Snapmaker announced the Snapmaker Orca Project.
Snapmaker is a Chinese company that rose to fame as one of the first “3 in 1” devices. These include three different functions: 3D printing, CNC milling, and laser engraving.
Since their initial system, the company has gone on to produce increasingly more functional equipment. Today, their product line includes:
- Snapmaker Artisan, an enclosed 3-in-1 3D printer
- Snapmaker 2.0, an open gantry 3-in-1 3D printer
- Snapmaker Ray, a 40W Laser Cutter
- Snapmaker J1/J1s, an IDEX 3D printer with two independent toolheads
To run these machines, the company uses their Luban software, which is based on the UltiMaker Cura engine. According to Snapmaker:
“While great for beginners, Luban lacks advanced features and optimizations for Snapmaker machines, leading many users to use third-party options. This is great – we love tinkering and experimenting, and encourage Snapmaker fans to continue to do so.”
But to “make life easier” for their customers, they are developing a new software tool called “Snapmaker Orca”. This is, as you might guess, a fork of the OrcaSlicer project. That tool was itself a fork of BambuStudio, which was a fork of PrusaSlicer, which in turn was derived from the original Slic3r project.
Isn’t open source wonderful? All of these tools have built on each other, leading to today’s powerful slicing tools.
Snapmaker recognizes this as well, and that’s why they are doubling down on open source by moving to their own Orca fork.
Rest assured, they will continue to support open-source principles. They explain:
“Snapmaker Orca remains aligned with OrcaSlicer in the slicing domain, contributing optimizations back to OrcaSlicer while maintaining its own open-source nature.”
The new fork will allow Snapmaker to implement a series of optimizations specifically designed for their equipment. They say, for example, that new features that appear on their equipment will be supported immediately, rather than having to wait for a new OrcaSlicer release. In addition, they are adding in their already powerful multi-extruder support functionality, which they developed for use with their IDEX equipment.
Snapmaker describes their current release as follows:
“V1.x (Current): Iterative improvements centered on print quality optimization, multi-extruder functionality refinement, and enhanced user experience. The goal is to better adapt Snapmaker Orca to Snapmaker machines while improving the usability of its general features.”
Subsequent versions will include more support for connectivity, device discovery and control, and the introduction of support for third-party equipment.
Their ultimate vision for Snapmaker Orca:
“To establish Snapmaker Orca as a universal software platform supporting multi-brand machines, integrating user model communities, machine control and management, and model design and slicing capabilities.”
That’s very ambitious, but also something that’s previously been done with this open-source software family tree by other companies. Can Snapmaker raise the bar even more?
