What work flow do you guys use to load files for printing?

3D Printing GCodePrintr
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1

What work flow do you guys use to load files for printing? I have tried using USB flash drives which I thought ought to work, but only have one method that does work reliably.

My Android device is a Nexus 7 (2012), I have this connected to a powered 4 port USB hub which has a webcam, smoothieboard, and a USB flash drive connected. With StickMount I can mount the smoothieboard SD card fine, and any USB flash drives I insert also show up.

Unfortunately I have mixed success with using USB flash drives to transfer files. They all show up in stickmount and I can view files using ES File Explorer, however when I browse to the drive in GCodePrintr no files on the drive are visible.

If I try to copy the files from the flash drive to the tablet internal memory using ES File Explorer, some of my flash drives work and some of them will not copy. It just fails with no explanation.

So far I have found 1 of my flash drives that ES File Explorer will allow me to copy files off, I transfer them to internal memory, and then GCodePrintr will print the files from there. It works, but its a bit painful.

How do you guys send big files to your printers?

2

Most of the time I use the “Network Receiver” feature to send files directly from the PC over Wifi to GCodePrintr. Sometimes I use Dropbox or Google Drive to exchange gcode files with my tablet.

3

I have established my USB issues are related to my tablet, the USB host can be very unpredictable, I’ll just have to live with that. I tried the WiFi transfer using GCodeSimulator and it works for small files, but anything over 10MB has failed every time. I get the first part of the file and it looks like its finished, but when I open the received file it is incomplete. There is also no warning to say it didn’t complete successfully. So I’m sticking with my USB stick for now and all its annoyances, at least I can trust the file is correct.

4

@Colin_Rose strange, it works fine for me even with large files.I will look into the code again and see if I can improve something.

5

Would it be possible to include a checksum as part of the transfer to detect when something goes wrong? Even just a message to say it is incomplete would be better than silently failing which is what I get now.