3d printing with Amiga?

Has anyone ever thought about operating 3d scanners and 3d printers with an Amiga?

Could this work, e.g. on an A1 X1k?

Could Xena be of help here?

@Dandy

The main issue here is rebuilding Cuts's C components with AmigaOS serial.device usage or
Binding "pronterface"(python scripting) with a python serial.device access extension.

These would enable the printing side of things.

3D scanning is more along the lines of photo processing with a known visual scale as part of the image (from what little I know from repeal building).

As for the controllers...you can try accessing any G-Code controlled machine using JRComm/NTerm/Term and scripting those too

Many 3D printers (at least the ones we have in work) also accept GCode on USB drives or SD cards, so "all" you need is the software for slicing up the model and generating the GCode and you should be good to go. There are open source solutions but I've no idea what sort of dependencies they have. Hardware-wise though there's no problem...

Thanks for your replies so far. Keep the ideas coming!

Well, I got this idea when I read about Andy Warhol using an Amiga 1000 and DPaint for his 'Pop Art' back in 1985.

I asked myself how Amiga cuold be used for art nowadays. Then I realised that 3d printing is becoming more and more popular and I asked myself if this couls also be supported on the Amiga platform.

But it could not only be used for producing art (3d sculptures), it could also be used to produce spare parts for technical devices in the household...

Of course we could say: let's use WIntel boxes and periphals for that - there everything is readily available.
But where would be the fun in that?
Finally the Amiga is our Hobby...

@Daedalus

Modellers = Blender (already an Amiga port existing), OpenSCAD ( requires several libraries)

Slicers = Slic3r (perl scripting, so newest mainline perl's Amiga builds), SFACT ( depending on python2.7, 68K-2.3 and PPC-2.5 builds are not new enough)

Device Controllers = Cura and Pronterface, written in C and Python...along with other options

These are all reprap project referenced software titles.

So...
Use Broadblues Blender builds to create STL's...
Then his perl builds to run slic3r creating G-Code,
Leaving only the problem of feeding this through Term or an equivalent to a serial connected or usb-serial linked CNC controller (RAMPS/Sanguinololu/SmoothieWare)
Optionally using SmoothieBoard controllers by IPv4 network
And just OWB browser upload the G-Code tomicroSD card and tell it to print that way.

The main requirement is feeding "Slic3r" or an equivalent slicing tool with an AMF or STL file and then feeding the produced G-Code to a SmoothieBoard(USB/Ethernet) or RAMPS open-hardware controller (SmoothieBoard is highly recommendable as I personally have made use of one of these on a sam440 and it appears with both mass-storage AND serial USB functions, the Ethernet option makes ALL existing network capable Amiga's with OWB able to use it pretty quickly)

Poseidon's existing usb-serial support along with REXX scripting for existing terminal programs gives a very simple but effective option for the serial option as well.

RAMPS controllers can take serial cabling directly and skip USB entirely as well (USB is conversion of serial to USB separate from the ATmega MCU used to control the machine from the ramps)

Sanguinololu schematics show where you can wire USB and serial as parallel options, but only one can work at a time.

Hopefully this is of some help,

www.reprap.org. www.smoothieware.(com?/net?/org?) have more specific information.

The FPGA on sam4x0 and the Xena on X1K A1 machines are not of any use unless you want to use Xena for an updated "LightWave ScreamerNet" or the FPGA's for some kind of hardware acceleration?


Edits are some autocorrect ion fixups...and adding a workflow description of what can already work.

Happy Hacking.