wireless board?

Mostly Printed CNC - MPCNC Advice
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hi

I am planning my last item before I start on a build, my question is what is the best control board to use( min Rambo control board) or is there a control board that will supports a wireless operation I can use?

I saw a cnc v1 build on YouTube that used a control board with a wireless router?

thanks

newbee

 

thanks

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If you want to go wireless and stick with the mini Rambo you could then get a raspberry pi and have the wireless control all set through it. It’s what I use with CNCjs and it is nice to not have to connect with wires.

It will be interesting to see what develops with the ESP32 controller boards. https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/06/26/open-source-esp32-3d-printer-board-marlin-2-0-firmware

 

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There are a couple builds using the duet 2 wifi card but it’s pricey. That being said I ordered one yesterday to use when my son comes home for Canadian Thanksgiving. I put one on my ender5 after frying the original board and love it.

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you can get a wifi module on the SKR pro board

 

I have the skr pro on order already have the wifi module…

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you can get a wifi module on the SKR pro board

 

I have the skr pro on order already have the wifi module…

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hi

ok let me be open with all of you, electrical units are a pay grade above me, so what would be a kiss board for some one like me. I have not yet read up on some of your suggested boards but I will. are these a plug and play units?

many thanks to all of you.

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The raspberry pi has a robust support and resource pool. You don’t have to get the latest model. A CanaKit for a 3B+ from Amazon will be about $79. Add a camera and longer camera ribbon cable and that will be another $30. What you get is a wifi setup that can do a camera feed and can control the board. It doesn’t need a monitor. You access it through a web page it serves up from any computer on your local network.

I taught gradeschool and highschool tech for about thirty years. I am very familiar with them so that is why I recommend it. There are other solutions, but this is what I use.

There are other solutions, but the raspberry pi ecosystem is one of the biggest and it allows you many options. It’s code base continues to develop.

These things run from an SD card so you can put in a new operating system just by switching the card.

If you haven’t checked out Octoprint/Octopi for controlling your 3D printer, this is a must have. It frees you from SD cards and USB cables. It’s super robust and is just what people use to control their printers remotely. You can also use the rPi to control other things like the lights and the dust collector and other things if you every want to look into the more advanced electronics.

I am super familiar with it all and @Jeffeb3 (right?) has an image all set up for the MPCNC.

 

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https://www.v1engineering.com/dip-a-toe-in-the-pool-v1pi/

 

Link to Jeff’s v1pi image. It has cnc.js as well, but I think there’s still issues with cnc.js and the marlin firmware on our boards. Like Marlin said, rambo with the pi as a wireless controller is probably the way to go if you’re just starting out. More of us use these than the other boards.

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I am going to bump this conversation and ask if there are any new updates or suggestions. I am using Raspberry Pi with Octoprint on four of my machines. Its great but not perfect. Depending on my setup I run into issues with the 32 bit pi talking to the 8 bit control board. I want to consolidate and eliminate problems. I am about to build two more printers and I want to use a reliable board with a web interface for control and starting prints. I also like having the web cam feeds.

So I am asking a very specific question. "Is there anything else like Octoprint that is an all in one Control board?"

These are the options I have found:

  • Duet Wifi is the closest I have found but it doesn’t support a live web cam feed from what I can tell.
  • SKR doesn’t support a headless print interface without connecting to a raspberry pi again
  • Clipper makes Octoprint do all the heavy processing but there is still an 8 bit board that controls the motors.
  • Prusa’s new little Mini printer uses a 32 bit Buddy board that can support a web interface but again no camera feed.

Am I missing something else out there?

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The Duet Wifi does not support a cameral connection on the board, but does support embedding a web cam feed in the web based control interface.

In the settings interface, under the “User Interface” tab there is a “Webcam Integration” section where one can enter the “Optional URL to an external Webcam:”

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I have an octopi board driving a logitech webcam streaming to my duet. Any ip based webcam will work though.

duet_webcam
duet_webcam1915×932 265 KB

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That sounds good enough to me. I recently saw how to turn a raspberry pi into an ip web cam server. You can connect several cameras to it at once. This sounds like a good plan to me. Thanks for the help and advice. I will start shopping for a duet wifi to try this out.

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Get the one with an external antenna. Mine had shitty reception.

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I have a grbl_esp32 board and it has a web ui. It doesn’t have a camera, that I am aware of. I haven’t used the mpcnc one, but the 2ch one is what I use on my ZenXY. I have the MPCNC one, I just haven’t had time to set it up yet.

I would have a hard time justifying the duet wifi’s price. Especially if you are using a pi anyway for the webcam. But I’ve never had a problem with octoprint and Marlin boards or cncjs and a grbl board. :man_shrugging:

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Yeah. The price is a tough pill. Because of that I am thinking about getting a Duet 2 Maestro (wired network instead of WiFi for cheaper) first then if I like it upgrading some of my other printers with the WiFi or maestro boards as I need.

Some of the problems I am having with the raspberry pi’s are as follows:

  • the Prusa Mk3s is best used with a pi 0 W because it can plug right into the board. No cables needed. But it is soooo slow! The pi 0 is really slow. Can’t use octolapse. And if I check on the print remotely I run the risk of ruining the print when the web cam stream loads up. It can actually cause the print to skip steps.
  • using a pi 3b+ on the Mk3s isn’t much better. If I use short cables to wire directly to the control board the pi gets undervolted and has power issues. That causes network issues and connection issues.
  • using the pi 3b+ on external power and a USB cable connection causes other connection issues that also lead to random lost steps during a print.
  • using any pi with octoprint prevents me from using the power loss print recovery features n the mk3s. Sadly that happens a lot at my office. Lost 5 print jobs from power outages since Christmas. Sigh.
  • using the pi 3 b+ on my Lulzbot TAZ 5 is better. It uses a RAMBO 1.3 board but still it has some issues. Sometimes I can’t connect to the pi or to the printer without a reboot.

Sorry for the long list. I am just frustrated by the pi issues. I like the idea of being able to update the firmware remotely as well. So yeah… my frustration might be making me willing to pay for a full set of new control boards.

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Yeah, IIRC, the zero is basically a different form factor of the pi B+ (not 2B+ even). I wouldn’t recommend a camera on the zero.

The 3B+ should take more power. That also makes sense.

This might just be a bad USB cable. You could also try wiring the serial in directly, or try a different USB cable. This is how I run both of my printers, and although I don’t run them as often as you do, I do not have these issues.

So this is for a 3D printer or a CNC? Octoprint can’t really handle that on it’s own. But you can enable SD support, and then you can upload straight to the SD card from the web interface, and/or run jobs from the SD card, but started from the web UI. I will warn you though, uploading to the SD card over the serial port is very slow.

That is really strange. I’m not sure why you would get errors connecting, and a reboot would help, but you print fine once connected. Is there more than one port showing up? Linux usually has no trouble finding the serial port on the rambos.

I can see why you might want something else. The grbl esp board I posted does not do printing though. Maybe a duet wifi is a good choice for you.