Print wirelessly from Cura, PrusaControl, or Slic3r PE to your 3D printer connected to an ESP8266 module.
UNDER DEVELOPMENT. See Issues. Pull requests welcome!
Printer SD card slot | OctoPrint | WirelessPrint |
---|---|---|
Need to plug SD card into computer and then into printer for each print | Ethernet and wireless | Wireless |
No cost (comes with many printers) | High cost (Raspberry Pi, Power supply, SD card) | Inexpensive |
No clutter on desktop | Clutter on desktop (Raspberry Pi, cable) | No clutter (can be placed inside printer electronics box) |
No set-up needed | Set-up needed (full Linux operating system, hundreds of megabytes) | Only quick wireless network setup needed |
No maintenance needed (other than replacing broken SD card slots) | High maintenance needed (OS updates) | Low maintenance needed (Firmware updates for bugfixes and new features) |
No extra power consumption | 2.5 W power consumption | Under 1 W power consumption |
No webcam | Webcam can be attached | No webcam |
No notifications | Notifications, e.g., "print ready" | Notifications possible (send pull requests) |
Cumbersome for print farms (sneakernet) | Suitable for print farms (can be managed centrally) | Suitable for print farms (can be managed centrally, OctoPrint compatible protocol subset) |
Readymade, pre-assembled, flashed and tested hardware may be available, please contact me for information.
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)
- Optional: SD card shield to the ESP8266 module (a capacitor across the power pins of the SD card; SD shields have this). Using a SanDisk 2 GB card formatted with the SD Card Formatter from the SD Association seems to work for me. If no SD card is connected, then the internal SPIFFS memory (3 MB) is used
- A matching case for a WeMos D1 mini and microSD shield can be found at http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2287618
The esp8266/Arduino sketch ESP8266WirelessPrintAsync.ino
is uploaded to a ESP8266 module. As or July 2017, this code compiled on Arduino hourly and esp8266/Arduino git master. See .travis.yml
for how this is compiled on Travis CI.
Pre-built binaries are available on GitHub Releases.
The following external libraries need to be installed:
mkdir -p $HOME/Arduino/libraries/
cd $HOME
git clone https://github.com/probonopd/WirelessPrinting
cd $HOME/Arduino/libraries/
git clone https://github.com/probonopd/ESPAsyncWebServer
git clone https://github.com/me-no-dev/ESPAsyncTCP
git clone https://github.com/alanswx/ESPAsyncWiFiManager
git clone https://github.com/bblanchon/ArduinoJson
git clone https://github.com/bertmelis/Ticker-esp32 # for ESP32
git clone https://github.com/me-no-dev/AsyncTCP # for ESP32
cd -
Can be flashed via USB or (subsequently) over the air. You can use the Arduino IDE if you compiled yourself, or one of the following commands if you just want to flash a precompiled firmware.
# USB
sudo chmod a+x /dev/ttyUSB0
/tmp/.mount_*/usr/bin/hardware/esp8266/esp8266/tools/esptool/esptool -vv -cd nodemcu -cb 921600 -cp /dev/ttyUSB0 -ca 0x00000 -cf ESP8266WirelessPrint*.bin
# Wireless
wget -c "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/esp8266/Arduino/master/tools/espota.py"
python espota.py -i 192.168.0.27 -p 8266 --auth= -f ESP8266WirelessPrint*.bin
Cura 2.6 and later come with a bundled plugin which discovers OctoPrint instances using Zeroconf and enables printing directly to them. No further software needs to be installed. To use it,
- In Cura, add a Printer matching the 3D printer you have connected to WirelessPrint
- Select "Connect to OctoPrint" on the Manage Printers page
- Select your OctoPrint instance from the list
- Enter an API key (for now a random one is sufficient)
- Click "Connect", then click "Close" From this point on, the print monitor should be functional and you should see a "Print with OctoPrint" button on the bottom of the sidebar. Use this button to print wirelessly.
Currently a custom fork, PrusaControlWireless, is required. This may change in the future.
Slic3r PE 1.36.0 and later discovers OctoPrint instances using Zeroconf and enables printing directly to them. No further software needs to be installed. To use it,
- In Slic3r PE, add the corresponding profile for your printer
- Select the "Printer Settings" tab
- Under "OctoPrint upload", enter the IP address of your WirelessPrinting device (in the future, it may be discoverable by Bonjour)
- Click "Test" From this point on, you should see a "Send to printer" button on the "Plater" tab. Use this button to print wirelessly.
To print, just open http://the-ip-address/ and upload a G-Code file using the form:
Ycan also print from the command line using curl:
curl -F "file=@/path/to/some.gcode" http://the-ip-address/print