An effective data structure for a 3d printing slicer API

Abstract

3D printing slicer is the essential part of additive manufacturing. While the algorithms and technology of slicing is mostly independent from characteristics of 3D printer hardware, the machine code is much closer and related to them. So someone who wants to build up his own machine-code generator will need a generic and effective slicing API. There is, however, no such a slicing API for this purpose. In this paper, we propose an effective data structure of such a slicer API and define the elements in the structure. So the machine-code generator can be plug-in-Able to the slicing API and the adaptation process for each 3D printer will be simpler and effective.