Where's the Duet Wifi 3?

deckingman

PS - today I finally found and fixed the cause of thermostatic fans blipping on expansion boards. The fix will be in the 3.2 release.

I'm glad about that. Although it was nothing more than a minor annoyance, I was beginning to doubt my own sanity, being that I seem to be the user who has noticed it.

minim

I'm also waiting for the duet wifi 3. No interest what-so-ever in a raspberry pi for this application. KISS is gone out the window it seems. I want to upgrade my printers but until the duet wifi 3 is out there just isn't any point at all.

deckingman

@minim said in Where's the Duet Wifi 3?:

I'm also waiting for the duet wifi 3. No interest what-so-ever in a raspberry pi for this application. KISS is gone out the window it seems. I want to upgrade my printers but until the duet wifi 3 is out there just isn't any point at all.

Why exactly do you want to go with Duet3? What are the printer upgrades that you plan which will necessitate using Duet3 over the Duet2 ?

BDubs

Since nobody answered it - @dc42 What's the forecast look like for the Wifi 2 in terms of availability, End of life announcement etc ? Or do you see the Wifi 2 as a staple in the Duet product line for the next several (<5?) years?

dc42

@BDubs said in Where's the Duet Wifi 3?:

Since nobody answered it - @dc42 What's the forecast look like for the Wifi 2 in terms of availability, End of life announcement etc ? Or do you see the Wifi 2 as a staple in the Duet product line for the next several (<5?) years?

We have quite a number of OEMs using Duet WiFi and Duet Ethernet in their products, so we will continue manufacturing them as long as OEMs want them. But we expect new customers to gravitate towards the Duet 3 series.

theruttmeister

There are also multiple suppliers in China producing their own clones (with varying levels of licence compliance).

As long as there is demand!

Phaedrux

Just to pour some more fuel onto the angry fire...

Here's a nice little low cost device that can add wifi to an ethernet only device.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TQEX8BO/

A Former User

@Veti said in Where's the Duet Wifi 3?:

@BDubs said in Where's the Duet Wifi 3?:

The speed of what is better because of the RPi?

the pi 4 has a 4x 1,8 ghz processor. it handles data transfer and processing in sbc mode

The only problem with an SBC it that for many users it doesnt work. even to the point of one user saying the following in another post ...

@NeueKlasse said in Duet 3 6HC Rev. 1.01 Faulty:

i am about to setup a TP-Link Nano and get rid of the Pi4...

And the forum has been littered with posts from users having SBC connection issues to the point where i could quote multiple times that the duet team has advised people to run the duet-3 in standalone mode.....

A Former User

@Phaedrux said in Where's the Duet Wifi 3?:

Just to pour some more fuel onto the angry fire...

Here's a nice little low cost device that can add wifi to an ethernet only device.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TQEX8BO/

S.M.H.

And that only supports what the op's point is, that to be able to use the duet 3 with a wireless capability you are FORCED to spend more be that by buying a SBC or a device you mention.

Phaedrux

@CaLviNx Yes, and the demand for a wifi version is duly noted.

A Former User

@Phaedrux said in Where's the Duet Wifi 3?:

@CaLviNx Yes, and the demand for a wifi version is duly noted.

it might be noted, from experience it being acted upon is a whole different matter.........

Phaedrux

@CaLviNx Merry Christmas Calvin. I do cherish our little chats. May the new year bring you peace and joy.

fcwilt

I think an Ethernet version is more versatile.

It is easy to have it support a WiFi connection and you have more control over the quality and range of the WiFi connection.

For those with printer farms one device in WiFi Client mode (as opposed to Access Point mode) can serve all of the printers.

The WiFi in the Duet 2 is so short ranged I had to install an Access Point nearby just to get reliable connections to my printers.

Frederick

BDubs

@Phaedrux said in Where's the Duet Wifi 3?:

Just to pour some more fuel onto the angry fire...

Here's a nice little low cost device that can add wifi to an ethernet only device.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TQEX8BO/

Where is this 'angry fire' you speak of ? Thanks for the link on the extender. (You don't think a Duet is all THAT important to me in the grand scheme of life do you? I sure hope not!)

