I've been having some trouble running my Airwolf3d v5.5 from my Asus laptop. The communication over USB is very sensitive to noise and electrical spikes onthe line. I first noticed it when I turned on the ceiling fan, the print job died. Then I noticed it happening sometimes if I had any static, then touched the keyboard. THe last straw was when I pulled an SD card out of the slot, and a 3 hour print job died after two hours of printing. Basically, my laptop is about as useful as a boat anchor when I'm printing on the Airwolf3d v5.5. I looked at a Viki LCD panel, but found that it's not compatible with the old Gen6 controller in my machine. I also considered replacing the Gen6 controller with anArduino Mega 2560 with a RAMPS board and an LCD panel with SD card reader. It would cost about $60 and I'd have to rewire the whole machine, which is more tedious an effort than I'm interested in getting into at the moment.
Then, a new option came along. How about using a Raspberry Pi as the computer to drive the printer? That way I'd free up the laptop for everything else. I already have a monitor that I can re-purpose, I also have a keyboard and mouse collecting dust. So I ordered the Raspberry Pi starter kit from amazon for under $70. I did add an HDMI - DVI cable adpter for $8 since the Dell monitor has a DVI port rather than HDMI.
Then, a new option came along. How about using a Raspberry Pi as the computer to drive the printer? That way I'd free up the laptop for everything else. I already have a monitor that I can re-purpose, I also have a keyboard and mouse collecting dust. So I ordered the Raspberry Pi starter kit from amazon for under $70. I did add an HDMI - DVI cable adpter for $8 since the Dell monitor has a DVI port rather than HDMI.
Mi Raspberry Pi running Pronterface. I have it connected to an old Dell monitor, wireless keyboard & mouse, beat up USB thumb drive and my Airwolf3D v5.5
I can't believe how easy this was to set up. The Raspberry Pi came with NOOBS preloaded on the micro SD and a wireless usb NIC. I plugged everything in, ran through the setup and booted to the desktop. I entered my network password in the network config tool and had internet connectivity in under a minute. At www.RepRap.org, I found instructions to install my Pronterface on a Debian Linux box. The system threw an error when I ran this command sudo echo "deb http://apt.ulrichard.ch/ squeeze main contrib non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list and I had to hack around a bit to figure out how to edit the \etc\apt\sources.list file. After un-commenting out the line in there, I got the Pronterface files to download and install.
I started up the program, plugged in my Airwolf3d v5.5, set the baud rate to 250000, and low and behold, it connected. I sent a few test commands, and the printer moved correctly. I preheated the hot end to 240, everything was working as it should. I copied a calibration file from my laptop onto a usb memory stick and plugged it into the last open port on my Raspberry Pi. Pronterface recognized the mounted drive and I was able to load the gcode file and print it.
I thought it was going to take me a week or two to get this to work. It took less than 4 hours. Now I can run all three of my printers without worrying if I'm going to inadvertently kill a print job in the Airwolf3d
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