Duet WiFi details published and pre-order window open

[Mac The Knife]

I have a problem with him trolling this thread, instead of creating another thread about what he would like to see in the next iteration of the Duet controller.

[Xenocrates]

The majority of folks do not have wired ethernet in their house, so they'd have to spend around that much on a wireless bridge to achieve network connectivity. I'm sorry that you desire wired connectivity, but the majority of folks wanted wifi.

So it's better to leave off an option and screw a huge portion of your userbase, or better to give people a choice? Perhaps sell the product in wired and wireless versions or something really thoughtful like that?

While I personally dislike the Wifi change, I understand why they made it. And considering that there are minimum order quantities to get reasonable prices on board fab and assembly, and that 3D printer electronics are already a niche market, I think having additional differentiation when it's not going to be cared about by most of the users (There are what, 6 of us who are really annoyed by loosing Ethernet who have spoken up, including on the Rep-Rap forums?) Is a good way to drive up prices or annoy users. (What do you mean you don't have a Wi-Fi board in stock? Can't you just rip off the jack?)

Once again, all those people out there with SD cards now have to run out and buy a MicroSD card just to use a new product? Screwing a good portion of your user base?

However, since you admit that every MicroSD card comes with the adapter, if the product came with the "Legacy" socket, everyone out there would be able to use it out of the box without having to purchase any new memory cards or adapters.

Here's where I would like to point out that the Duet comes with a micro SD card (It's actually a relatively high quality Sandisk 4GB one if I have them straight), and that the Rambo also came with a Micro SD card (In adapter)

You're also apparently convinced that there are no advantages to having a larger physical card connector in terms of ease of use or ruggedness, so restating the obvious to you is a waste of time if you close your eyes to such things.

Besides, the designer of the board says there's a place to plug in some kind of board to allow full SD cards to be used, which is better than not having a choice at all, so when such a board is available and proven to work as designed, I will have an acceptable alternative.

Edit: Such a board exists. I have the 4.3 in LCD panel that Filastruder offers to use with the paneldue. it has a socket on the back and the Paneldue has a header which is unpopulated for connecting to it labeled x5, and could easily be connected to the Duet wifi. I would be tempted to do so if I had a Duet wifi, or planned to buy one in the near future (While the price was great for beta boards, I don't want to jump on it first, especially when I just bought a 0.8.5 board, and will hold out hope for a larger "Pro" version.) If someone could do that to demonstrate that it works and give DC42 another test source for validation, that would be great. I made a mistake initially. I guess that's what I get for not looking back at the documentation for something I haven't picked up in weeks.

[elmoret]

Such a board exists. I have the 4.3 in LCD panel that Filastruder offers to use with the paneldue. it has solder points for the header on the back (The manufacturer of the board, which is not DC42 or T3DP3D, has elected not to populate it as a cost saving measure), and could easily be connected to the Duet wifi. I would be tempted to do so if I had a Duet wifi, or planned to buy one in the near future (While the price was great for beta boards, I don't want to jump on it first, especially when I just bought a 0.8.5 board, and will hold out hope for a larger "Pro" version.) If someone could do that to demonstrate that it works and give DC42 another test source for validation, that would be great.

Here's the current 4.3" LCD from Filastruder, if you want to swap let me know.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/J9WFOHe.jpg[/img]

We'll look to source LCDs with full size slots in the future, no promises as it is a bit tough to find them at all in good quality/volume.

[Xenocrates]

Here's the current 4.3" LCD from Filastruder, if you want to swap let me know.

[img]http://i.imgur.com/J9WFOHe.jpg[/img]

We'll look to source LCDs with full size slots in the future, no promises as it is a bit tough to find them at all in good quality/volume.

Alright. Looks like I misremembered about there being a header specifically for that on the LCD. Mea Culpa It looks like it's on the Paneldue instead (According to the docs, pads are provided for a 5 pin molex connector), and labeled x5. I don't think that was removed from the latest revision of paneldue. The slot on there is as good as you get from the Rambo's smart controller, or from my computer tower for that matter. I doubt it will be a problem, other than for people using enclosure designs that didn't account for the slot being there.

