We have been tinkering with the XYZ Davinci 3D Printer for a while now and we were looking around to find some way to use an external slicer with our 3d printer instead of the supplied XYZware software. Preferably Slic3r, since it is very powerful, mature and of course free. Without going into the technical details, there are lots of different options for using a generic silcer for slicing your models. The simplest one is to take the generated .gcode file and perform a few certain manipulations so that the code is readable by the Da Vinci printer.

Since we could not find a simple and easy way to do the conversion we came up with this little ".gcode" to ".w3" converter app. All you have to do is upload your .gcode file and the app will make all the necessary changes so that your DaVinci printer is able to understand and print the sliced model. The newly generated file is then automatically downloaded to your computer ready to be uploaded to the printer.

Uploading files to the 3d printer is not possible with the latest versions of the XYZware. Please make sure you use version XYZware version 1.0.29.4 or earlier. You can find the software (plus a lot more info) at the Voltivo forum.