Making a 3D printer work wirelessly
posted May 21st 2011 2:30pm by Mike Szczysfiled under: cnc hacks
Looking for more ways to enhance his 3D printer, [JJ] decided to make it wireless. He got his hands on some $10 Bluetooth modules and figured this would be just the thing to make the link with his laptop.
They came as surface mount modules, so the first thing he had to do was develop a breakout board that he could patch into his Ultimaker 3D printer. This provided a nice opportunity as he needed to do some level converting to make the 3.3V module play nicely with his 5V CNC electronics. The first version of the board turned out well but he had really a poor communications range. The second version, which is pictured above, hangs the module’s antenna off the edge of the breakout board and works a lot better.
We’ve embedded a clip after the break that walks through the development of this board. [JJ] shared the Eagle CAD files as a megaupload link, but we’ve also mirrored the file after the break for your convenience.
[Thanks Kyle]
hmm yeah. It is a nice hack, although one should wonder how much less reliable this makes the serial connection and how much data you can pump throug it. Ultimakers are very quick to print, so need their data at a high rate.
And on another not, this post of JanJaap was like 3 months ago…