Saturday 19 June 2010

RepRap host software on Mac

Just a quick note to anyone trying to get the RepRap host software to run on a new Mac (Mac OSX 10.6.3).
I downloaded the software from the wiki and unzipped it.

To get it to work, I had some problems trying to make it accept a classpath. Eventually I did the following:

Make a directory ~/Library/Java/Extensions
Copy any files with *.jar and *.jnilib extensions to that directory.

The librxtxSerial.jnilib file supplied in the reprap software didn't seem to work. I found one at
http://iharder.sourceforge.net/current/java/ and I replaced it with this newer one.

Go to the reprap host software directory in a terminal window (you need to be in a directory with the rr-logo-green-url.png file in it).

type 'java org.reprap.Main'

This brings up the main reprap windows on my mac, and I was able to load and slice a .stl file. YMMV :-)

UPDATE:
As pointed out by Tony, this is not the most elegant solution. It doesn't help that I was looking at the 'mac-experimental' version from last year, rather that re-building from source :-( oops.

I also found out why I was having problems with the classpath :
java org.reprap.Main -cp $CLASSPATH 
is NOT equivalent to
java -cp $CLASSPATH  org.reprap.Main 

Doh!
This is usually true of any other command-line program, but any arguments AFTER the classname are passed to the class Main() method. I blame late-night programming :-)
Ignore all the java/extension rubbish, just use instructions from
http://tonybuser.com/reprap-host-on-osx-snow-leopard

A command line that also works is
 java -cp "*" org.reprap.Main 

1 comment:

Tony Buser said...

I figured out a cleaner way to do it, here's what I came up with:

http://tonybuser.com/reprap-host-on-osx-snow-leopard