Print Wirelessly
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This may be a silly question, and I may be overlooking something, but how do I print wirelessly? I am connected in the control panel via wifi and I can control the printer via wifi. However in every slicer I don't see it as an option to connect to. I see it when I connect via USB, and some slicers such as pronterface, Cura, or Simply 3D show a bluetooth option, does the duet wifi even have bluetooth capabilities? I have been using a USB cord, however I would like to omit that as it goes across a walk way and my children are subject able to trip on the cord, yanking it out, and that would be very bad. Oh and I am using a Mac, if that matters. Thanks
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The general idea here seems to be:
A slicer outputs a gcode file (commands for printer to execute).
Printer control board take a gcode file and runs them.In any slicer, you should be able to save the gcode file and then you can upload that to the duet wifi via its web interface.
Now, that process may be improved, I think I read that Slic3r can upload directly to RepRapFirmware…. But that's fundamentally the same thing.
I also feel it's important to state you are not "live streaming" a job. You are doing a one time upload of the entire job file so that it is local on the duet board, and then telling it to run that.
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Yeah it seems this question gets asked a lot. I think it's because most of us start off printing tethered to a PC and "drip feeding" gcode line by line to the printer. When setting up a new machine this is advantageous as it's easier generally to move the head around, send m119, adjust the axis min and max from a PC host like pronterface. Plus a basic printer doesn't have any memory to store gcode so you have to do it this way.
Once your machine is tuned, and running reliably a lot of people switch (on ramps/mega or equivalents) to sd card printing with addition of an sd/Lcd module, as you don't need the control - you need reliability that sd cards give you, and pcs an usb cables do not.
With duet/RRF you get the best of both worlds a web interface that can do everything that pronterface can do, and the ability to send the whole gcode file to the printer, start printing it and turn your PC off altogether. It would not be more reliable to drip feed via WiFi, what happens if your neighbour switches wifi channels, or your router crashes etc… No problem for a 30 minute print? How about a 3 day print?
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You make an excellent point, I never really thought about all the things that could go wrong during a print over wifi. It would be terrible to get into a print that deep and have it fail. Time is more valuable than the lost material. The only way that would work is to send the whole job at once and have it load onto the machines ram. I am going to guess these little guys don't really contain enough ram to do that anyhow. Thanks for the explanation!
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Well that's the thing a duetwifi card has a micro sd slot, in fact it has to have an sd card inserted to work. So I've got a 4gb card in mine and could store a few hundred complete gcode files if I wanted to. No PC required. You can stick a 32gb card in there if you want.
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Mac with S3D… put this in your Scripts/Additional terminal commands for post processing section.
You will need to update the IP address to your Duet. When you save the gcode (it doesnt matter where), it will at the same time upload to the duet and start printing right away. Be sure you check your printer before printing, Its easy to forget a print or maybe even just a skirt is still there. You can turn off your computer after it finishes uploading. The gcode is completely on the Duet. You will not be able to control the printer from S3D at this point, you will need to use the web interface.
curl --data-binary "@[output_filepath]" -X POST [http://192.168.5.26/rr_upload?name=gcodes](http://192.168.5.26/rr_upload?name=gcodes)[output_filename].gcode
curl -G http://192.168.5.26/rr_gcode –data-urlencode "gcode=M32 [output_filename].gcode"EDIT: This might have problems with certain characters in the filenames. I had a failed upload with a space in the filename. I havent had time to play with that yet.