[dc42]

Two small corrections:

1. I am the designer and manufacturer of the PanelDue control board.

2. The unpopulated header for the SD card in the PanelDue display is on the PanelDue controller board, not the display board. It's the 5 pads labelled X5 next to the display connector. They are designed to accept a 5-way right angle Molex KK connector.

[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/193 ... .50.52.jpg[/img]

For the next version of the PanelDue PCB, I'll look at using a ribbon cable connector instead, to make connecting to the Duet WiFi easier.

[Xenocrates]

Two small corrections:

1. I am the designer and manufacturer of the PanelDue control board.

2. The unpopulated header for the SD card in the PanelDue display is on the PanelDue controller board, not the display board. It's the 5 pads labelled X5 next to the display connector. They are designed to accept a 5-way right angle Molex KK connector.

[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/193 ... .50.52.jpg[/img]

For the next version of the PanelDue PCB, I'll look at using a ribbon cable connector instead, to make connecting to the Duet WiFi easier.

Yeah, I understand that you design/manufacture the paneldue, and that the header is on there. I'll edit my statement otherwise shortly, but I did correct myself when Tim pointed out that it wasn't on the LCD. Once again, Mea Culpa.

[dc42]

I've just published a blog entry at https://miscsolutions.wordpress.com/201 ... d-silence/ describing how I upgraded my delta printer to Duet WiFi and PT100 temperature sensing.

[U.S. Water Rockets]

http://hackaday.com/2016/07/01/wired-ne ... e-esp8266/

This mod looks like it will solve my problem.

[Nylocke]

I hate to burst your bubble but this may not work because of reasons detailed here https://www.duet3d.com/forum/thread.php?id=29

The gist is both SPI channels are used for things currently (though rereading I see that the channels can be shared if cables are short). One is for communicating with the main processor and the other is used for reading off the flash chip that holds the web server firmware. I skimmed the Hackaday article and it mentioned an SPI to Ethernet board, so I'm assuming its running over SPI. There was also an I2C version mentioned in the article that might work.

[U.S. Water Rockets]

I hate to burst your bubble but this may not work because of reasons detailed here https://www.duet3d.com/forum/thread.php?id=29

The gist is both SPI channels are used for things currently (though rereading I see that the channels can be shared if cables are short). One is for communicating with the main processor and the other is used for reading off the flash chip that holds the web server firmware. I skimmed the Hackaday article and it mentioned an SPI to Ethernet board, so I'm assuming its running over SPI. There was also an I2C version mentioned in the article that might work.

In spite of the continued negative tone of your responses, I will be nice and just let you know that you must have misinterpreted the HAD article, or you have not acquainted yourself with what an ESP8266 is, or both.

The ESP8266 is a complete microcontroller with WiFi radio on a small module with some flash memory. It contains the wireless Ethernet software stack and a webserver, and it has a bunch of onboard peripherals like GPIO pins and a UART. The default firmware on the ESP8266 turns the Wifi radio and UART peripherals into a Wifi to UART bridge for an external serial device. In this case, that would appear to be the Atmel CPU on the Duet.

I never suggested using the SPI on the ATmel CPU on Duet for Ethernet, because I had thought of that back when this discussion first started and saw the issues you mentioned before. Then I saw that the CPU on duet already has wired Ethernet on it that was simply going unused, so adding SPI Ethernet would have been redundant hardware anyhow.That's why I never mentioned it.

Here is why this suggestion is not the same thing:

A notable feature of the ESP8266, which is used by a small fraction of those that use it, is the ability to replace the firmware in the ESP8266 and make it do more than just act as a UART to wireless bridge. The HAD project describes a very clever person who took a $3.00 SPI Ethernet board, and attached it to the spare GPIOs on the ESP8266 module, and then loaded custom software into the ESP8266 CPU to make use of BOTH the Hard wired and the wireless Ethernet. In other words, he added Wired Ethernet to the ESP8266 module. This is then used as a Wired Ethernet to UART bridge and/or a WiFi to UART bridge. Both Wired and Wireless ports on the same ESP8266!

