I made a new change to the Spherebot GUI. Now it is not necessary to have separate files for each layer any longer.The program recognizes the layer changes on its own.

Happy Easter! ;)

Spherebot UI 2.0

Finally I have finished the version 2.0 of the Spherebot UI. On the first look it may look like version 1.0 but under the hood there has changed a lot. I actually tried to, again, release it as a static build but I just couldn´t get Qt compiling statically. So I just extracted all needed .dlls and copied them in the folder of the .exe file .

-I completely changed the underlying communication library. In 1.0 the used library was the QextSerialPort library but because of some problems I had with it I was only able to get it working when the communication was polling-based. That was not really good because there was a high and unnecessary CPU usage. Now the communication works event-based and is completely implemented with the Qt integrated SerialPort library.

-A new feature is the Multilayer Support. If you want to print on one egg with different Pens/Layers then this is a very handy feature. Just name you .gcode files in this way:
<PictureName>_1.gcode
<PictureName>_2.gcode
<PictureName>_3.gcode
etc.

Load the first layer and start the print. after that you will get a dialog asking you to change the pen and press OK. Then it automatically loads the next layer and starts printing. After the last layer it will ask you whether you want to restart and print the next egg.

-A really nice feature is the persistence of the loaded file and the connected port. So if you connect your bot to the computer and start the program, it will remember that it was connected to this port the last time and automatically connects to it. It will also loads the file that was loaded the last time at start up.

So these were the most important changes I´ve made to it. I hope you ´ll have fun with it ;)