FAQ?
Can ChiliPeppr be used offline?
My equipment is networked, but not to the 'net.
You could load it while online then disconnect. Most folks throw serial port json server on an old Windows box or raspberry pi and then run chilipeppr from their laptop over home Wi-Fi. There was a thread a week ago about somebody writing a macro in chilipeppr to generate a full inline version that pulled all dependencies so you could save local as html to achieve offline. From my perspective the cloud adds so much power it’s not worth offline.
Ah… but my corporate background is one in which Cobal programs were used until 2005… so I much prefer software that doesn’t rely on someone else’s computer to stay up and available online.
Well, ChiliPeppr runs off of Google App Engine. So it’s only down if Google is down. Have had 100% uptime since launch of ChiliPeppr 7 months ago. The other thing is, here’s the latest list of cloud connected resources you would lose if you go offline:
- Always getting the latest codebase update (roughly weekly releases right now)
- JScut integration
- WebRTC webcam integration
- Dynamic add-on loading (the Eagle BRD Import widget uses this)
- Upcoming OpenCV image recognition from the cloud
- Upcoming slicer from the cloud
- Upcoming “TinyG in the cloud” where 3 TinyG’s will be made available to all ChiliPeppr users for testing at any time to test run your Gcode as if it’s a real job.
- The tutorial videos in many of the widgets and upcoming widgets
i love cloud software, but I also see the advantage of being able to run offline. For one, it allows you to run on an air-gapped machine/network, which is sometimes what folks want for security if they are running on an older machine or an unpatched OS, or a machine without firewall and malware protection, etc.
Secondly, another reason might be to consistently run with the same version. I’ve been incredibly impressed with how fast John has been able to fix things and update CP. It’s incredible. I’m guessing that some folks, assuming they are running a few jobs over a course of a week or a month and have gotten to a version that works well, would want a way to keep running that version without any changes to it. Running offline would be one way to accomplish that. There could be others.
Just throwing my $0.02 here because I’ve thought about doing the same thing for those reasons.
Running your own mirror to get all the components local is ok as well but like John said, we live in the cloud age where everything is up all the time. There has been another instance where jsfiddle goes crazy but they fixed that almost immediately.
At the end of the day, you are a user of a software and if there is enough need, someone will step up to develop a solution. Perhaps you can ping the person who is working on an inlining version to voice your support?