Any decent gcode sender programs for Linux?

I've just gotten my reprap all tuned and making decent prints, so I'm ready to do some all-nighters but I can't get a print to make it more than about 5 hours as my laptop connected to my printer keeps shutting itself down due to overheating (that's the message I get from POST when I restart). Running 'top' I see that 'python' is using 80% cpu?!?! I'm running cura which I understand uses python for a lot of its tasks, but 80% just to send/recv from serial port? I m a c++ professional (languishing in the gawd aweful visual c++ realm, but it pays the bills) and have done serial programming in the past and I know that serial comms are next to nothing for a CPU (at least in c++ native code).

I'm thinking of writing an app to just handshake with the serial port and send gcode but I don't want to reinvent the wheel. What else is out there? I'm running cura on gentoo Linux on an older dell laptop; it's old, but hell, a 386 sx should handle serial comms without breaking a sweat.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/01/2016 11:51PM by hoxsiew.

pronterface work fine, and if you wish to ditch the GUI pronsole.py

Still python though..

Laptop overheating and USB comms problems are just two of dozens of ways that a host computer will let you down. Get an SD card reader for the printer and print from it. There are still plenty of other ways for prints to fail, but getting rid of the host computer is probably the single change that yields the biggest improvement in reliability.

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]

the_digital_dentist: That is true, but even printing off SD, one might still leave a laptop hooked up -- I do. Not everyone's hardware is as reliable as yours, so it's a good idea to have a stop button and such ready to go.

Sending a command via USB is a lousy way to emergency-stop the machine. USB commands get stacked in a buffer and executed when the controller feels like it. If you want an emergency stop, flip the power switch to off.

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Ultra MegaMax Dominator 3D printer: [drmrehorst.blogspot.com]

I ordered a SD board and I'll see how that works out.

I use pronterface on Linux Mint 17.3 without problem. Depending on your distribution you may or may not need to update pySerial to get 250000 bps data rate working (with Mint I had to update).

It is better to print from the SD card as others suggested though.