Today I gave a go at connecting my smoothie board to my home network via a wireless NetGear range extender. I connected both the Ethernet and USB ports from the Smoothie. I then scanned for the network on my Android tablet using the ES File Explorer app and it popped right up. All the files on the Smoothie SD card were there and usable. I do not yet have the smoothie connected to a working printer so I could not test that yet. But I see no reason why it won’t work…only question is at what speed will a g-code file transfer over the wireless connection. I found later however that the Ethernet port passed no data; everything was flowing through the USB wirelessly.
how is the GCodePrinter app going to access your smoothie?
The way I’m looking at the Robert is via the USB port. I won’t have the physical OTG USB cable connection, but having the wireless USB connection should have the same connectivity. I read an account from another fellow (I’ve lost the link) who used a IOGear USB wireless hub to make that same connection. He said it worked well as I recall.
Will gcodeprinter see that?
He said it did. I don’t have my smoothie selected as a printer yet so I don’t know.
I’m confused. You are tunneling USB over wifi ?
I’m taking what another has claimed to have already done, and attempting to incorporate something similar into my own printer design. (I guess I need to try and find his post again to guide me). I have in fact linked my Android 5.0 tablet to the Smoothie SD card through my home network. Now whether or not I can control the board via your app in the same fashion I will find out once my printer is finished and ready to print. The other poster said he had already done so. I hope to find he is correct.
It would be great if someone with a Smoothieboard printer would try this and confirm if it works or not. Another poster said he did it using bluetooth but it was too slow.
I found the bluetooth user JohnnyInBrisbane over on the Delta Robot Google Groups page. I’ll keep looking for the IOGear poster. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/deltabot/gcodeprintr/deltabot/dSZWDE1NBl0/s8aCyVDVBAAJ
Ahh…I finally found the IOGear USB hub link but it was not what I wishfully recalled. The poster Lazerman did in fact set up the USB hub to control his printer wirelessly from his PC and Repetier Host. He also uses a USB drive to store his print files. The IOGear software is the interface that links the combo together. Mathias…I would appreciate it if you would please look at this and see if it is applicable to adding an Android tablet and your GCodePrintr app to the network. Please let us know what you find or what may be necessary to find out. Thanks…TP
I don’t see where he was able to use an android device to connect to any of that. Maybe wireless access to some files, but I don’t see this helping with GCodePrintr
Now if you can find an app, like a socat port for android, and map a telnet connection as a virtual serial port, then GCodePrintr could be made to work with smoothie network shell without updating GCodePrintr…or add a Bt device to your printer, it’s fast enough to print from SD
Yes, it was not use of an android device as I thought. Why do you think a BT device would be fast enough? Several have reported it was not for them. Your other suggestion is something I know nothing about which is pretty close to true about all of this. Thanks…TP.
Fast enough to for me, I don’t need to print over bt, just send the start command to print over sd, and maybe issue a few g/mcodes.
I guess I’ll drop all this for now and come back to it when the build is wrapping up. Just maybe there will be a solution I can comprehend and follow then. Thanks for all your info Robert.
Actually socat is not a complete solution for smoothie, as to be complete you need to be able to stream gcode over TCP/IP and NOT wait for ok, and let TCP/IP do the flow control.
@Mathias_Dietz it would be cool if you could allow connection over TCP/IP to smoothies telnet port, then USB would not be needed. I can give you more info if you are curious 
Now that sounds interesting. Thanks for the input Wolfmanjm… I hope Mathias has time to consider this and implement a solution through his app.
@Wolfmanjm cool. I already thought about adding TCP/IP based printing, it shouldn’t be too difficult. But not waiting for “ok” sounds dangerous, how do you prevent overflow of the print buffer ?
@Mathias_Dietz You need neither wait for OK or do line number and checksums, TCP/IP does all that already. You can’t overflow the buffer because TCP/IP does flow control. In fact you MUST NOT wait for OK, otherwise it will stutter really badly. Pronterface already implements network connections and has a tcp streaming mode. There is also an example python script on our github called smoothie-stream.py which shows how to stream over network. Basically just send the gcode as fast as you can, and consume any OKs that come back as fast as you can.