Printator is a simple 3D printer simulator based on a subpart of Printrun.

At the time of writing this, the simulator in itself fits in 232 lines of Python code (as reported by sloccount). Most of the non-trivial things come from Printrun's gcoder and gcview modules, which respectively provide gcode parsing and the 3D viewer.

Dependencies

To use Printator, you will need:

• Linux or MacOS (to use socat command)
• python (tested on 3.12.4),
• pyserial (or python-serial on ubuntu/debian)
• pyglet (<2.0)
• wxPython
• socat (external binary dependency, used to create virtual serial ports)
• Printrun (installed directly from the GitHub repo)

Initial setup

Install most of the dependencies from the requirements.txt file

pip install -r requirements.txt

Once this is done, you will just need to install socat. Install instructions for Mac can be found at https://ports.macports.org/port/socat/.

Running

Running Printator is as easy as

python printator.py

It will create a serial port with a random file name and start the simulator.

You can specify the serial port path with the -s option:

python printator.py -s `pwd`/sim

You can also disable delays (i.e. process gcode as fast as possible, without realistically waiting) using the -f option.

Known issues

• Custom baudrates are not supported for serial-based communications. TCP support shouldn't have any speed limit, though.

Planned features

• Checksum/line number verification
• Computing an STL file from the print results
• Temperature support