New release: 1.3.0

Phew!

After over a year of work - constantly interrupted by intermittent maintenance releases of 1.2.x I might add ;) - and unmeasured hours of implementation, testing and debugging plus also a full blown funding crisis in between, the day is finally here: 1.3.0 is released.

Before I talk a bit more about what you’ll find in this release, let me take a short moment for another huge THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart towards everyone who helped getting this on the road. That includes everyone who contributed even the tiniest amount of code, documentation or typo fix, engaged in valuable discussions about how to solve certain issues, provided feedback on stuff that was or wasn’t working. It includes everyone who helped test the release candidates and reported back. And of course it includes every single one of over a thousand Patrons on Patreon and of course all of you who contributed via PayPal to make my continued full time work on OctoPrint financially possible. Getting this release out wouldn’t have worked out without the community!

With that being said, on to what’s new! There’s a multitude of new features and improvements plus of course also a handful of bug fixes in this release, way too much to list all of it here, but let’s at least take a look at some of them:

  • Finally there’s a way to keep all of your files for one project together in one place thanks to the newly added folder support. Along with that OctoPrint now also exposes copy and move functionality on the API, which the File Manager Plugin by Salandora will utilize to offer a full fledged file manager to make working with your new folders even easier.
  • A new wizard dialog system replaces the old “first run” dialog, leads through first time setup and/or consecutive setup steps and is also extendable by plugin authors to query information from users about freshly installed or updated plugins they need in order to run1. See the screenshots below for an example
  • Plugins may now temporarily or completely replace the web interface. It would for example be possible to have OctoPrint show you a different UI when connecting from a mobile device vs. your desktop machine, or from a specific machine vs all other machines. And to take some of the boilerplate out of connecting to the API from custom UIs, I’ve extracted out an API client into a Client JS library too. I’ve also prepared a small proof-of-concept example of a plugin utilizing the new possibilities by checking the login status of a user and delivering a login-only UI to anonymous users instead of the stock UI2: the ForceLogin plugin. UiPlugins and the JS Client Lib together open up a lot of possibilities in creating full blown dashboard systems, alternative UIs and customizations and I’m excited to see what plugin authors will do with these new toys! There are screenshots of some examples below.
  • OctoPrint will now track the current print head position on pause and cancel and provide it as new template variables pause_position/cancel_position for the relevant GCODE scripts. This will allow more intelligent pause codes that park the print head at a rest position during pause and move it back to the exact position it was before the pause on resume (Example). Note that OctoPrint does NOT ship with such scripts in place. For now you will have to adjust the pause and resume GCODE scripts yourself since position tracking with multiple extruders or when printing from SD is currently not fool proof thanks to firmware limitations regarding reliable tracking of the various E values and the currently selected tool T. Thanks to those limitations I did not feel comfortable to make this a preconfigured out-of-the box feature, but maybe there’ll be some way to change that in future versions!
  • There is now an (optional) firmware auto detection in place. This should hopefully reduce issues for first-time users running a firmware that needs specific flags to be set for proper support.
  • A lot of UI improvements like e.g. test buttons for various settings like the webcam URLs or paths to executable like ffmpeg, a refactored printer profile editor, and a lot more tiny adjustments all around the UI.
  • More verbosity during updates of OctoPrint and installed plugins for logged in admins.
  • Better (and earlier) error reporting for timelapse issues.
  • Aggressive caching for APIs and UIs for improved load times and less resource consumption.
  • Centrally managed server commands for restarting OctoPrint and rebooting and shutting down the system its running on. For those OctoPrint will now generate entries in the System menu automatically and they will also be used for restarting after updates or after installing plugins that necessitate that.

That is only the tip of the iceberg, best take a look at the Changelog for a more comprehensive overview.

Finally, if you run into any problems with this OctoPrint or its bundled plugins in this release, please report them since I cannot fix issues I know nothing about. I’ve tested this version excessively over the past couple of months, and I guess so have a lot of you running the “Devel RCs” release channel or even the devel branch itself. This is a huge release though and as I’ve mentioned before all of you together run way more combinations of printers, controllers and firmware plus usage scenarios than I (or any single person for that matter) could ever hope to cover in tests. So if something doesn’t work in OctoPrint or any of the bundled plugins, keep that in mind and just report it back so that it can be fixed :)

Also see the Further Information and Links below for more information, where to find help and how to roll back. Thanks!

Update 2017-01-13: Fixed links to the changelog 😅

Further Information

It may take up to 24h for your update notification to pop up, so don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t show up immediately after reading this. You can force the update however via Settings > Software Update > Advanced options > Force check for update.

If you don’t get an “Update Now” button with your update notification, read this or - even more specifically - this.

If you are running 1.2.7, get an “Update Now” button but the update is immediately reported to be successful without any changes, read this.

If you are running 1.2.16, get an “Update Now” button but the update is immediately producing an error message, read this.

If you have any problems with your OctoPrint installation, please seek support in the G+ Community or the Mailinglist.

Footnotes

  1. Note that this will also trigger for the CuraEngine plugin after you update if you haven’t yet setup a slicing profile. Just skip the wizard once, reload as instructed and it will not ask you again :) ↩

  2. Please note that this will only protect OctoPrint’s UI. It will not be able to protect your webcam since that’s not served by OctoPrint, OctoPrint is only embedding it (as a side-note though, I’m working on a solution for that too). So do not use that in a setting were a) the URL of the webcam stream might be guessable and b) someone anonymously accessing the webcam would be a serious privacy issue. ↩

Images

The new folder support
The new wizard dialog system in action
A custom UI by Mr Beam tailored to their laser cutter, done through a UiPlugin
A custom UI by Leapfrog for their printers, done through a UiPlugin
A login-only view forced for logged out/anonymous users, done through a UiPlugin
Configuring a custom safe bounding box
New firmware auto detection feature
Author
Gina Häußge
Published
08 Dec 2016
Category
Release