ESP8266 on Prusa i3?

Hey everyone! Newbie here.

I'm about to finish building my first Prusa i3 kit (Ordered from ebay with some missing parts).

I've been reading about having connectivity on the printer and I've heard of the ESP8266 module as a good way of connecting any project to the internet using Wi-Fi.

Did anyone try to connect his/her 3D RepRap printer using this module? (Or any other shield/module for that matter)

I've read a lot about blue-tooth modules, but Wi-Fi would be a lot more advantageous in my case (I spend a lot of time out of home).

I'd appreciate some feedback/help on the matter.

Thanks.

As far as I know this has not been attempted yet, but there is nothing technically (again AFAIK) that would prevent an ESP8266 module being used to interface a 3D printer controller to a WiFi LAN. However, please note that after reading the ESP8266 specs I personally have concluded that it adds an excessive latency to the usual Command/ok-response communication loop between the PC and the 3D printer.

Until somebody effectively implements an ESP8266 and experiments and takes some measurements, I am sticking to this preliminary analysis: it may work, but may not be a practical solution.

Something that demonstrably works very well is this: [reprap.org]. I use it everyday for printing on various 3D printers.

I am looking into using the ESP8266 for interfacing my budget 32-bit board design to WiFi. The board will support RepRapFirmware 3D printer control firmware, which includes an embedded a web server. Latency isn't a significant problem in this mode, because the machine will be printing from the SD card. Bandwidth of the ESP8266 is more of an issue, especially when making the initial connection to the machine, and when uploading files to print.

In the meantime I have my large delta printer (described at [miscsolutions.wordpress.com]) connected to my WiFi network. The printer uses Duet electronics, which also runs RepRapFirmware, and I have its Ethernet port connected to an Ethernet-to-wifi adapter. I often use my smartphone to control the printer.

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

Thanks AndrewBCN & dc42.

I appreciate your help and input.

I like the android box and duet ideas, but I have to figure out a way to use the module with an Arduino Mega + Ramps setup.

Guess I'll have to keep doing some research.

Quote
Life.test
...but I have to figure out a way to use the module with an Arduino Mega + Ramps setup.

As the saying goes, "If I wanted to go there, I wouldn't start from here!".

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Large delta printer [miscsolutions.wordpress.com], E3D tool changer, Robotdigg SCARA printer, Crane Quad and Ormerod

Disclosure: I design Duet electronics and work on RepRapFirmware, [duet3d.com].

Check the wiki for how people have connected a Bluetooth-to-serial interface to an Arduino + RAMPS stack. The connection to an ESP8266 module and a good part of the firmware hack would be identical. However, keep in mind that the ESP8266 module uses 3.3V logic, the standard Arduino Mega 2560 uses 5V logic, so you are going to need a couple of logic level shifting circuits for the Rx Tx pins.

Again, I am pretty confident that it can be made to work, I am just not sure how practical this setup would be and I have serious doubts about whether it would provide adequate bandwidth for 3D printing.

Thanks again guys.

Appreciate it.

And sorry for the late reply. (Exams)

I've been working on getting the ESP8266 to work and have had some partial success. Right now I have the NodeMCU firmware on it and I wrote a simple lua script that creates a serial-tcp bridge. With this, you can login to the printer with any telnet client and send it gcode commands. I also used some linux wizardry to get any application to talk to it as if it was talking to a serial port.

We tried some test prints with limited success. After a while, the connection drops for some reason. Not sure why. Also, there is a lot of stuttering issues when the printer is doing many short consecutive moves. This is probably due to the excessive latency [AndrewBCN] was talking about. We saw the same issue while testing Sparkfun's serial-bluetooth modules.

I will try to get the code posted, along with a more detailed writeup.

Probably should work something up where it sends the GCode to the SD card and then remotely starts the print from the SD card.

Hello Guys,

My friend have successfully implemented ESP8266 with RAMPS 1.4 , please check out.



http://creatorbot.com/projects/electronics/add-esp8266-wifi-to-your-3d-printer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFH1TWNZgFk

Sure, again, it can be made to work... The simple fact is that with an approximately 0.3s max. estimated latency (delay) between sending a G-code command and getting an OK response, you are going to get into situations where the firmware has an empty buffer and just stops printing (the "stuttering" mentioned above). That will slow down and severely degrade the quality of your prints. And I am not even factoring in the frequent connection losses with these ESP8266 modules.

In other words, you severely degrade the performance and reliability of your $350~$600 printer by adding a $3 ESP8266 module (plus adapter).

A much, much better solution is to add an OctoGoatBox to your setup. You can probably setup an OctoGoatBox for < $45 nowadays.

Imo ESP8266 modules are a great solution for extremely low-cost, low-performance, non-critical IOT applications. They are not very useful for 3D printing.

Pretty much correct, there are issues but this was a fun project and don't intend to include into product. If any one have these modules can try this, best would be to start print and check status using SD card and ESP on the printer as someone pointed it above.

Quote
zippys123
Pretty much correct, there are issues but this was a fun project and don't intend to include into product. If any one have these modules can try this, best would be to start print and check status using SD card and ESP on the printer as someone pointed it above.

Hmm... The web page you linked to does not mention any issues, so imho it would be a good idea to list them, to avoid anybody trying to reproduce this while thinking that it will work well. Because it simply does not work well enough to justify even its modest $3 cost (and the time wasted implementing it).

As for printing from SD card... sure, that always works, but even transferring to SD card using the ESP8266 module takes quite a few seconds because of the low bandwidth and could suffer from Wi-Fi connection drops, so... again, not worth it imho.

It would be worth it in my opinion, for SD card transfer. Face it, on a 3 hour print... What's an extra minute? So if I can have my printer in another room. Load the stl to the SD card on the printer and remotely start print... Yeah... I'll take a bit slow... Yeah I know there's octoprint and the likes... Or duets... But if a $5 card can do it... I'll do that.

Maybe the latency problem could be mitigated by increasing the size of the move buffer in the firmware?

I have made it work with my printer by using this serial-tcp bridge:
[github.com]

the latency is relatively low about 1-3 ms when pinging.

for level shifting i used a pair of and gates, because I couldn't find some cd4050
printed lots of things so far, without failing connections.

Quote
Duality
I have made it work with my printer by using this serial-tcp bridge:
[github.com]

the latency is relatively low about 1-3 ms when pinging.

for level shifting i used a pair of and gates, because I couldn't find some cd4050
printed lots of things so far, without failing connections.

Can you add a few details?
Which pins do you use on Ramps?
Which pins need a level shifter? ( The ESP8266 inputs are 5V tolerant, I've read )
What software do you run on your PC? Does it work with pronterface?

THX
-Olaf

i'd of thought flashing firmware would be on the list.. not just SD card access.

is this of any use?

http://reprap.org/wiki/RAMPS_1.4#BT_Extension