I’m getting back into this after 5 or 6 years of absence from 3D printing. I had helped my kids 5th & 6th grade teacher do some 3D printing with her class. She is getting back into it, teaching at a new school, so I will be lending her my Lulzbot Mini2 (upgraded from the original Mini we used 6 years ago.)
The kids will mostly be running TinkerCAD on their Chromebooks for the design work. We need a cheap computer on which to run CuraLE, since we can’t install it on their Chromebooks. Can anyone suggest a low budget computer that will run Cura acceptably? Most of the designs will not be very complex.
Will Cura run acceptably on a Raspberry Pi 3b? I have a couple of those kicking around. I see a Debian version of CuraLE, but am not sure how well that will work on a Pi.
There are some slicers that will run on a Raspberry Pi but I would recommend a Windows desktop or laptop. I bought this one as I needed something that runs Windows 11. Not very powerful, not a very big screen but I installed Ultimaker Cura 5.1 on it. Pretty sure it will run CuraLE 3.6.37 as well.
Another alternative is to use a slicer that runs in a browser (on the Chromebook). SliceCrafter or Kiri:Moto.
@b-morgan - did you find that 64GB storage on the HP laptop you linked to on Amazon limiting? Does it run Ultimaker Cura 5.1 well enough to suit you? 9I’m assuming that Cura LE 3.6.37 is based on an older version of Cura, so if you are running 5.1, I should be able to run Cura LE.)
Our local Best Buy had this 14" HP laptop on sale. I confess I’m not up to date on various CPUs, graphics cards and what would equal or surpass the listed Cura LE requirements:
• OpenGL v2 compatible graphics card
• Suggested: OpenGL v4.1 or higher
• Intel Core 2 or AMD Athlon 64 or newer
• 4 GB of RAM or more
A web based slicer might be a good fallback. I was hoping to stick with Cura LE for now, since it is already optimized for my Mini 2, and would simplify getting them up and running
I don’t find the 64GB of storage limiting but I don’t have very much installed. I just installed CuraLE 3.6.37 and Ultimaker Cura 5.1.0 and the disk is just over half full.
It runs both CuraLE and Ultimaker Cura well enough. The 11.6" screen is pretty small but the 14" screen on the one you linked should be better.
It’s the slicing with Cura LE I’m concerned about. Does the machine have the graphics capability to run the software. They don’t care if it takes a bit to do the computations - their designs are fairly simple anyway.