Would you like to print to you're Ender 3 with just your phone, I'll show you
how to do it on today's Filament Friday.
This week's Filament Friday is brought to you by these patreon supporters. This
is the Astrobox gateway kit for $99. You can connect your 3d printer to the
Astroprint cloud and it's based on octoprint, if you're familiar with that.
Well now they've come out with the Astrobox touch so it adds touch
capability in addition to cloud capability. Several months ago they gave
me one to play with and give them some feedback and I really like it. Let me
show you some of its features. You physically connect it to your 3d printer
with a USB cable. Then through the easy setup you connect it to your internet
and now you have touch control of your 3d printer. You can move the bed around,
you can home it, you can preheat it. The touch screen is a little bit soft you
have to press a little bit harder than you would on your phone, but I found it
worked pretty well after a while. And there's apps on it like a phone where
you can go to Thingiverse or my mini factory, download a file, it'll slice it
and print it right here from the box. And you've even got full control of how the thing
works. Including your camera. You can set up the resolution, if it's rotated or
not. It's very very handy. But the biggest thing is you can print right from the
cloud. The cloud has all the files that are in the astroprint cloud which I'll
talk more about in a minute. During the making of this video toy box labs showed
up on shark tank. They had a 3d printer you could control
from a phone to print toys for kids and they're asking for $150,000 investment.
Kevin O'Leary gave him the money and I thought this
was very interesting. Because if you go back in history you'll see that Mattel,
the big toy maker, had the thingmaker. They delayed it a couple times and
finally canceled the whole plan. And then there was new matter with the mod T. This
was a $299 printer, slice in the cloud, they went out of business.
So all that history makes me question is this a good idea or a bad idea? But after
using it, what I love is you can connect it to any Marlin based printer. And it
was taken out of the box connected to my internet and all I needed to do is
connect the USB cable and this thing started to work. Then adding a camera to
this thing was easy. I went with their recommended Logitech c920 USB camera. I
plugged it into a USB port, it recognized it and it started working right away. The
only thing I need to do is find a better way to mount it then putting it on the
box. It starts at cloud.astroprint.com. And you can actually use this right now
for free. You don't even need an Astrobox. And you can set up your printer and
they've got various printers already in the system. And then you can select your
slicing engine. There's slic3r PE, there's cura 15 and now cura 3. And you can
make multiple filament profiles, you just come in here tell it what size diameter
and then what temperature's you want it to be. And that's the hardest part
because from then you can use the apps such as Thingivierse app or my
minifactory app. And go search for whatever it is you want to print and
once you find it you can download it or add it to your files in the cloud or you
can just print it. And you can do this from your phone, from your iPad or from
the desktop. Anywhere you can get to the cloud. And it's going to use those
settings that you made for the printer, from the material. You can do some minor
settings, you can go into advanced settings but for the most part you can
just click print. It's going to tell you how long it will take how much plastic
and then you can add it to the queue to print later or you can click print now.
And if you have an Astrobox or a Astrobox touch, it'll find your printer.
There's my CHEPbox. And you can click print. And then it'll send the sliced file,
the g-code file, to the box. It'll store it on its own memory and from there you
can monitor it. You click on monitor. It will tell you the temperatures of the
bed, the extruder, and you can also turn on a camera, if you've got that equipped.
And here it is. And another thing I like is once it's warmed up I can watch it
print and I can right click on it and make it picture and picture. And now it's
just a lose picture I can put anywhere I want on my screen.
So I can go work on a Tinkercad design and just move the picture where it's out
of the way here. But I can keep an eye on how it's printing, if it's gonna fail. So
I can do two things at once. Get my next design ready before the other one is
finished. If you like this idea of printing toys from your phone there is
the toy maker app. This is a little bit older. Hasn't been updated in a while but
they do have some toys in here. Some you can pay for and some that are free. So
here's an astroprint calibration rocket. I click on that on my phone and then I
can send it right to the cloud. And once it's in the cloud it is treated the same
way as a thingiverse file. And what was interesting is I can actually resize it
right here. I can scale it down to 50%, resize it, and then all the other
settings. Including advanced settings I can get to. But I can just click print.
It'll tell me how long to print. And then send it to the printer. The same way I
did from my computer. Then I can monitor it right here on my phone as well just
by clicking monitor and turning on the camera. I can see the temperatures.
They'll rise and the camera will start showing it printing. So it's very very
handy. Just like they showed on shark tank.
And if you want to do custom design, well Tinkercad works in the cloud as
well. And now works really well on the iPad. And they have this scribble tool,
which I showed in a previous video, allows you to write something or draw
something and turn it into a 3d print. And so here's my CHEP Chuck Hellebuyck's
Electronic Products logo. And I really wish I could just export it and send it
right to my Astrobox touch but that capability isn't there yet.
Although I have gotten Tinkercad and Astroprint to start talking, so maybe
we'll see this in the future. So right now what I do is I send it to
Thingiverse and it goes right to my Thingiverse account. Automatically
uploads it and here it is now. In order to see it on the iPhone or in the cloud
of astroprint, I actually have to release it so that's the one drawback. I
have to publish it. And then it shows up here in the astroprint cloud, right here
on my phone. From there I can print it from my phone, from the iPad, from the
computer in the cloud or if I want to wait and print it later it's in the
cloud. So I can just go to the Astro box touch and download it and print it right
there just by touching the touchscreen. So this is very handy and when it's
done it actually gives me a print again button so if I want to print multiple
versions, pull the print off, hit print again. I don't have to go through all
those steps. And while it's printing I can monitor it from wherever I'm at on
my phone. As long as I got connection to the Internet I can check on it.
So here's my CHEP. It's finished. Its ready to go. After using a for a while I
would not say it's absolutely perfect. They're still working through some bugs
with the apps and stuff, but overall it's worked really well for me. And it's
really handy to sit in my chair in the living room, search Thingiverse, find
something I like, and click print. And the biggest advantage I think they have over
all these other solutions, including the one on shark tank, is the fact it'll
connect to any printer. I don't have to buy a small little toy box printer or I
don't have to buy a mod T printer. Neither of which had a heated bed and
neither one of them really print that good. So this is a nice solution. I can
use any printer I want and still get that capability. Now as far as the
$150,000 investment? That was only for 12% so that puts this company at like
1.2 million or so. I really don't see that. So if Im one of those
sharks, sitting in that row of chairs?... I'm out...I ain't got any money anyway. So if you
like what I'm doing here, maybe check out some of these videos that are popping up.
Ff you want to help support the channel patreon one way or just buy through the
affiliate links, it all helps. And if nothing else click on that CHEP logo
down there, it's free! Subscribe! I'll see you next time right here
at Filament Friday.