Would Like To See

I would like to see a Windows 8.1 printer driver, so that when more apps that allow 3d printing to work will have no problems. So far there is only one, but that could change quickly. Makerbot already has drivers available for their printer, as does Up.

The current driver for the RAMBo and RAMPS electronics work well, since the printers are responding to standard gcode commands. Hopefully they choose to support the community driven formats.

The reason they are doing the print functions the way they are is to make it easier for people to use 3d printers. You install the drivers for your 3d printer, like a regular printer. Then any application that has a print function can print to it. So for instance you could, in the future, create a 3d model in blender, hit the print button and done. No need to export, load another app, pick settings, export to slicer, then print.

Most likely that will not happen with the stock “print” functionality of programs as those send a 2D projection of what you want to print to the driver. What you would need would be a plugin for each program that can either send the 3D model to the driver to be sliced/printed, or slices the 3D model and sends the gcode to the driver/printer

It is already happening. Adobe is adding 3d printing functions to their 3d product and it only works so far in the makerbot and others that have drivers for Windows 8.1.