So you want to add Wi-Fi to your 3D printer installation?

Smith|Allen is a design firm based in Oakland, California. The firm says its "work is interdisciplinary in focus, bringing design, innovation, and novel concepts to bear on a wide range of projects."

Writing at Instructables.com, Smith|Allen notes that: 

"3D printers have come a long way in the last 2 years. It used to be the norm to be tethered to your printer and dedicate a whole computer to running your print jobs or even worse use SD cards to sneaker-net your printers. When we are creating our large scale installations we need our printers to run 24 hrs/day 7 days a week. This means we need ultimate reliability and can't be swapping USB cables and SD cards around. 

Even now printers like the Form1 and MakerBot Replicators still use this old method! It's amazingly annoying for your battery to die during a print or for a restart to ruin a print after hours. Some of the new printers like the Type A Machines Series 1 have on-board networking and Wi-Fi which solves this problem. This is possible because of an open source project called OctoPrint. Octoprint handles all the communication for your printer allowing Wi-Fi standalone printing. Octoprint runs on the immensely popular Raspberry Pi and with their new Model B+ it's simple and surprisingly inexpensive to add on Wi-Fi to your 3D printer. " 

The article at Instructables.com then goes on to provide step-by-step illustrated instructions for accomplishing this project. 

Read the full article.