AstroPrint’s Cloud Platform Lets You Manage 3D Printing From Anywhere

the actual process of 3D printing is about as interesting to watch in real-time as ants building out their tunnels in an ant farm. It happens slowly, with tiny mechanisms adding slice after slice, layer after layer, until you have something that actually looks like a recognizable shape. It’s something you only need to see a handful of times, and is best seen as a time lapse.

But if 3D printing is something you do professionally, it’s still important to monitor what’s going on with your prints. When something complex can take half a day or longer to print, it’s important to make sure you didn’t waste half of it because of a misprint a few hours in. AstroPrint’s solution is built around a cloud platform that’s accessible from any modern browser. From their platform, you can see 3D models from repositories connected to their database. The biggest is 3DaGoGo, a site that AstroPrint’s founders had been working on but pivoted away from as they realized a majority of users were only printing free models. Once you’ve got a model in mind, you can process it into “slices” 3D printers can understand and send it to any printer you’ve got connected to the web. AstroPrint makes it easy to hook up most printers to their cloud with their AstroBox, a $149 plug-and-play kit that works with most 3D printers on the market today.

Complete article: AstroPrint’s Cloud Platform Lets You Manage 3D Printing From Anywhere