for the love of all things internet, make easel open source so we can contribute a pull-request of the feature we want.
I understand not making the cutting and g-code generations closed-source, as that’s secret sauce, but lets make the front-end open source…
and while you’re at it, have you heard of a little project called Electron? There’s really no reason this software cannot be offline…
Not really any point in using electron. Offline access can be done by using HTML5 in any modern browser. The real issue is the same issue that has always existed with not having a constant connection and that is sync conflicts.
Ultimately I agree with you about open sourcing the code I can understand why they don’t want to. They have a vision for the software where they want to be able to test and confirm things work and work well and if they are having to do test cuts every time someone has an idea that they want to add then things can get rather complicated.
There have been a few things that i would like to add and have the know how to do so. But I would hate to do it and just have it sit there.
What do you mean about sync conflicts? What are the target and source, and what are they synchronizing?
I’m suggesting they open source the UI, not necessarily the CAM engine.
What would you modify @GeoffEvans? If you had the source, you could fork it and run at your own risk.
My point is that this software and the xcarve platform appeals to either the novice, or the technical tinkerer. I’d like to see it open up to the software development capable tinkerer…
All of the CAM is written in javascript and runs in the browser. The UI and the CAM are linked and realistically for someone to design changes you need to run the full easel package in a development server.
In order to use easel offline(as in open projects at will) you will need to download the projects from the server. You have 2 real options at this point
1 make it read only unless there is server connection so that the user cannot make any changes so you don’t have to deal with syncing any changes back to easels backend.
Or 2 you have to deal with sync conflicts if you want to allow the user to edit offline in much the same was as would happen now if you had one computer offline made a change then opened it on another computer without having gone online on the offline computer and you make changes on the online one.
The whole advantage of easel is edit anywhere so running my own server for this is less than ideal.
However what I would like to have added is add an ip address to the locate easel local. All it does now is call localhost allowing you to enter an ip address would mean that you can drop the proxy and also run it from things like an iPad.
You could also go further and make it send send the complete Gcode as easel just sends one command at a time. However that would be a fundamental change to the local software. But it would mean that you can then make the local software more powerful like in the same vein as octoprint.
Also I would change the ui to be a better at doing mobile responsive layout as changing the size of the window will usually remove some part of the interface that you want or some part is obstructed by another part of the interface.
In essence if you want any part of easel to be open source then you require all of easel to be open source as you only have 2 parts easel and easel local. Easel local does very little all it is is a lightweight web server that takes commands in and sends them to the serial port and sends back the reply.
do you write code for inventables?
No but I write code as a day job using ruby on rails(what they are using) and know how to use the inspector to view the code in the browser and the calls it makes to know what is going on and see what it is doing. Also from discussions on here with the devs I know this to be the case.
