I learned that my 3D printer (and many others) are built around the Arduino Mega platform and even though there is no network hookups, many people are merging theirs with a Rasp Pi and ESP boards to monitor and light duty control their printers remotely. Setting up this way also alleviates some of the overhead of printing via SD card or connecting from a Windows PC. All of that said, I’m curious if the Blynk team will consider extending Blynk’s fantastic network’ability with the 3D printing world. If this can be done, I assure you that you can easily double your current traffic as each popular printer has it’s own facebook group of roughly 3000-5000 members each. I own a Tevo Tarantula and our facebook group has that many members, and there are many more popular printers than that.
I just wanted to pop the idea in your heads if nobody ever brought this up before.
What’s stopping you? Blynk is very flexible and the interface can be easily built for managing 3D printers. I don’t see the problem. It’s a matter of programming skills.
It can be done, and doesn’t require the Dev team… but it would be VERY tricky to mesh the timing required between stepper controls and IoT connectivity (and who really needs to control their printer remotely… monitor yes, but control? not until quality robot arms are added to the mix).
But I do not see that increasing membership… However, questions on why the device keeps going offline mid-print and ruining a finals course project unless someone can “HELP!!! please fix code now!”… that, I see increasing
It’s definitely doable.
You can easily monitor/control any 3D printer.
I dont’t think @myggle wanted to control steppers directly during print, but rather mimicking the ordinary 3D printer lcd control panel…
I don’t really see the point here, I’ve got a 3d printer and when I print something I’m always next to the printer taking care about all details… the first layer, the filament, the proper temperature, ensure my cat is out of the desk…
IDK if I can do it justice, but here’s my try. Some folks are printing robot arms and stuff like that, and maybe I also will print one and build, mount it to the ceiling of my enclosure and give it suction cup fingers to swap out panes of glass so a freshly printed part could be put aside to cool and a clean pane can then be placed on the bed. Just a scenario, clearly not thought all the way through
Monitoring of course to view all the temp, motion and feed stats, plus a piCam to see the printing progress. I think all printers come with LCDs, but I have the cheapest of the cheap so it’s the smallest LCD used for printers and only shows me half of my data. Also, if a microphone were added, I could detect certain noises and slow print speed to get through a print. There’s a lot of functionality to manage and why glue yourself to your printing station if the lot of the tasks could be outsourced, by yourself of course, just the version of you out living your life. Myself and another WAY more experienced coder have been refining the hydroponics controller I’ve been working on for years and gardening is traditionally a hands on hobby , yet I’m near the point where I only need to do certain hands on tasks and will soon be doing all of the water movement, adjustment and waste remotely, “because of Blynk”.
IDK, maybe it’s just a new nerds fantasy to make work as hands off as possible, and I think Blynk would give me that. I will no doubt try to build this myself with existing widgets etc as working my Arduino project into a Blynk environment and mostly the feedback from you all have substantially improved my coding skills throughout the years (thanks for that BTW). But I was hoping this could be a vision others would see the point for and maybe inspire new widgets and possible functionality.
