The sd extension cable route is what I did
Fwiw- I find control using the tablet much better than the TFT. That feels clunky to me
For some reason. I’m a 44 year old that grew up with TFTs, I’d have thought I’d feel differently.
3 Likes
Thanks, reassuring to see, using a SD extension cable looks helpful. Considered Wifi SD Card?
No idea why, but my ESP01S from V1E was working, stopped working, then started working again, for now… Mentioning because others also seemed to observe unexplained intermittent failures.
Expected behavior… Was initially able to load the ESP3D setup web pages, configure settings, set to AP mode. After restart can see and join the AP’s Wifi network. Great so far, but then…
I often ended up in a state where page doesn’t load, ping responses are slow/dropped. Observing TCP retransmissions, browser never gets a full response, not seeing ack data packets (observed using Wireshark on Windows 10). Tried numerous resets and powering down. One recent change made around the time things started working is I tweaked ESP3D AP IP from 192.168.0.1 to instead be 1.2.3.4, doubt that’s related, but who knows at this point, I’ve yet to locate ESP3D logging.
V1E ESP01S…
Thanks to @tjones99’s really helpful info in Add Wifi to SKR Pro step by step I was able to quickly flash this 4MB ESP01S laying around which has been consistently working today.
So, I currently have two ESP3D/ESP01S boards working for me. Will use them until if/when decide to use v1pi or something else with fancier features.
The ESP3D keyboard jogging is a nice feature, can finally look at the bit while positioning origin. Am looking into key remapping since my amzn fire BT keyboard doesn’t have PageUp/PageDown needed for Z-/Z+. A Joystick managed by Marlin would be cool of course, but for me, a reliably working ESP3D will be an upgrade from unreliably wired Repetier-Host. Cheers!
No, because the sd card extension was $4 compared to $40 for the least expensive wifi sd card I could find. Plus, I feel antsy doing files over wifi when I had ‘hardwired’ as a cheaper option
A note about keyboard jogging: the X and Y axis are flipped in the ESP3D interface. Arrows up/down control X axis, left/right control Y axis. A little annoying
Which keyboard did you get? I got the mini one linked up thread . The main issue with it is that if I’m using keyboard mode to type in terminal commands, it doesn’t turn off the ‘X’ button being the ‘home X’ hotkey, so it Homes x (or Y if you hit Y) if I’m writing a gcode command. I have to go out of keyboard mode, type, then back into keyboard mode. It’s messed me up more than once and I’ve stopped using the keyboard for those two reasons. I only use it for making macros now, but I’ve set it up so I have set target locations for different sized boards or router/laser home points.
I’ll occasionally get a slow response if I’ve recently used my kids baby monitor app- the wifi camera for that is ESP3D based as far as I can tell, and I get a weird IP conflict. If I try to connect to the Cnc, it pulls up the camera splash page. If I close out of the app first, it’s all good.
The solution is to go back to ‘broadcast’ mode and connect to the ESP3D under its own wifi, not connect as a client on my home network
2 Likes
1 Like
My guess on the intermittent behaviour would be wifi channel interference. You can set what channel the ESP-01s uses. Try setting a channel that is not used. THATS easier said than done. You pretty much need to run a little utility that does a wifi site scan to tell you what channels are in use and how strong they are.
Smarter wifi access points are capable of doing a site scan on startup and picking an unused channel. But an ESP-01s is not a smart device. Just does what it’s told.
If your poor ESP-01 is fighting a real access point with big antennas on the same wifi channel it’s going to lose.
I use a windows app called Netspot.
1 Like
Yes, agree. ESP3D default key mappings didn’t feel intuitive for my combination of machine orientation and keyboard (Wireless BT keyboard for my Amazon Fire 10"). Was curious about ESP3D code and used this as an opportunity to learn about, and extend, ESP3D WebUI code to support configurable optional key mappings. Will send details in a bit hopefully.
