Before you now get all excited let me break the fun - it won’t help much with the connection and drop out issues…
I found a TP-Link 2408C antenna for dirt cheap and brand new.
Wanted it to replace the flimsy antenna on my router to get a better signal in the garage.
But then I also spotted an equally cheap router with WiFi 6 and good reviews…
Long story short I salvaged those antenna cables from the old router and used one as an ‘extension’adapter cable’ for the big antenna.
Bit of a hassle with the sticky tape but at least Bamu has a Wiki for the antenna replacement.
My expectation were not that high as we already established that cheap hardware paired with overcomplicated security features are our main issue.
But from just one bar for the Wifi signal my printer went to a full strength signal.
Even tried a 20m Ethernet cable for the router and with about 30m between it and the printer I still had a working signal.
Great if getting a Wifi signal is the only worry.
Transfer speeds only improved marginally, if at all - still takes forever to transfer a huge print to the machine.
Still get the occasional drop out resulting the printer getting lost for Studio, still have Studio forgetting the access code every few days.
Is it worth investing the $20AU for a big antenna and to use salvage parts to complete the connection?
It certainly is if the signal strength is your worry.
The advertised 8dBi extra do show and make things a bit easier.
Tried the antenna with a Wifi module and with the original short antenna I lost the signal before I reached my neighbours driveway - about 12m from the (new) router.
With the TP-Link antenna attached I lost the signal a further 25m down the road.
If we now could get a simplified firmware or at least the option to modify it like for the X1 series we could start to make progress…
I have a suspicion that the micro SD card is to blame on the slow speeds. Getting a faster, more reliable card has been recommended by some to also avoid eventual corruption.
I have a Sandisk Class 10 in there, so I doubt the SD is to blame for the slow speeds.
In the time Studio delivers a 10mb file to the printer I send a 2GB file from the same computer to a laptop or any other device in the Wifi LOL
Bambu just does not have a need for speed when it comes to connections.
With hot temperatures and fire raging I decided to stay home and do some more tests with my new external antenna.
Couldn’t understand why there transfer speeds are so low and why the printer still keeps getting lost in Studio from time to time.
This time though I used a little Wifi analyser app on the phone first to check how many other networks at still in range.
Turned out the people have a lot of things online these days that provide a WiFi AP, like TV’s, car radios even baby monitors…
So I switched my router to the Wifi channel with the lowest interference rate from other things my neighbours use.
Had to use Linux on the laptop to do some sniffing and what a nightmare that was…
It seems that at any given time Studio communicates with the printer using three different methods - total overkill but I guess required due to the low powered hardware.
To my surprise there isn’t even any attempt to negotiate higher transfer speeds, it all works on the lower end of serial com speeds…
Explains why no measure actually helps LOL
There does not seem to be any reason though why things are THAT bad as similar hardware bases are capable of performing much better.
My attempts to sniff out anything meaningful of course failed due to the lack of Linux understanding.
What is stunning though is the total overkill in terms of security.
Don’t get me wrong - in today’s times any networked devices should be as secure as possible…
But for crying out loud not in a local LAN environment …
Give the thing a secure connection but ditch those certificates and hardware bound security measures - the tine ESP just isn’t able to handle the overload.
For a remote access scenario I rather much prefer a secure AP under my control over some cloud based solution under Chinese control - no offense…
Basically any communication requires authentication, many hardware components only work after being ‘paired’ to the hardware/mainboard.
Adding the few bucks for an Ethernet port would have avoided all these hassles…
So what possible reasons could there be to go WiFi only for a printer that is supposed to be used in print farms and such?
The few bucks saved can’t be it…
The hassles of implementing Ethernet capabilities into the firmware is no excuse either.
But going WiFi only means nothing works unless the mobile app and/or Studio work flawless together with the firmware of the printer…
All closed source with Bambu not disclosing much of anything…
Cloud services down, printer down, certificates revoked, printer turns useless.
The more I think about the more I realise I paid a lot of money to just lease a printer.
At any given time Bambu can take my printer over, render it useless or abuse it to gain elevated access to my Windows system…
Don’t know but checking why the connection sucks so badly wasn’t really the best idea…
The bottle neck here is the “brain” of P1S, which is a tiny microcontroller ESP32. Although esp32 is fast by microcontroller standards but very slow by CPU standards.
In the esp32 datasheet, max WiFi speed is 150mbps but I doubt the actual speed could get higher than 1mbps for P1S.