An Ender 3 Pro was donated to the school and I started restoring it to operational use.
After getting it ready for testing and calibration I connected my laptop over USB to the 3D printer and fired up OrcaSlicer but nowhere could I find the ‘connect’ button for USB. So I downloaded the latest PrusaSlicer and the same. A couple of google searches confirmed they no longer support USB connectivity and the explanations were that Windows often doesn’t run continuously long enough for large prints so they pulled the feature due to either power saving, updates or some other reasons.
I ended up just loading the sliced calibration objects to a microUSB instead of installing Pronterface/Printrun, Cura or provisioning an rPi with OctoPrint. The Ender3 Pro works better than the 2 MakerBots Gen3 so I will eventually put OctoPrint on the Ender3 Pro and replace one of the 2 Makerbots.
Call me old fashioned, but I enjoyed being able to jog the axes, jog filament and enable/disable the hot end and bed from the computer without having to go through a bunch of menus.
yes, exactly the thing I was originally looking for at initial eval and just used the onboard UI when I initially couldn’t find the USB connect button.
APM on all platforms screws with 3D printers but you know who got the blame for so many failed prints. Mostly because so much more than APM has to be dealt with. I’m sure it makes it a lot easier to rip out the USB system from those slicers but we still have lots of decent(yes the Ender 3 is a decent 3DP) 3D printers working just fine and often looking for new homes.
My understanding of this is that because the USB drive can “sleep” it causes failed prints, and the solution is supposed to be copying the file(s) to the local storage first. This is how I always did it when I used OctoPrint.
I don’t know why people would have their slicer putting files on a USB drive before sending to the 3D printer but for many years people used their computers for streaming the GCode to the 3DP firmware. New breed of people or a particular computer OS company has made the choice for its users that no matter what’s going on with IO, they were going to put the OS to sleep.
This is likely why Bambu removed the USB port on the P1S or should I say, removed exposing it to the user and downloading the gcode file over the wireless network was the only choice.
For now it’ll be sneaker net then maybe Printrun or Octoprint.