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Digital fabrication

Digital fabrication (digifab) is the side that actually makes things. It sends a file to a machine to be made and tracks the job to completion.

Coordinate, not control​

Cobblr hands a machine a file and follows the job. It doesn't drive the hardware move by move; the machine's own controller does that. Cobblr coordinates.

Many machines expose an API Cobblr can talk to directly, like Duet and Klipper, so nothing sits in between. A machine with no API of its own, like a Marlin printer, needs something in front to give it one. OctoPrint is the usual choice, and Cobblr talks to that. Bambu printers are their own case: over Bambu's cloud, Cobblr can watch, pause, and stop jobs, but Bambu blocks third parties from starting prints, so sending a job needs the printer's LAN Developer Mode through the edge bridge.

How Cobblr reaches a machine​

  • Self-hosted on the same network as your machines: Cobblr reaches them directly. Nothing else to run.
  • A firewall between Cobblr and the machines, or machines at a different site (a second workshop, say): Cobblr can't reach them directly, so you run the edge bridge where the machines are, and Cobblr connects through it. The bridge always dials outward, so nothing on your network is exposed.
  • Software pinned to one computer, like LightBurn: even on the same network, Cobblr has to drive it on the PC it runs on, so the bridge runs there.

Watching for failures​

A print can be watched while it runs: a detector scores camera frames for failure, and when the score crosses your threshold, Cobblr can pause the job automatically, flags the machine for attention, and sends a notification. The detector is pluggable: your own AI provider's vision, PrintGuard, Obico's ML API, or any scorer you run on your network, and like machine drivers, a detector is an installable manifest.

Detectors come in two shapes. Frame scorers take frames Cobblr samples from the machine's camera. Services like PrintGuard watch their own cameras instead, so you link each machine to one of the detector's cameras, picked from a dropdown. You can also hand a printer to the detector straight from Cobblr: it registers the machine with the service using the credentials it already holds (they stay server-side), and for a single-printer connection you can tell Cobblr to stop polling it, so exactly one system talks to the hardware. Coordinate-not-control still holds: the model and the pause both live where the hardware is; Cobblr only asks.

What's covered today is in What Cobblr connects to; to add support for a machine that isn't, see Edge-bridge drivers.

(This page will grow with the connect-and-print walkthrough.)