It looks like all that would be required would be the addition of a header to plug in one of these http://robokits.co.in/development-board ... d-enc28j60 to the duet, and some new firmware loaded into the ESP8266 like that in the HAD project, and there's an option for hard wired Ethernet as well as WiFi.

I hope the designer of the Duet is still around to see this subject and will consider making room for that small header connector on future versions. For now I can probably tack on one and hot glue it in place.

[Nylocke]

I wasn't trying to be negative, perhaps I worded myself poorly. I didn't want to disappoint you by bringing you bad news about your idea. I'm not trying to shut down the possibility of you having ethernet while being a dick about it, so settle down for a moment.

I read the hackaday article and visited the project page. It was talking about an SPI to ethernet board, which I interpret as a board that communicates via SPI with the ESP board to provide Ethernet.

I also know what an ESP8266 is. No need to patronize me bud. I also know that not all ESP8266 packages are the same (a quick google search shows how different each one is). As I read from the forum thread I posted (which it seems you didn't read) the package they have on the duet doesn't have internal flash storage, or the flash storage on board isn't internal to the processor and it uses SPI to communicate with it. This is the impression I got, if DC could confirm that would be nice.

Also it seems you know very little about how the duet wifi works. Your reception being an indicator, I'm not surprised you haven't been keeping up on the forum/new board. There are 2 firmwares that run on the new duet, the main one the SAME controller, and one that runs on the ESP module. Theres also the duet web control files which I'm assuming is the interface that the web server shoves to your computer. All 3 of these things can be changed and updated (see https://duet3d.com/wiki/Updating_WiFi_f ... trol_files and https://duet3d.com/wiki/Updating_main_firmware). So this means there is already a custom firmware running on the ESP module.

Also stated on the forum thread I posted previously, the ESP is communicating with the SAME over SPI, not UART. Its running the whole web server, not just the default firmware it was loaded with at the factory.

All that being said, I hope that DC and the guys at T3P3 do see this article. If what I read from the HAD article/DWF forum thread is true, then they could potentially add an extra header to the board and include an ethernet module in their store. Since the distance would be short, they could maybe add the ethernet module on some broken out SPI pins (minor board change) and modify the existing ESP firmware to support this ethernet hack.

Once again, when I said "I hate to burst your bubble" I really truly meant I would hate to pop the hope you got from reading the article of having ethernet. I did word that in a confusing manner and I apologize.

[dc42]

Extra pads to break out the unused ESP8266 pins have already been suggested on the Duet WiFi forum, and will be included on the production boards if we can find room for them. The pins we are not using are GPIO2, GPIO5, GPIO16 and ADC.

[U.S. Water Rockets]

There's no reason the HAD concept wouldn't work, since the ESP8266 has 2 SPI ports in addition to the UART. Since they already have gone through the trouble to write their own ESP8266 firmware, adding a chip select to that firmware to communicate with multiple devices should be child's play. The Microchip I2C Ethernet device has plenty of onboard RAM, so it could even be polled between accesses to the other SPI peripherals, and there should be no problems whatsoever.

There's a lot of ways around the problem, but none of them are easy if you don't have the chip selects available. I didn't look at the schematics, but I get the feeling the chip selects were used for something else and are not available now.

You can always Bit-Bang additional SPI busses using GPIOs, but that's going to divide your GPIO SPI maximum speed by at least 8 (or more, depending on the CPU core you're using) in relation to the dedicated SPI busses. If top speed on the SPI is your goal and you're clever, you can connect an SPI device to the UART on the ESP8266 and get it to work with a little software tweaking. But it looks like the ESP8266 wants to use the UART for firmware updates too. That makes it a bit more challenging.

The ESP8266 UART most therefore be connected to the ATSAM4E8E for soft loading new WiFi firmware, so it should also be possible to soft disable the ESP8266 to ATSAM SPI connection and then dedicate that to the Microchip SPI device, and then use the UART for the bridge.

