Network Printers

[AutoWiz]

Well I thought I was done building. I sure wanted , ... or thought I wanted to be done building and re working these machines. But here's the thing. At this point I have picked up a lot of experience in 3d printing. Obviously I have made and printed out a lot of parts getting the machines this far, right? So in the beginning I only used a pc connectioin to print from. It was real cool to watch repetier draw out each line real time and show cooling of the filament. But once I got multiple machines up and going it just became an obstacle to have to damn the pc to driving the hours long print. I started exploring other ways to print when I got the monoprice mini printer. At first I printed on that with the micro sd card, and then I tried the wifi thing. I might be a little immature in this claim as I haven't explored octoprint, yet, but so far for me, the best fastest and easiest and most direct and reliable method to 3d printing is a .gco file saved on a sd card. From my experience and with my 3 printers on 1 bench as I try to make things that use all the printers, what works the best and fastest is having the multiple printer configurations saved in repetier host and just slicing the .stl file with the right configuration, put it on an sd card, start the print and forget about it and all the resources of my creation station save that one printer are still readily available to me. I feel that even when I do get octoprint up and going I will find that it has some nice features but still adds to the steps involved to getting a sliced file printed.

It is in this spirit that I have taken notice and a special liking to these mks tft32 3.2" color touchscreens. I put one on the Black Widow printer..




And I put one on the GEEETech i3..




It is nice using these printers. It is real nice playing with their touchscreens and printing from sd with the touchscreens. Printalicious is stuck with the lcd12864 display with knob because when I built it I had delusions of a 3 color mixing printer and so I needed a board with 6 stepper drivers and the megatronics v3 seemed to fit that bill. But it is not compatible with the mks touchscreen. So the only way for me to get Printalicious on par with my other 2 printers is to upgrade the controller to an mks compatible part. Like the same mks gen that is in the Black Widow. So there is going to be another round of upgrades in the form of a controller and display swap. Because I can't stand the way this looks..



When I touch a screen I need something to happen. I need to see some kind of a reaction or I want to touch the screen harder.