3dpc for iOS available in app store

I am proud to announce the release of 3dpc for iOS. It is a fully configurable control panel for OctoPrint. I am a small independent developer with a passion for 3d printing and Octoprint. I hope you enjoy 3dpc as much as I enjoyed developing it.

3dpc is great for monitoring your 3d printer and if you have an old iPhone or iPad sitting around, it could become a control panel that sits by your printer full-time. Here are a few of the features:

- Create the layout that you want with 3 customizable screens
	β—‹ Snap to grid or free form layout
	β—‹ Adjust the size of all controls
	β—‹ Move the controls around for the perfect placement
	β—‹ Remove controls that you don't need
- Supports SSL connections (even with self-signed certs)
- Supports basic authentication (haproxy usernames and passwords)
- Support multiple printers (with purchase of Pro Tools)
- Prevent your iOS device from sleeping.
- Dark mode and light mode
- Controls that you can add, move and resize:
	β—‹ Web stream - View your web stream in a resizable control!  Oh, and you can add multiple cameras by simply adding the control more than once and customizing the properties by double tapping on the control while in layout mode.
	β—‹ File browser - you can even upload files from iCloud!
	β—‹ General printer functions - start, stop and cancel
	β—‹ Status control - includes the file being printed and time estimates
	β—‹ Print head X/Y movement 
	β—‹ Print head Z movement
	β—‹ Progress bar
	β—‹ Temperature chart
	β—‹ Temperature monitor for controlling tool temps
	β—‹ Extruder control
	β—‹ Label - place a label anywhere on the screen
	β—‹ Octo Info - basic control showing the API Version and Server Version
- Pro Tools
	β—‹ Ability to add more than 1 printer.
	β—‹ Gcode buttons and gcode entry field controls.
- Subscription
	β—‹ Ability to remove ads and my deepest thanks for supporting development!
- Works on both iPad and iPhone in portrait or landscape.

I would love to hear any feedback that you might have.

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Feedback

  • I think it's lost on most users that haproxy is used by default behind-the-scenes with the OctoPi image (which doesn't include credentials, btw). Your setup wizard on the first page seems to think that this is necessary.
  • The printer address screen seems to expect the ":5000" decoration at the end of the hostname. OctoPi includes haproxy which goes to the default port 80 so this ought to be unnecessary.
  • Somewhere in your blurb it mentions that this would be great to install on an old phone. It won't install on my iPad since it indicates "This applications requires iOS 10.3 or later." Apple denies updates to older hardware in case you didn't know this. It's part of their planned-obsolescence agenda to make sure that our landfills have plenty of old Apple-trash in them.
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Great feedback.

You are obviously right that the username/password are not necessary. I was thinking about hiding that and showing it only when the user taps something like "Authentication Info" or maybe an "Advanced Settings" button or something like that.

OctoPrint does default to port 80. I actually like using port 443 which uses SSL. My thought was that people who do use SSL and might map ports outside their network would understand based on that example, but then again, it confuses those who don't understand ports as well. I'll see what I can adjust.

Yes, I did mention above that if you had an old iPhone or iPad sitting around that you could install this and yes, you are right that it requires 10.3 or later. I'll take that out going forward. Out of curiosity, what iPad model do you have? An iPad 2 or older? I have a 4 year old iPad Air that is still getting updates from Apple.

Thanks again for the great feedback!

Looks like this will be a good app to have around. A couple quick observations (sorry that I didn't see this earlier when it was in beta):

  • It would be great if editing the layout didn't require three different states (add, edit, remove). If this could be consolidated into a single Edit mode, that would be easier to use, as setting up a layout often requires going back and forth between these states. Perhaps in your current edit mode doing a 3d touch, or long press could pop-up a remove item "X". and maybe a "+" in the top bar of the edit mode to pull up the list you currently have.
  • When done editing, "Done" is a more intuitive button than "Lock" to signify that you're done editing.
  • Not sure what the "Send Layout" mode does. When I click it nothing happens. I was expecting it to pull up a share sheet to send the layout to another user, or to another of my devices via text/email/airdrop etc.

.

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Bingo. I actually have two of those and a iPad mini somewhere around here.

Feel free to be inspired by my Robo app with a similar concept. It gets around the Apple-agenda by using Cordova (Adobe PhoneGap) for the platform.

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So, I messed with those editing modes. I agree that going back and forth is a bit challenging at times. The 3d touch idea is interesting. (Latest rumors about the next gen iPhones say that 3d touch might be removed.) I'll look into how to make it easier.

The send layout was not supposed to be there. Ooops. Snuck out of the beta version and shouldn't. The next update will have it removed. In the future, I was hoping to make it possible to actually download or browse layouts provided by other users. We'll see - there are some issues with that as a whole.

I agree that "Done" is better than "Lock". I'm going to change that.

I still have an original iPad. Scary.

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How many pages are in the app I only have 3 I would like to add more pages for having a camera on its own page. I think I was able to zoom in on a video feed but after 3 or so I couldn't zoom in on a camera.

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So, you can add 7 more pages for a total of 10 pages. When you are on the screen with the list of printers, swipe left on a printer and select "Edit Pages". You can then add, remove and reorder pages from there.

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