There are a lot of workarounds, but none of them are really easy or quick.

The more I learn about how the duet wifi is designed, the more impressed I am with the original version. The Wifi version looks like the design approach was not focused on finding the best way to add Wifi to the duet, but instead took the approach of how to add a duet to the ESP8266.

[Eaglezsoar]

I have read the posts in this thread and I certainly see the need for WIFI.
That being said, I have hard wired my entire network and only use WiFi for my laptop.
WiFi is great but please do not stop making the hard wired ethernet cards for us die hard users.

[U.S. Water Rockets]

Since Duet is open hardware, their SPI protocol (which appears to be simple Gcode) should be easily portable to any microcontroller with an SPI port. That being said, it should be pretty simple to port their ESP8266 webserver to any other CPU with any other outward facing network connection. I just happen to have a lot of TI LaunchPads in my collection, because I used them for various onboard rocket flight computers, and they have a nice low cost variant with 10/100 Ethernet and SPI available. (https://store.ti.com/tiva-connected-launchpad.aspx)

So, it should be really easy for me to desolder the ESP8266 WiFi module from the Duet, and wire in the SPI of the Launchpad, then put a modified firmware on the Launchpad to emulate the ESP8266 custom firmware, only using 10/100 Ethernet instead.

Problem solved.

Taking it a step further it might even be possible to make a new LCD panel with nice frontwards facing Ethernet, USB, and SD card connectors, and put the Ethernet enabled CPU on that and use that to bypass or even augment the functionality of the ESP8266.

That could be a fun project.

[dc42]

Since Duet is open hardware, their SPI protocol (which appears to be simple Gcode) should be easily portable to any microcontroller with an SPI port. That being said, it should be pretty simple to port their ESP8266 webserver to any other CPU with any other outward facing network connection. I just happen to have a lot of TI LaunchPads in my collection, because I used them for various onboard rocket flight computers, and they have a nice low cost variant with 10/100 Ethernet and SPI available. (https://store.ti.com/tiva-connected-launchpad.aspx)

So, it should be really easy for me to desolder the ESP8266 WiFi module from the Duet, and wire in the SPI of the Launchpad, then put a modified firmware on the Launchpad to emulate the ESP8266 custom firmware, only using 10/100 Ethernet instead.

Yes, that should be possible. It's along the lines of the wired variant we are considering - except that the TI chip appears to integrate the Ethernet PHY as well as the MAC, which makes for a reduced component count compared to using the ATSAM3X4C.

[DerStig]

Holy crap US water rockets is an angry person

I like what they have done with the Duet Wifi, so much I bought one to replace my Duet 0.8.5

[dc42]

Thanks, DerStig!

For those who want a wired Ethernet connection, we have firmed up a plan to use a small daughter board in place of the ESP8266. Production Duet WiFi boards already have pads for the associated connector and holes for the mounting pillars. We probably won't have it in production until early next year because right now we are concentrating on the DueX5 expansion board.

[Xenocrates]

Thanks, DerStig!

For those who want a wired Ethernet connection, we have firmed up a plan to use a small daughter board in place of the ESP8266. Production Duet WiFi boards already have pads for the associated connector and holes for the mounting pillars. We probably won't have it in production until early next year because right now we are concentrating on the DueX5 expansion board.

Very nice. Thank you for taking our (sometimes angrily phrased) feedback. Is there any estimation on the cost difference it will make as far as retail?

[dc42]

Thanks, DerStig!

For those who want a wired Ethernet connection, we have firmed up a plan to use a small daughter board in place of the ESP8266. Production Duet WiFi boards already have pads for the associated connector and holes for the mounting pillars. We probably won't have it in production until early next year because right now we are concentrating on the DueX5 expansion board.

Very nice. Thank you for taking our (sometimes angrily phrased) feedback. Is there any estimation on the cost difference it will make as far as retail?

Not yet. Based on the expected build cost, my guess is £5 or £10 more.