construct an NC program (G-code) for the sliced geometry.
- Possibility to convert all sliced objects to planes that can be used to construct programs for, for example, ABB and KUKA robots.
You can download the latest release directly from this repository's releases page. Download the SaladSlicer.gha file and place it in your Grasshopper components folder (in GH, File > Special Folders > Components Folder). Make sure that the file is unblocked (right-click on the file and select Properties from the menu, click Unblock on the General tab). Restart Rhino and you are ready to go!
You can find a collection of example files demonstrating the main features of Salad Slicer in this repository in the folder Example Files.
Bug reports: Please report bugs at our issue page.
Feature requests: Feature request can be proposed on our issue page. Please include how this feature should work by explaining it in detail and if possible by adding relevant documentation.
Code contributions: We accept code contributions through pull requests. For this you have to fork or clone this repository. We only accept code contributions if they are commented. You can read more about this topic here. If you want to make a significant contribution, please let us know what you want to add or change to avoid doing things twice. For questions or if you want to discuss your contribution you can reach out to one of the developers.
Salad Slicer is an open-source project that is developed and initiated by the 3D Concrete Printing Research Group at Eindhoven University of Technology. The technical development is executed by the PhD and PDEng candidates who are listed here.
We would like to acknowledge the authors of Robot Components for making their Grasshopper plugin available and open source. The code structure of Salad Slicer is heavily influenced by Robot Components. As an acknowledgment, we have provided Example Files wherein we demonstrate how to use Salad Slicer in combination with Robot Components.
Salad Slicer is a free-to-use Grasshopper plugin and does not legally bind you to cite it. However, we have invested time and effort in creating Salad Slicer and would appreciate a citation if used. To cite all versions of Salad Slicer in publications use:
Arjen Deetman, Derk Bos, Matthew Ferguson, & Jelle Versteege (2023). Salad Slicer: An open-source slicer toolkit for 3D concrete printing. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7818240
Note that there are two reasons for citing the software used. One is giving recognition to the work done by others which we already addressed. The other is giving details on the system used so that experiments can be replicated. For this, you should cite the version of Salad Slicer used. On our Zenodo page you can find how to cite specific versions. See How to cite and describe software for more details and an in depth discussion.
Salad Slicer uses the following Semantic Versioning scheme:
0.x.x ---> MAJOR version: incompatible changes.
x.0.x ---> MINOR version: functionality added in a backwards compatible manner.
x.x.0 ---> PATCH version: backwards compatible bug fixes.
This software could be developed and maintained with the financial support of the following projects:
- The project "Parametric mortar design and control of system parameters" funded by Saint-Gobain Weber Beamix.
- The project "Additive manufacturing of functional construction materials on-demand" (with project number 17895) of the research program "Materialen NL: Challenges 2018" which is financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Copyright (c) 2021-2024 3D Concrete Printing Research Group at Eindhoven University of Technology
Salad Slicer is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3.0 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
Salad Slicer is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Salad Slicer; If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
@license GPL-3.0 https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
Contact us if you want to obtain a copy of the source code with a different license.