/WirelessPrinting

Print wirelessly from Cura to your 3D printer connected to an ESP8266 module

Primary LanguagePython

WirelessPrinting Build Status

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Allows you to print from Cura to your 3D printer connected to an ESP8266 module.

UNDER DEVELOPMENT. See Issues. Pull requests welcome!

ESP8266WirelessPrint

The esp8266/Arduino sketch ESP8266WirelessPrint.ino is uploaded to a ESP8266 module.

Compiling

Before you compile this, you need to create a file called private.h in the same direcory as the sketch. It should contain:

const char* ssid = "________";
const char* password = "________";

This should be replaced by something more elegant. Pull requests welcome.

As or March 2017, this code compiled on Arduino hourly and esp8266/Arduino git master.

Connection

The ESP8266 module is connected with your 3D printer via the serial connection and to a SD card (acting as a cache during printing).

You need to connect

  • TX, RX from your 3D printer to the ESP8266 module (EXT-1 header on RAMPS boards)
  • Power and GND from your 3D printer to the ESP8266 module (attention, the EXT-1 header on RAMPS boards has 5V while the ESP8266 needs 3.3V)
  • SD card to the ESP8266 module
  • A capacitor across the power pins of the SD card

A note on SD cards

Using a SanDisk 2 GB card formatted with the SD Card Formatter from the SD Association seems to work for me. Also, putting a capacitor across the power pins of the SD card appears to increase the probability of the card being recognized.

Usage

To print, just open http://3d.local/ and upload a G-Code file using the form:

Upload

Ycan also print from the command line using curl:

curl -F "file=@/path/to/some.gcode" http://3d.local/print

WirelessPrinting

Cura plugin which discovers ESP8266WirelessPrint instances using Zeroconf and enables printing directly to ESP8266WirelessPrint.

Installation

  • Make sure your Cura version is 2.4 or newer. On Linux, download Cura-2.4.0.AppImage.
  • Download or clone the repository into [Cura installation folder]/plugins/WirelessPrinting or in ~/.local/share/cura/plugins on Linux. The folder of the plugin itself must be WirelessPrinting
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/cura/plugins
( cd ~/.local/share/cura/plugins ; git clone https://github.com/probonopd/WirelessPrinting.git )

How to use

  • Make sure WirelessPrint is up and running, and the discovery plugin is not disabled
  • In Cura, add a Printer matching the 3D printer you have connected to WirelessPrint
  • Select "Connect to WirelessPrint" on the Manage Printers page.
  • Select your WirelessPrint instance from the list
  • From this point on, the print monitor should be functional and you should be able to switch to "Print on " on the bottom of the sidebar.