A bit more progress and observations.
The SD card I had installed had something not right, so I stuck it in the Ubuntu machine and used Gparted to completely wipe and then create a Fat32 partition. Now is working great in the Jackpot board. 16Gb SD card, for whatever that is worth.
Gcode file upload to the SD card is a dream over WiFi in AP mode, very fast.
Similarly, running the gcode file works great from the UI.
I tested multiple times disconnecting while a job was running, no issues at all with stuttering or corruption of the job.
I did many runs replacing my material test gcode as well as a couple of attempts at engraving a V1 logo. In one of those, as soon as I started the upload I got the dreaded memory errors and lost connection. I had to power cycle, then power cycle again after that because the first time up it did the thing where it won’t accept the WiFi password.
I did replace the harness pigtail for the laser module as I discussed up thread. This one pulls 12V power and return from the power inlet (put both cables into the crimp ferrules). It’s working fine and I’ll leave it until I find a suitable SSR or P channel MOSFET to use for switching the laser with the enable GPIO.
I just realized I didn’t install the heat sinks on the TMC2209s, so I’ll do that now.
Of the many times I connected and disconnected WiFI over the course of the day, there were three or maybe four times when I had to power cycle as I occasionally get that situation where the ESP32 won’t accept the WiFi password. Power cycles resolve that.
I’m going to start looking into adding buttons to the UI and also am very interested in the capability to run gcode in response to an input pin. Lots of really cool features in FluidNC that I’m starting to discover.
What I do notice is that when a connection is made, if there’s no disconnection then the system is very stable and the only hiccup I saw when staying connected was the time when a file upload caused the out of memory error. After that, when the system was back up I uploaded the same file 10 times without issue, so I’m not sure what that is.
All of my connections today were in AP mode, and I only connected with one of my laptops.
I haven’t yet tried connecting with a phone but will do that in the coming week.