Welcome to the SeeMeCNC Community

Hi folks, so I've gotten things up and running fairly well...thanks to this awesome community. I'd considered selling the RM2 for a while, just not having the time to really mess with it. Got laid off and poof, with the help of you all it came to life and I've had some decent prints.

Now, on to greatness! My question is this: What would be the best way to do prints? Weird question so I'll break it down.

I run MatterControl directly from an old Macbook Air I got from work. Sometimes for 11 hours.
Slice engine varies based on part, sometimes MatterSlice > Cura but usually not.

How do you folks do it? I hear tell about something called OctoPi which I'm super down to build if it's a RPi project...which I'd have to learn more about. But I hear running straight from a laptop might cause some jitteriness.

Also heard KISS might be a great alternative, but a little worried about trying to get RM2 + E3D V6 working correctly.

So...what your favorite way to get a model sliced up and in your Rostock Max?

Hi, don't sell it, the learning curve is priceless. Yes, you are having some headaches and you will have more. But you built it!, and eventually you will diagnose it better than anyone else here. If you sell it just to get a plug n play printer, be sure that problems will come with that one too, but you won't have a clue on how to resolve them. At least with the Max you know every inch it.

If the print is >8hs, I slice with S3D. Then save the file on an SD card and print from the lcd menu.
If it's a short print. Slice with S3D. Then open that G-code with Repetier Host and handle everything from there.

I've never used MC nor KISS, but my previous slicer was Cura and before that Slic3r.

Thanks! I haven't tried Repetier Host yet. WIll look into that today.

Is S3D easy to set up for RMaxV2? It's really expensive so I'm a bit hesitant. When I try to use KiSS, I load the gcode into MatterControl and it's usually just 1 layer that shows up...so not sure I should spend that much money on S3D until I learn a litle more

I tend to print from SD cards. solves the USB connectivity issues, and potential for it to go to sleep. (At this point, I use a different controller board, but using the SD card on the LCD interface is one of the nicest ways to do it). Real, repeatable prints, no problems with interference (My printer lives in a workshop which has a large number of other pieces of equipment, and the e-field from an older 15A universal motor is no joke, so USB would have interesting dropouts), no added hardware, and no fiddling with com ports or host programs.
Admittedly, if there were a controller using an actual serial port that wasn't a terrible fit for a printer, it might be interesting to have actual hard COM ports, but serial to USB is a crock of shit that's less resilient than either and harder to configure for odd equipment than both

Xeno, what slicer do you use? I tried setting up KISS but so far it's been sort of a pain. I loaded the gcode file as a normal file in mattercontrol and it was only the first layer...so something is up. Going to try repetier-host next.

I use primarily KISS, although sometimes CURA (when working with the printers at the college as well, it's easier for me to build a Cura profile for my Max, instead of a KISS profile for the 18 taz 6's which are all slightly different, while the profiles are already built in CURA). I've also used Craftware for some specific prints which needed more support. I went ahead and attached my settings for KISS