Apple II Talks To 3D Printer With A Little Modern Help

Controlling most desktop 3D printers is as easy as sending them G-code commands over a serial connection. As you might expect, it takes a relatively quick machine to fire off the commands fast enough for a good-quality print. But what if you weren’t so picky? If speed isn’t a concern, what’s the practical limit on the type of computer you could use?

In an effort to answer that question, [Max Piantoni] set out to control his Ender 3 printer with an authentic Apple IIc. Things were made a bit easier by the fact that he really only wanted to use the printer as a 2D plotter, so he could ignore the third dimension in his code. All he needed to do was come up with a BASIC program that let him create some simple geometric artwork on the Apple and convert it into commands that could be sent out over the computer’s serial port.

Unity controlling the Ender 3

Unfortunately, [Max] ran into something of a language barrier. While the Apple had no problem generating G-code the Ender’s controller would understand, both devices couldn’t agree on a data rate that worked for both of them. The 3D printer likes to zip along at 115,200 baud, while the Apple was plodding ahead at 300. Clearly, something would have to stand in as an interpreter.

The solution [Max] came up with certainly wouldn’t be our first choice, but there’s something to be said for working with what you know. He quickly whipped up a program in Unity on his Macbook that would accept incoming commands from the Apple II at 300 baud, build up a healthy buffer, and then send them off to the Ender 3. As you can see in the video after the break, this Mac-in-the-middle approach got these unlikely friends talking at last.

We’re reminded of a project from a few years back that aimed to build a fully functional 3D printer with 1980s technology. It was to be controlled by a Commodore PET from the 1980s, which also struggled to communicate quickly enough with the printer’s electronics. Bringing a modern laptop into the mix is probably cheating a bit, but at least it shows the concept is sound.

15 thoughts on “Apple II Talks To 3D Printer With A Little Modern Help

  1. Seriously cool stuff!

    If anyone wants to complain about the use of a modern computer as a go-between, it could almost certainly be done with period-accurate technology, too. There were various third-party (and a couple, expensive, first-party) devices which could buffer outgoing data to a Centronics printer, so that the machine itself could be tasked with other things while a print job was running.

    In theory, a Z80 clocked at about 8MHz driving a Motorola MC68681 DUART and a handful of RAM could probably accomplish the equivalent in this case (serial buffering, rather than parallel buffering used by 2D printers of the time). The 68681 has a maximum link speed of 115.2 kilobits, and since the 68681 is two UARTs in one package, incoming data from the IIc could be received along one channel, buffered, and then sent out to the printer along a second channel when an appropriate amount of data has been stored up.

        1. I wouldn’t have even thought to look for an ‘M’ command for that. It’s kind of a chicken and egg sort of solution since you have to be able to send the ‘M’ command at the current speed!

          It’s definitely settable in the config file, well one of them. I don’t remember if it’s config of config_adv but I’ve definitely seen it. I would be surprised if you couldn’t just use any speed there that the controller (probably an Mega 2560) supports. It’s just a really big Arduino sketch afterall.

      1. It looks like the Apple IIc actually supports much faster baud rates, it’s just that the default is 300 baud. So just poke the location to change the baud rate (and maybe change the baud rate on the marlin side) – no heroics needed.

      2. I see 2400 listed on the datasheet for a atmega2560 unknown about the 32bit cpu if it is limited differently, perhaps software serial but I doubt marlin expects to use that. Would still be neat to see 300 baud fed o the printer, filling a buffer and sending a bunch of data at once at 115200 is just too fast.. lol.

  2. why not use the apple in 115200 speed, drivers for this are available within ADT Pro, just bootstrap it to prodos over serial and the first thing it does is send a high speed serial port driver

  3. There’s been a longstanding debate between the reprap crowd and the people who first invented 3d printing over it’s history. I’m not naming names here because I’m writing from memory and don’t have time to look up the specifics. Feel free to reply with what I missed or got wrong.

    The reprap story was that the inventors delayed 3d printing from reaching the masses by patenting everything and then only building high end machines individual users could never afford. The inventors’ story was that nobody ever enforced a patent against a hobbyist and at least one of the inventors actively encouraged the hobbyist community to attempt to build personal 3d printers but nobody succeeded with the technology of the time.

    I do remember at least one article in Radio Electronics that supports the latter story although it was about SLA, not FFF printing and so was arguably much more difficult for a home hobbyist especially with the tech of the time and so maybe setting them up to fail?

    Anyway, I’ve thought before that trying to build a repstrap using only parts a hobbyist could have obtained in the 1980s and controlling it with a computer from that period would be an interesting project and a test of these claims. It looks like somebody just did one part of that!

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