There was a point in time where we could have a civilized discussion (on a discussion forum of all places) and listen/respect differing opinions...Only now did I notice the ability to anonymously downvote posts that don't agree with the herd mentality. That seems like a great way for cowards too inept to, agree to disagree, to bully others. It's sad really.

Anyway...I'd still love to have a Wifi 3, but until then I'll roll with the existing offerings.

DaBit

I think I spent around 100 liters of petrol and many Teamviewer sessions helping people to get the Duet2Wifi in their printer working after a network change or relocation of the printer. In my garage I had to place an extra access point to make the Duet2Wifi (and Pi, for that matter) work. All in all the Wifi on the Duet2 series is not great, and from a developer point of view it is quite hard to improve a lot. ESP32 Wifi is not that great either.

And then there is setup. For 'us computer wizards' it is a piece of cake, for many people just wanting to print whatever they download from Grabcad & co it is not.

With Ethernet: plug a cable into the router, open up a browser, go to http://<printername>.local, and it works. Want to add Wifi? That 20-euro TP-Link thing sounds good. Usually TP-link makes decent stuff, so I bet it works a lot better than Duet2Wifi builtin client. At least the antenna does not end up between a steel table and aluminium build plate, really close to some aluminium extrusion.

I think delegating Wifi to a 3rd party device is a good choice, but that's just me.

dc42

The internal antenna on the Duet WiFi IA is too small to give good range, made worse by mounting the Duet horizontally in most cases and sometimes also made worse by surrounding metalwork. Smartphones have much longer antennas.

The external antenna version has much better range. We've decided to make the Duet 3 Mini with external antenna only.

whosrdaddy

@dc42 : The original question of this thread remains. Will there be a Duet Wifi successor (or a new HW revision) in the future?
Or is the Duet 3 mini supposed to be the Duet Wifi's replacement?
I mean the board is fine as is (ie I/O, Drivers), only the wifi sucks a bit (unless you mod it and add an external antenna). So a new version with built-in antenna and maybe a better CPU (ie more RAM) would be awesome.

dc42

@whosrdaddy said in Where's the Duet Wifi 3?:

@dc42 : The original question of this thread remains. Will there be a Duet Wifi successor (or a new HW revision) in the future?
Or is the Duet 3 mini supposed to be the Duet Wifi's replacement?
I mean the board is fine as is (ie I/O, Drivers), only the wifi sucks a bit (unless you mod it and add an external antenna). So a new version with built-in antenna and maybe a better CPU (ie more RAM) would be awesome.

We intend the Duet 3 Mini WiFi to be the successor to the Duet WiFi. It is better than the original Duet WiFi in almost every respect, yet it costs less. See https://duet3d.dozuki.com/Wiki/The_Duet_family_of_motion_control_electronics for a comparison.

weed2all

@dc42 but we need Duet3 6hc with WIFI for cnc use case! duet 2 wifi or duet 3 mini+ will still remain main choice for 3d printers!

DaBit

@weed2all said in Where's the Duet Wifi 3?:

@dc42 but we need Duet3 6hc with WIFI for cnc use case!

No, you don't. Really, you think you want Wifi, but you don't.

I have seen countless of issues with USB/WiFi and CNC machines. Mostly that is due to less than stellar wiring and insufficient use of supply filters in front of the frequency inverter or brushed universal spindle motor, but that is often the way it is and only a good electrical engineer is able to slay those gremlins. I know how to do it, I tried using an USB Pokeys57 for my lathe control panel, worked fine until the spindle servo starts to deliver more than a few Watts of mechanical output power, and no shielding, supply filtering or CM-choking the USB could stop that. Switched to Ethernet, never had a single issue since.

Second problem: if the Wifi connection drops, the CNC keeps doing it's thing, including the spindle. And you will encounter the mill pulling the workpiece out of it's clamps or simply loading up. Try to stop it using the normal interface, realise it won't work, hitting the (hardware) emergency stop, and that is 5 seconds wasted. I had a big dent in my garage door due to those precious seconds. There is a lot of energy in even a few grams of material spinning at 10000+rpm.

At least you want a very reliable stop and feed-% knob; the last one saved more endmills and workpieces than any other knob or button on my machine. Ethernet is a very reliable data transport mechanism with a robust physical layer, it's failure rate is so low you could consider that 'never', and latency is low too. USB and WiFi are not that reliable, not even close.