I wonder if someone that knows what they’re doing can tell me if it’s a lost cause.
I do not have wifi ( I use “xfinity NOW” $10/mo, which afaik uses other nearby routers and is unusable for these purposes)
I do have a router (~4yr old model in my closet)
My laptop does not have an ethernet port
I’d rather not pay +$30/mo for conventional wifi just to access the wireless functionality of my A1. Solutions I’ve considered but don’t have the networking experience to attempt:
Use the router to bridge the gap between my laptop and printer. Seems like most people doing this already have regular wifi and just want to stay offline for other reasons.
Use some product which mimics an SD card and uses Bluetooth.
Suck it up and walk back and forth with my SD card for the next year
If you have a router that can generate a local area network (LAN) and a laptop that can connect to it, you should be able to connect to the printer via it’s LAN option (see the wiki).
You loose a little in functionality, mainly the skip object option, but otherwise it should work fine.
I have a router but the wifi isn’t so good from the other end of the house to where my printers are. But I also have a hard wired network and have a switch near the printers so I connected an access point near the printers that is plugged into the switch and have wifi in an excellent spot now. Then I set it up and am using LAN ONLY mode and it works great. You could just use your router if the signal is clear to your printer or run a piece of CAT5 cable to a switch and plug in an access point. Here are some links:
My printer is in the garage out of wifi range.
I use an old phone, a £1 per month SIM with 10gb of data and put the phone in mobile hotspot mode. The printer can then connect to the Bambu Lab cloud.
My laptop connects to my home wifi as normal and sends prints to the cloud which the printer then downloads.
As mentioned, a router can usually stand alone without an external internet connection. You just need to connect to it and set it’s configuration up, which depends on the router and you probably need to know about IP addresses and certain terminology and you might need an ethernet cable… which is going to be a problem if your laptop does not have an ethernet port. If you find the manual for the router then you should be able to reset to factory settings where you will then know the router’s IP address and login details and should be able to configure it wirelessly. The mobile phone solution above might be the easiest answer though. The most modern solution that might be the best (and they are pretty cheap) is to buy a USB wifi router hotspot. Just do a web search for suitable products. The downside with these is that you don’t know how easy they are going to be to set them up.