Recently I had an extended internet outage due to storms (the joys of rural living) and had to put my machines into LAN mode so that I could continue to print some stuff that had been ordered. What I noticed was that while in LAN mode, the software (both BLS and Orca) were extremely slow to respond, froze up and crashed on multiple occasions.
Since the computer and the printers were both still connected on my wifi network, and there was no internet on the other side of the wifi I’m confused as to why the communication was so slow and everything seemed to freeze up.
Is this normal when running in LAN mode or what?
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I would say not normal. I am usually in LAN mode and neither Studio or Orca slow down or crash.
When I first go to the Device tabs, it shows “No Printer” and I do have to select the printer before printing.
I am hoping that eventually this authorization mess will result in a unencumbered LAN mode that lets the slicers remember my LAN mode printer without needing to reselect it each time.
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This behavior is definitely not normal, my ftc team and I are using LAN mode for over 4 months (we are restricted because of the university wifi).
Normally I wouldn’t recommend using LAN mode, if you are able to connect your printer via wire it would be the best.
In my understanding WLAN works with the local network from your router. The storm you are experiencing may have an effect on the local network and as a result the LAN mode runs slow.
P1S and P1P has ESP32 microcontroller at heart, which is very slow. Espressif datasheet says ESP32 maximum datarate is 150mbps. The maximum speed of ESP32 is 240MHz. Say the esp32 effieciency is very high so that takes only 10 clocks to get 1 bit from the cloud to it’s RAM, so the maximum possible speed is 24mbps. But the thing is, ESP32 has to work double time to read/write SD card while receiving data from BBL mothership (or cloud as we know), and all of that is running from software stack.
I doubt the P1S could pull data from their mothership with datarate higher than 1.5mbps. But that doesn’t matter because Orca/BS closes the start printing dialog as soon as the upload process to BBL mothership finishes. The download process from BBL mothership to P1S is only shown on the tiny monochrome LCD of the printer, which is very slow. And the printer takes this time to heat up the bed as well so there is no waiting time.
Upload to the printer directly via LAN would suffer the same speed 1.5mbps. Let say you print something big, the gcode is about 5MB so it would take about 27s just to send data directly via LAN.
If I am correct, the download process from BBL mothership is very close to TCP/IP call, which is native to ESP32 SDK. In another hand, sending data via LAN is done with FTP protocol, which add another software layer over TCP/IP and thus slow it down more.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not criticizing BBL for make P1S so slow. I am actually applausing BBL to achieve incredible work on the tiny ESP32, you know, runs all sort of stuffs like managing gcode, control motor, rendering LCD, read/write sd card… I know a lot of companies just use ESP32 as a BLE adaptor to allow communication to phones app. A BLE module from Microchip is twice as expensive as an ESP32 module, even 5 times more expensive when chip shortage happenned.
I’m just a bit of disappointed because if BBL just added $10 more for better chip like rockchip or allwinner and it could run Linux and would be as good as x1c.
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This sounds about right, and is quite easy to test… instead of using the default “Print plate” option, use the “Send” option… that will instead send the job direct to SD card rather than the cloud upload and subsequent download from cloud on the printer. That should be “slower” than a cloud upload, but also entirely local. You can then use the device tab in bambu studio to start the print job from the sd card if you are not near it. edit: correction, currently only in cloud mode, not when in LAN mode. I find this handy when planning on doing several prints on another day, or when I’m not going to be near the computer… can just trigger the pre-prepared jobs from the printer itself.
and, while doing all of that … you can even send to the printer’s SD card… even while it is printing (at least in the case of the A1), and it will just keep on chugging along with the print job. 
This is not good at all! 
Ouch sorry… yeah, you can control the printer, monitor status, view the video and send files to it when in lan mode but you can’t browse them :-/ Interestingly you also can’t OTA firmware update, it looks like that only works in cloud mode also.
Sorta sounds like I should do any editing etc without connecting to a machine, and then only LAN connect to send the file. Good news is, my internet is back up lol
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