Hi, I'm Aldo.

I'm an artist and creative coder, and over here I'm mostly known for being the creator and maintainer of many plugins for Ultimaker Cura, and as a contributor to that slicer.

My work on the Cura slicer

I got my first 3d printer, an original Ultimaker, in 2013. When Ultimaker launched the first iteration of their newly rewritten slicer, I had some remarks. In 2015/2016 I had the pleasure of working as a UX designer and developer for Ultimaker, helping to get Ultimaker Cura 2.x ready for the launch of the Ultimaker 3. This gave me a unique insight in the inner workings of Cura (and Ultimaker).

After leaving Ultimaker to be able to do other projects too, I continued contributing to Cura. This allowed me to focus working on features that were often requested by the 3d printing community at large, but were not on the agenda of Ultimaker product management. I am now the biggest 3rd party contributor to the Cura project. Among many bug fixes and smaller features, I contributed the following to Cura (in no particular order):

• The machine settings dialog to support custom as well as delta-style printers
• Many sidebar improvements, such as search, sets of visible settings and tabbing through settings
• Support for custom themes and the first dark theme
• Print weight and material cost estimations
• Suppression of support using the Support Blocker
• The ability to include arbitrary settings in material definitions
• Many updates for USB printing, firmware updating and the print monitor

Plugins for Cura

Cura is architected to be extensible with plugins. Much of the basic functionality in Cura is implemented as plugins that are installed and enabled by default. The plugin system allows me to add functionality that may not benefit every user, but still large groups of users. My plugins improve workflows, add missing functionality or provide alternatives to how things are designed by Ultimaker.

My plugins constitute about 40% of the total downloads from the Ultimaker Marketplace. The cumulative number of downloads crossed half a million in under 1.5 year of the Marketplace existence. My most popular plugin, the OctoPrint Connection plugin, was the first plugin to be downloaded 100.000 times.

Sponsor me, maybe?

Ultimaker Cura has come a long way, but there's still a lot to do. There is still a lot of functionality requested that slips the attention of Ultimaker. Maintaining the plugins so they stay compatible with future as well as older versions of Cura is a lot of work. I would like to keep contributing to the project. Thanks for your contribution!

You can sponsor me with a monthly micro-payment here on Github, or with a one-time contribution via Paypal