Wireless Physical Control  

RE: Wireless Physical Control

Maybe I'm wrong, I doubt if anybody has a offtheshelf product to do this but ..

First up you can send data to the SD card remotely (either a WiFi SD card or USB)

Assuming you can program ESP or similar.

Easy enough to duplicate the rotary encoder remotely. The Problem is the LCD, but doable.

The downside is that you have tons of software, seriously modify your printer and ultimately is it worth it?

I don't know (not that thats any sort of measure) of a list of functions that are available on the Prusa display and not on Octoprint, maybe someone could provide that so you'd know if it was worth the candle. As you obviously realize, there are a number of remote control type apps for 3D printing, perhaps you should look at those possibility's before you go hard core.

RE: Wireless Physical Control

The HD44780 protocol is pretty well defined. It probably wouldn't be too challenging (just tedious) to "reverse" implement it to emulate one from a set of GPIO input pins on a Pi (as opposed to driving one via output). 

RE: Wireless Physical Control

I wouldn't call a small, fun project hardcore.  Both emulating an encoder and reversing the LCD are relatively simple, but tedious.  There were those exact examples included with the MC68H dev kit I hung onto for the last few decades.  In my opinion the SD card presents the largest hurdle for me, as I am unfamiliar with reading/writing to a singular device from multiple devices.  I am unsure if this would require SPI write from the esp and communication to the einsy via tx/rx - which may completely defeat my purpose.  That is the portion of this that would be completely new to me. ...and is where I am currently stuck.

I can assure you that after playing with OctoPrint and even writing a small installer for it - it is not at all what I am looking for.  I wish to avoid any additional processing with g-code or any additional timing overhead.  esp3D is similar, and it seems ponterface is the basis for many.  Again..this is not what I am looking to accomplish.  I do not want to replace any processing - only allow actual remote control.  Not control of another application.

And yes...I realize that this may seem tedious, or even pointless.....but I enjoy it greatly. If it amounts to nothing, I still consider it time well spent learning.   My mk3s has gotten me back into hobbies I haven't visited in years. I am just now going through the einsy schematic/pinout and reprap basic connections.  I love the amount of information and documentation available.

RE: Wireless Physical Control

Posted by: @nilok

I wouldn't call a small, fun project hardcore.  Both emulating an encoder and reversing the LCD are relatively simple, but tedious.  There were those exact examples included with the MC68H dev kit I hung onto for the last few decades.  In my opinion the SD card presents the largest hurdle for me, as I am unfamiliar with reading/writing to a singular device from multiple devices.  I am unsure if this would require SPI write from the esp and communication to the einsy via tx/rx - which may completely defeat my purpose.  That is the portion of this that would be completely new to me. ...and is where I am currently stuck.

I can assure you that after playing with OctoPrint and even writing a small installer for it - it is not at all what I am looking for.  I wish to avoid any additional processing with g-code or any additional timing overhead.  esp3D is similar, and it seems ponterface is the basis for many.  Again..this is not what I am looking to accomplish.  I do not want to replace any processing - only allow actual remote control.  Not control of another application.

And yes...I realize that this may seem tedious, or even pointless.....but I enjoy it greatly. If it amounts to nothing, I still consider it time well spent learning.   My mk3s has gotten me back into hobbies I haven't visited in years. I am just now going through the einsy schematic/pinout and reprap basic connections.  I love the amount of information and documentation available.

The FlashAir card solves that problem by letting you send files over wifi, as suggested. The SPI bottleneck to write to it is very slow and while (e.g.) octoprint support doing that it's not really useful due to the length of time it takes to send that data over serial. 

The printer is basically a read-only device, so at least you don't have to worry about concurrent writes to the same file on the card; just need to make sure the gcode is all there before starting the print. 

RE: Wireless Physical Control

Its funny you mention that, as it is what got me to the questions I asked!  FlashAir was suggested in another thread of mine, and that got me to wondering about emulating the controls/display to complete the convenience.  I have a drawer full of Wemos D1s, esp12s, and esp32s......that I knew I could do that with.  Which led me right back to wondering if I could then get replace the flashair with one of the $3 SPI sd card readers on amazon and plug it into the esp.  I realize the i/o is limited on those boards....which is why I also added a question about firmware mods to accommodate other display forms.......but even a mega with a esp8266 is cheap enough to use to have fun with.

RE: Wireless Physical Control

@nilok

"Which led me right back to wondering if I could then get replace the flashair with one of the $3 SPI sd card readers on amazon and plug it into the esp."

The point about the FlashAir that it is essentially a dual port SDcard , one port physical SDcard and the other WiFi. What you need to do is plug something in the printers SD slot (SD card extension), connect the various pins to your ESP and program that to emulate a SDDcard - scary.

Realistically, is it worth it, when there are several solution that will do that (and a great deal more) for you. If you're concerned about Octoprint "getting in the way" you do have the option (in Octoprint and I think in PrusaSlicer) to load directly to the SDcard (via USB).

RE: Wireless Physical Control

@towlerg

Not too scary - its been done with WebDAV already and a couple of resistors......but it doesn't emulate, it shares.....or technically replaces.  Paired with ESP3D, it would do exactly what I want.  But after the research I put in getting there finally, I found the ESP3D author had already reached that point way earlier.  They partnered with Panucatt to release the wifi backpack - which accomplishes exactly what I want for $15. What I found a little upsetting was in the end all the open source work that went into esp3d, then into an open-source hardware company......is sitting for sale without any info released about the hardware.  I stopped my research at the unanswered threads requesting hardware specs.

So ends my search.....thanks for the help and feedback!  I learned a ton!

RE: Wireless Physical Control

What is your solution to your original post?

RE: Wireless Physical Control

@towlerg

I don't have a solution yet.  I'm still learning how to ask the right questions and look in the proper places.  I learned that what I want is the same thing a lot of dev's have been working on for years....so my search for that is over.   I also learned what I needed about the hardware. After everything I read, I think that multiplexing the SD card seems like the best option.  I may change my mind after diving into the prusa firmware, tho.

I cloned the espwebdav project and may look at updating it to work with current libraries, but it does compile with the old and I honestly think there are better minds than mine working on this exact thing.  I saw someone named 3D-Gussner pop up in the threads, and they seemed to be after the same thing I was back in 2018.  It sounded like they were running a custom version of MK2 firmware and very very happy with the results.  Then they seemed to stop posting in the project.  I know I've seen that name in the prusa repos.....and I would really like to start looking into their stuff.

If  esp3d or even just ponterface, could play nicely with the extra features baked into prusa firmware, and have sd card direct access.....it could be an awesome setup.  I was able to build up a working board in under 10minutes with nothing but a WeMos D1, OLED, and Zener diode.  I love my pi's...but this is not the place for Linux.

I am waiting on my firmware build to complete as I type.  So...no solution, just a thanks and a different direction.