New release candidate: 1.3.0rc2

A bit later than originally anticipated¹, today I can finally present you the second release candidate for the upcoming 1.3.0 release!

Compared to 1.3.0rc1 this RC fixes some regressions that some of you or I observed (and a full hearted Thank You! btw to everyone who switched to 1.3.0rc1 and reported back on their experiences, every tiny bit helped a lot!) and improves on quite a number of things that were still not ideal. I also did add four new features I had planned to include in 1.3.0 but didn’t manage to finish in time for 1.3.0rc1 and which have been something I wanted to do for ages now, to improve the user experience and supportability.

Short overview of the larger points from the changelog:

• OctoPrint will now track the current print head position on pause and cancel and provide it as new template variables pause_position/cancel_position for the relevant GCODE scripts. This will allow more intelligent pause codes that park the print head at a rest position during pause and move it back to the exact position it was before the pause on resume (Example). Note that this is NOT enabled by default and for now will necessitate adjusting the pause and resume GCODE scripts yourself since position tracking with multiple extruders or when printing from SD is currently not fool proof thanks to firmware limitations regarding reliable tracking of the various E values and the currently selected tool T.
• There is now an (optional) firmware auto detection in place. This should hopefully reduce issues for first-time users running a firmware that needs specific flags to be set for proper support.
• New command line safe mode flag --safe and config setting server.startOnceInSafeMode that disables all third party plugins when active during startup. The config setting will automatically be removed from config.yaml after the server has started through successfully. Through the new octoprint config command it can also be easily set from command line by issuing octoprint config set --bool server.startOnceInSafeMode true. In the long run I also hope to add a specific “Restart in safe mode” command, but for 1.3.0 we’ll leave it as it is now.
• Auto migration of the old manually configured system commands (restart, reboot and shutdown) to the new application wide commands. That means that you will no longer have duplicated entries in your system menu if you had both configured ;) (I also made it do a backup of your config.yaml before that migration, just in case you want to roll back to 1.2.x again)
• The new bounding box warning feature now allows to define a custom bounding box for your printer (in its printer profile) for which no out-of-bounds warning should be issued. That should hopefully make all you Prusa i3 Mk2 owners happy where I’ve heard a nozzle priming outside of the print volume is part of the standard start GCODE sequence.

You can find the full changelog and release notes as usual on Github.

If you are tracking the “Devel RC” release channel, you should soon get an update notification just like you are used to from stable releases. If you are coming from 1.3.0rc1, you might run into an update error that actually isn’t one, please see the “Note for Upgraders coming from 1.3.0rc1” in the release notes for more details on this.

If you are tracking the “Maintenance RC” release channel, you will not get an update notification for this release candidate. If you want to give it a test whirl, you’ll need to switch to the “Devel RC” release channel.

If you are not interested in helping to test devel release candidates, just ignore this post, 1.3.0 stable will hit your instance via the usual way once it’s ready :)

Depending on the feedback regarding this version I’ll look into fixing any observed regressions and bugs and pushing out a follow-up version within the next two weeks. I really hope we’ll see a stable 1.3.0 release before the holidays :)

Links

• Changelog and Release Notes
• Using Release Channels
• How to file a bug report
• Contribution Guidelines (also relevant for creating bug reports!)
• FAQ
• Documentation
• How to roll back to an earlier release (OctoPi)
• How to roll back to an earlier release (manual install)

Footnotes

Images