For those who don’t know the image source, it’s from Kung Fury, a short comedy (half hour) on youtube. Fully recommend for over the top parody of bad 80s action movies.
For those who don’t know the image source, it’s from Kung Fury, a short comedy (half hour) on youtube. Fully recommend for over the top parody of bad 80s action movies.
Prusas don’t run locally?
Prologue: I can’t talk from experience about the Mini, the XL, or that…$12,000 delta printer they’re offering? This is going to concern the conventional “MK” series of bedflingers and the new Core One.
All Prusa printers I’m aware of “run locally.” From the MK3S and back to the Prusa Mendel, they used various 8-bit ATMEGA 2560-based control boards which had no networking capabilities at all. You could add network capabilities with Octoprint, For awhile Prusa even included a way to attach a Raspberry Pi Zero W to the main board via the GPIO header.
Since the MK4, they now use a 32-bit ARM-based control board that has an Ethernet jack, and a removable Wi-Fi module. You can still walk up to the thing, poke the touch screen, and stick a USB stick in the side with G-Code on it, but we now have not one but two ways of controlling the printer remotely:
PrusaConnect is their cloud-based service. Either through a web browser, PrusaSlicer running on a PC or their smart phone app, you can monitor and control the printer across the internet, from anywhere. It integrates with Printables, their own Thingiverse with blackjack and hookers, and they even have a cloud slicing service. You can choose a model from Printables on your phone, their server will slice it and send G-code to your printer to start it printing. But, everything you do to it goes to the internet. So when I press the Preheat PLA button in PrusaConnect, that message crosses the Atlantic twice before the red light on my print bed blinks on.
PrusaLink is their local network control system, which consists of a web server running on the printer itself, through which you can view the current temperatures and upload G-Code (and firmware) files. That is it. You cannot so much as preheat the bed through PrusaLink. You can set it up in PrusaSlicer such that it will give you a button to upload G-Code to a printer directly across the LAN, but…
It feels really strange that I can preheat my printer either from its control panel, or across the internet, but not across my LAN.
Yes, they do. But you can now choose to download via Easy Print from your phone and run the printer if you want. I’ve never even tried the app. My Prusa is still my trusty Mk3s that runs on Klipper now.