Curious, has someone in the community already extended/modified ESP3D code for their V1E builds before? Pointers to your forked repo’s would be appreciated. Welcome to track my experiments in GitHub - aaronse/ESP3D-WEBUI at 3.0, cheers!
Problem: The axis orientation and direction of ESP3D’s default jogging keyboard shortcuts didn’t make sense for my build, and keyboard layout. Sounds like @Neilp didn’t like default behavior either, guessing others too?
Fix: Implemented small ESP3D-WebUI edit allowing Users to optionally configure ESP3D keyboard shortcuts. Requires uploading a index.html.gz that includes the changes. Added a key remapping property to the Jogging section. This enables arbitrary keyboard shortcut overriding, defining, or suppression even.
Shared a short demo (@7:53):
Sent an initial pull request mainly to communicate the idea and possible approach. The edits don’t handle a bunch of cases/scenarios, and there’s no documentation (@coders, see jog.js to discover Ids of functions that can be mapped). That said, I personally like setting key remapping property with the following for my build…
ArrowLeft=btn-X,ArrowRight=btn+X,ArrowUp=btn+Y,ArrowDown=btn-Y,'=btn+Z,/=btn-Z
Hope that helps. Cheers!
2 Likes
I assume I need one of those data writer dongles to do this?
I have zero ESP3D coding knowledge and bought mine configured from Ryan.
The reverse mapping is bugging me. I mean- it’s literally a Cnc controller interface, with the keys backwards.
Thanks!
I mean the shortcut is just stand to the left side… 
I’m pretty sure me, you, and jeff talked about that way back and y’all said I just needed to reorient my thinking, and use it like a Cnc operator
Don’t need a dongle for this. You’d need the programmer dongle if/when firmware needs to be updated. Unrelated to this change, there’s a recovery scenario where the dongle can be helpful.
Fortunately, the web app can be updated using the web app 
You can upload index.html.gz, refresh the browser to load the updated website pages, set the key remapping property, save changes, refresh the browser to pickup new settings, and your new keyboard shortcuts will kick in. Assuming I didn’t screw up the code changes…
I initially created the video above mainly to communicate key remapping idea to ESP3D folks. But on reflection, with a bit more effort maybe it could help folks considering using ESP3D to go wireless, either completely headless, or enhance their SKR+TFT experience even?
2 Likes
Awesome info
I’ll try this tomorrow, thank you so much!
Where in the web panel do I upload?
OMG I did not notice that was a video!
I chimed in to your conversation with Luc, I completely forgot to bring this up with him before. I bought the keyboard but I only ever use the esp3d with a touch screen laptop or phone. Sorry everyone for forgetting. I did not add it to my list.
1 Like
I honestly think they are just mapped wrong. Why would anyone want the keys that way?
Vaguely recall you wanting to suppress key presses from being considered jogging key shortcuts.
For example to prevent ‘x’ key from triggering X homing, you could define a remapping that includes… x=NOP
Where NOP means no operation, don’t do anything, just ignore. Sorry if that’s not clear, I probably should’ve used different value to enable suppressing key shortcuts.
Right? Makes no sense
Correct. In keyboard mode, if I press X as part of a gcode entry in terminal, it’ll home the X axis, since it has an X key press mapped as a homing event
So if I added x=nop, it will stop that behaviour? That would be awesome- I’d get full use of the keyboard back
??? that is not cool. It should be ctrl X or something.
So why not use your phone though? What is the main benefit of the keyboard? (I am staring at 3 BTT boards with wifi, like right now on my desk, trying to decide which one to use going forward). Is wifi not the way to go? Most inexpensive laptops and all phones are touch screen with keyboards when needed. So why the wireless keyboard?
It’s mainly because I’m 44 and I like the tactile touch of the keyboard buttons… and I already bought it for use purely on the lr3 and I hate not using it.
I could just use the phone, and have been. And it’s been great.
I’d like to use the keyboard with the clicky buttons
Nothing more to it than that
Edit: wifi is definitely the way to go. I love this upgrade.
2 Likes
